Steve Jobs

So there was this guy on my friend’s friends list today, and he’s like one of those hippy anti-Apple brigade types, carrying on like it’s all just some evil capitalist corporation or whatever; and he was on this thread where a bunch of them were going on about how the Chinese workers who make the iPads are tortured and treated like battery chickens, and how they kill themselves, and bla bla bla, and he asks this question. He says that if Steve Jobs changed the way the world communicates, then did the guy who made the car radio change the way we drive? You know, basically doing that whole “Steve is not important to our civilisation” thing. Completely ridiculous.

And it got me thinking. I’d been thinking all day, really. In fact, since Steve Jobs died yesterday, I haven’t stopped thinking about Steve Jobs. Reading all those quotes everyone’s been posting on facebook – those amazingly profound things He has said throughout His career – you realise what a Visionary™ this man really was. And He was more than that. He was a Teacher™. I mean, you forget that. But He didn’t just give us all this Cool Shit™, and let our dreams come true on these machines, and enable us to download movies on demand and stuff. He taught us. He taught us how to Be. He changed our lives by teaching us how to change it. And He gave us the machines to do that on.

I don’t know about the guy who changed the way we drive, because I just catch trains. But on those trains, I leave the cruel reality of strangers sitting all around me – we all leave one another, together – through the little screens that take us to the place we were before, when we were in our homes on a slightly bigger version of the machine. All day at work, I can keep going back there, too. My boss can ban us browsing important facebook status updates on our work computers – like “here’s an upload of an aspirational lunch I’m valid enough to afford”, or “I’m loving my life, as evidenced in this photo where I’m smiling with my many friends, and feel free to tell my ex you saw this status update”, and so forth – but we have our iPhones. And we can go back to that place on them, and what can the boss say? They’re just phones, right? We’re not even talking on them, right? That’s the genius of the iPhone! And I don’t even have to literally speak to anyone anymore. It’s fucking amazing.

And the China stuff, I mean, seriously, what were the Chinese even doing before we gave them the industrial revolution and let us make our Cool Shit™? Does anyone even know? I don’t. They were no doubt sitting around their little huts, starving to death, bored out of their minds, and now they have something to do, stuff to make – cool stuff like iMachines – and in return we give them enough to go buy some wheat or soup or something. And that might seem pretty shitty to us, but in China, wheat and soup are like AMAZING. They’re lucky to have that experience. And we came along and basically gave it to them, in return for letting them know the value of being a worker, and to make something as Cool™ and Important To Our World™ as a fucking iPhone! And none of that would have been possible without Steve Jobs.

Before Steve, our lives were often having to be spent OFF THE MACHINES! I mean, really, breathe for a second and grasp that. We sat on those trains and actually had to deal with those people around us; we actually had to sit with our own thoughts, with nothing to stimulate us but our own minds. People were having to resort to reading books – big motherfuckers made of paper – and they were like hundreds of pages long, and it took you days and days to even get to the end of them, like a status update that only reveals itself, one character at a time, over the space of weeks. Imagine that. That is beyond painful. But that’s what we did, until Steve made our world mobile. Then, we could have our world with us on the train. Before, going anywhere meant not knowing if my status update had garnered some scathing attack that required me to instantly defend myself – and being completely unable to defend myself, because I was on a fucking train with no way of being online. Shit was happening to my identity, and I was just sitting there, helpless, on the train. That is a vivid anxiety nobody can deny.

I had to go to nightclubs in the hope of getting shagged. I had to go outside. All the time. Getting shagged had a maximum possibility of three nights out of the week where I got to go through excruciating effort that potentially only amounted to the failure of me not getting shagged. Who here has not walked that long walk of shame home, seedy and deflated at 3am, where you inevitably turn the key in your door alone, your effort amounting to absolutely nothing? Excuse me for being glad I don’t have to do that, anymore! Now, I can pick up on the train! I could even not have laid eyes on them in the flesh – which I wouldn’t, because I only watch the screen – and before you know it, there we are, making those emoticon smileys with the tongue poking out (we all know what that means, thank you). The anti-Apple dudes go on about how it’s disconnecting us from humanity, bla, bla, bla, but it’s bringing us together. It’s bringing us together in places we have never come together, before. Before, I’d be sitting there reading a fucking book, knowing that I wouldn’t learn what happened to Dumbeldorf until God knows when. And now, I’m getting together!

I have to be honest, I have seriously thought about unfriending lots of people who I’ve had to sit and endure today, as they go on and on with the usual propaganda they mask their envy or whatever it is in. And they think we’re the ones in the cult?! They seriously just don’t get it. They go on and on about how Steve’s evil and how Apple are just about taking everyone’s money, and how the other machines are better because they’re open-source or whatever. Like they know what we, the people, actually want? Why on earth would I need to install shit from wherever on my phone? Who the hell wants to actually know how to install something? I press a button on my iPhone, and it installs things for me. And it has everything I could possibly need. Apple have got the biggest app store in the world, there is nothing your life could need that isn’t on there. I challenge you to think of something you want to do that there isn’t an app to do for you. You won’t.

And yes, yes, I have to synch it to my Macbook pro and can’t just plug it in anywhere. But so what? When am I not on my Macbook Pro? I like that it synchs. Synching is a good thing. It knows it’s me. If I plugged my phone into a PC or whatever, it wouldn’t know it was me. It’s like it wouldn’t really be mine. My iTunes comes up, and it connects to me, and it loads everything on my iPhone to my iTunes, and there it is, I can do whatever I want with it. How can anyone in their right mind argue with that? Why would I want something that doesn’t synch?

Oh, but I have to pay for my songs just for the device! I can’t take my songs to anywhere else! Well, boo hoo! Hello, I pay to have them put onto it, right there and then. And I don’t want to put music into it from somewhere else. Why would I be somewhere else? And why would I be buying songs there? I don’t have anything else to get them from or put them on. I just want to pay for them and own them – to have them right there with me in my life, the minute I realise I want to own them. If I can have that capability if I pay, I’ll pay. Who wouldn’t?!

And Steve made that. He gave us somewhere where we already were to go buy songs – whatever songs we like. He deserves every cent of His however many billions. He gave us something to listen to our songs on, even if we’re running on a treadmill, or even when we’re defending ourselves on the train, on the way to work. Music is life. It’s our dreams. Steve Jobs gave us those dreams. How can you compare that to a radio being put in cars? That’s just stupid.

I also read this article by some bitter journalist who no doubt gets kickbacks from Bill Gates, and he was saying that on the same day, some doctor or scientist or whatever died, and this guy made some breakthrough in cancer treatment, and how ironic that this man had probably prolonged Jobs’ life, bla bla bla, how the world had lost someone who had given us a hope in life itself against this most terrible disease, and yet how wrong it is that we don’t know his name, or talk about him, like we do Steve or whatever. But still, that guy’s only really affected a small portion of people. Steve Jobs may even have been one of those people, but then look at what Steve Jobs did with that time to the whole fucking world! He changed us. Life was different before Apple. That is no exaggeration. What were you doing before Apple? No doubt something completely different.

They say it’s like some kind of cult, and that Jobs was just a good marketer who basically built a corporation like an evangelist builds a church. But they just don’t understand. There’s like this pathetic world left behind, where people for whatever reason decide to resist this new world. But this new world is better, and most of them who carry on about it are in this world anyway. If you’re forced to be in something, you might as well enjoy it. Maybe you’ll realise how much better this world is, and then eventually you won’t even have to try to enjoy it any more – you just will! I don’t know, I just feel sorry for these people, really. I think they’re the ones in the cult. They’re hoodwinked by the evil media, and the evil media just don’t get it. The media have clearly got it out for Him, everybody knows that. And now they’ve spawned all these ridiculous people who go around trolling on about how sad it is that the world is mourning the death of a ruthless CEO and whatever, and it’s like “God, who told you that? The meeeeedia, by any chance?”

I was reading this article on CNet the other day, and they totally had it in for Him, it was so transparent – going on about how Apple are suing all their competitors to destroy the competitive market or whatever – completely ignoring that if anything it just shows how much Steve cared for the world, that He would go to all that trouble to keep it free of inferior technology and imperfection. That should be a matter of law, after all. The world has changed, and we can’t let the legal system fall behind. I feel relieved to know that the courts are helping Steve help us be the best we can be. And quite frankly, do you know how long it would have taken Steve to decide what shape the screen should be? Why can’t these companies think of their of own shapes? Why should they ride His Vision™ for free? But no, no, the Android sheep believe everything these so-called journalists are saying, and so then they go around spouting off these slogans like they’re the words of some great sage or something. They’re basically brainwashed.

I see them sometimes on the train, sitting there with their Androids or whatever. They always look miserable. And you just see this thing they’re sitting there scratching away at, and you just know it would have the touch intuitiveness of a fucking magna doodle, and you know they’d bark at you about how it’s better than your iPhone; but there it is, just looking so god damned ugly. I mean, really, those poor people – so naive, completely unable to grasp it. Steve Jobs understood what these people do not. He understood that we do not want these complex machines that look ugly. We want simplicity and beauty. My iPhone is beautiful. How can you not want that in your life? It’s art. Steve Jobs is an Artist™ too, don’t forget. How can you have anything against art? These people who don’t understand Apple are basically lefties, aren’t they? But Lefties love art, don’t they? How could they try to destroy the very thing they supposedly love?

And now, He’s gone. I think part of this incredible global grief is that we’re realising that, if anything, we took Him for granted. We actually underestimated this guy. We never took the time to remember just how great what He was doing for us was. His machines are so great, they make us forget how great they are, because its like you can’t imagine any other life anyway. Have you ever been without your machines because of some reason? You freak the fuck out. You know you do. And this is like losing the machine. Except it’s the biggest machine of them all. It’s Steve. It’s the man who created this whole damned world. And I’m supposed to believe I’m in some kind of cult for realising this?

In the end, those people will dwindle. They’ll realise. And the ones who won’t realise will die out with the generations. Steve is gone, but he has already built His world, and it’s here to stay. We are a part of it. The market share will rise and rise, and they will finally be the world’s richest company. And that is a good thing. We should be glad that in the middle of all this chaos of recent years – of wars, of terrorism, of the world’s economy collapsing, of fears that the world will heat up and destroy us – that a company like this could rise to take it all. That says something good about human beings. That says something good about us. We put Him there. He gave us a new way of living, and in return we put Him there, to a place that was rightfully His. He will look down from the clouds, and He will see His world finally become all, and it won’t matter that He died, because He’ll still see it. And we’ll all be here, connected to each other. He died building this for us. He did not give up. He basically died for us. Did the guy who gave the cancer patients a few more years or whatever do that? No.

I bite the Apple because I choose to. You made us better people, Steve. iMiss you.

“It’s Magical™”

(Steve Jobs)

This week, Li Hai, a 19 year old Chinese factory worker, began another 15 hour shift, as he had done every single morning this year, meeting the frenzied demands of Apple’s hungry cult of technology. It had been a “good” year for his company, Foxconn, after scoring the contract to be the main producer of the latest Must Have™: the “revolutionary” and (let’s not forget) “magical” iPad. You could easily presume that these magical devices form in rose petal cocoons upon golden clouds in a cybersky, their freshly glossed screens glistening in the sunlight, waiting to revolutionise the life of yet another middle-class Westerner. But, in fact, it is the hundreds of thousands of Chinese factory workers, like young Li, who deliver us our 21st century Salvation™. Li’s factory, in the province of Hunan, is home to 300,000 such workers. They slave tirelessly through 7 day working weeks – forbidden from talking or listening to music, most not even given a stool, and under military-style supervisors armed with iron bats – and all to earn less than what most us make checking facebook in between lunchtime and clock-off (building an iPad earns you around 50 cents per hour). They are not given a magical device for themselves, nor could they dream of affording their own. They are the faceless, hidden cogs of the Apple Machine™. And they are dying.

Where Dreams™ Are Made

On Tuesday, as the world’s media – gun pointed firmly to its head by its new overlord, Steve Jobs – hurriedly pumped out advertorial after advertorial, heralding this wondrously pointless device as the official replacement of our souls, Li left his workstation, climbed the steps to the roof of the Foxconn factory – as eleven others, all under the age of 25, had done in the first five months of this year (that’s 2 per month) – and walked to the edge. Of the twelve who have done so, only two have survived the fall. Li Hai would not be one of them. He is dead. As Apple’s golden bitch du jour, Stephen Fry, happily rode the publicity train to tirelessly repeat “It really is a Revolution™!” to any media agent who would listen (thanks to their desperation to appease this new content platform, that’s basically every media agent there is), the Hai family gathered outside the factory to mourn and reject the tragic loss of yet another Chinese factory worker’s future.

Just a week before his death, Hon Hai Precision, the parent company of Foxconn, had joyously reported a first-quarter profit rise of 35 percent (netting over 800 million AUD) – small bikkies, of course, next to Apple’s annual profits of over 60 billion.

The story of Hai’s death, quite predictably, achieved nothing more than a barely noticeable ripple in the muddy Western media puddle, and was run with by the last remaining newspapers yet to sign lucrative deals with Apple for content publishing on the magical iPad. At first, Apple announced it “did not wish to comment” on the situation; but today, after at least some traction on the tragedy occurred, it has released a tiring press release, suddenly becoming “deeply saddened” by the events. It assured us that, whilst it has no comment on the allegations of beatings now coming from the factories, it had requested (but has had no policy of enforcement or even checking) that these workers at least be given a stool and work no more than 60 hours per week. It has promised to investigate the situation in all its supplier’s factories, yet has confirmed there will be no interruptions in the current manufacturing of its iPad (or its other magical devices) whilst this takes place.

The complexity of the problem is further illustrated by the factory’s incredible attempts to respond to the situation. At first, it simply – wait for it – “demanded” workers “not take their own life” (I shit you not) – an approach somebody clearly told them was probably not going to be looked kindly upon by the western way of doing things, because today saw them announce a retraction of this approach. Still, its angle remains – that the suicide attempts themselves are not the problem, but, rather, whether these attempts are successful (!!!). Bizarrely, it was happy to reveal that original media estimates actually fall short of the reality, boasting that there have been a further 20 attempts throughout its factories since January. Why announce this? It takes credit, as an example of the company’s ability to address the situation, that these further 20 were intervened and thwarted. This morning, the company invited media to hear a young employee who was marched out in front of journalists to announce that “this is a good place to work because they treat us better than many other Chinese factories”, and to view the nets it has now placed around its walls! It also announced that it will be hiring troops of gymnasts to periodically brighten the lives of its one million workers. Get a load of real life, huh? Fucking hell.

Even on a local Chinese (state run) TV station, broadcasters offered a strange sociological analysis of what was resulting in the suicides of the young factory workers who build our iPhones and iPads. It saw the problem as a lack of “chi ku” – a term literally translated as “eat bitterness” – a cultural reference to a Chinese ideal of being able to put aside individualistic angst and basically take the hardship it is dealt with for the bigger picture. “The previous generation,” it mused, “only thought about how to improve the lives of their family. The younger generation starts to think about themselves more.” What a selfish generation!

The problem here is the impossible intertwining of the Western dream this machine has now become a part of, with the reality of that machine. And it is a part of it. For us, we don’t have to think about this reality – we are quite deliberately made sure we don’t have to – but what we see in China is the juxtaposition of the complete picture: that behind the dream, so long as our dreams are now the stuff of gadgets and consumer products (which the iPad is surely the current apex of), a fundamental foundation of this must be the production of these products. China has jumped to the head of the global economic cue, thanks to communism’s complete disregard for humanity for the sake of industry, and we have allowed our own corporations, like Apple, to build our modern lives on the blood and very being of the millions of Asian factory workers that are sacrificed to this enterprise. That is an obviously grave problem in itself, but it is now being further complicated by China’s growing elite that is flourishing as a result. This is how the “chi ku” is lost – the irony is that the state broadcaster’s analysis is spot on. These factory workers are no longer oblivious to the “good life” that these products they spend their own lives building for 50 cents an hour are for. One Chinese social science professor this week highlighted the cruel paradox that these factory workers, such as Li, now see the affluent Chinese generations now coming through, who live a very different westernised life, toting the products they slave for at 50 cents an hour but will never themselves be able to buy. The awareness is creating an angst that undermines the “efficiency” of these young workers, because they understand the bigger picture, the ladder they are clearly at the bottom of. “What is the point of living?” they ask themselves. An increasing number seem not to be able to find any point, at all.

Lu Xin, a 24 year old worker who committed suicide on May 6, wrote in his diary: “I came to this company for money; but then I realised this is wasting my life, my future. I made a mistake even at the first step of my adult life. I am lost.”

It’s game over for Lu Xin. But tomorrow, the hundreds of iPads that passed through his latex gloved hands will bring a hollow glean to the eyes of the Apple faithful, who can hardly contain their anticipation for Jobs’ latest Revolution™.

The brutal irony continues, when you consider the nature of this Revolution™ on our own shores, far away from the bloody reality of the factories where our dreams are, literally, made. We can note and tisk away at the Chinese propaganda seen in the story of Foxconn and the countless other factories like it, and at the response in Chinese media. But let’s take that finger we spend a lot of time pointing, and instead point it to ourselves. Yes, the iPad is a “revolution”. Of the very worst kind.

It’s Jobs’ world, after all…

The saddest part of the iPad’s arrival in our world is that millions are very aware of how ridiculous it all is, but to no avail. The Apple machine has been very successful in recasting it is a tiresome cliché, but the idea that this device is nothing more than an oversized iPhone that does far less than much of what the iPhone can do, and a smaller laptop that doesn’t do anything anywhere near what a laptop can do, is actually correct. The iPad does nothing new. Zero. There is not a single thing you can do on your iPad that you can’t already do. That is not the essence of this Magical Revolution™. Functionality and practicality have, with the arrival of this machine, finally left the building. We are down to nothing more than marketing. That is all this is. Jobs’ slow rise to the top of the techno pile has culminated in a terrifying moment of our times – the moment when one of the richest companies in the world finally managed to convince a people that it “needed” absolutely nothing than what a marketing strategy and brand culture had fictionalised. That is fucking scary. What is says about where we’re at is truly horrifying.

But this rather common sense of many trying to be heard in cyberworld has been completely quashed by the even more terrifying moment this has all come to be. Even aside from the horror of watching consumers dizzy with the thrill of holding this beautiful looking piece of shit, simply because they have been so successfully brainwashed by the marketing, is the broader picture of how the model of media has now officially changed.

Ah, technology. I mean, we thought it would free us. And it has, in some ways. It did. My hope in all this – and it’s an arguably futile one – is that it will push the climate back to people’s media (which would, admittedly, require people to wise up and reject it – a big ask, I think). Because Steve Jobs now owns the media. When all the different forms of media realized they would need to wander over to cybertown – from newspapers, to book publishing, music publishing, all of it – they were walking into a trap. And they would no longer be different – regardless of the nature of their content – for they were all about to become enslaved to a new model where whoever managed to monopolise content distribution and delivery platforms, owned the whole damned thing. And that’s what Steve Jobs and Apple have managed to do in the last few years. He calls the shots, because all these industries now need him to survive.

He did it through the machines. I mean, it’s brilliant. Evil. But brilliant. Once upon a time, the machines meant nothing. The manufacturers of walkmans never had any say in the music industry; there was no direct relationship between the content and the machines that delivered the content, between the media and the media players. But internet technology changed all that. The internet began as a “free world”. But Steve Jobs sought to close it. And he has.

We watched him do it to music, completely killing the entire industry as it had evolved through our society, by managing to commercialise digital music and subsequently become its gatekeeper. This was the role of both iTunes and the iPod (continued with the iPad, which only syncs with Apple-oriented music). If you want to use his platforms and machines, then you’re only going to purchase from businesses who deliver their products for these platforms and machines. This allowed him to completely redefine the industry; not just controlling pricing, but placing Apple in the stream of those profits. Almost every sector of the music industry tried to side-step Apple, and all failed. Today, they have completely given in, and their industry is in tatters. Music piracy didn’t destroy the music industry. Steve Jobs did. They now do as he tells them to do.

He further developed this technology to begin to intersect video content. And what many people still don’t grasp enough is how his quest for domination is now bullying other technological companies – such as the current war with Adobe (of which the iPad is the strongest assault yet, and predicted to be the final blow), where Jobs has simply barred all his devices from playing video content on Flash. If you don’t understand the Adobe vs Mac war, it’s one of Apple now trying to quash other platforms. Adobe makes the Flash software that, up to now, has been how the world watches video content online. But Adobe are too big and too autonomous for Jobs’ liking, and have simply refused to bend to his demands. So, what has he done? Again, used his machines to wage a war – none of them will allow consumers to view content through Adobe Flash. What this will do is push the media (who use Flash to deliver their content) to turn on Adobe, as they all now need to make sure their content can be viewed on Apple devices (knowing consumers will choose media with content viewable on their iPad or iPhone).

It is an incredible testament to the marketing power of Apple that the iPad – even though it is heralded predominantly as a web browsing device – won’t even let you watch the content on most sites (who are still using Flash), yet is still being heralded as a Magical Revolution™. Consider it – a device that kills such a large section of media and content, yet somehow is declared as the next best thing, a giant leap forward in technology, and naively lapped up by the masses. Those masses will now be angry to discover how restricted their consumption actually is. But they won’t blame Apple, heavens no. They’ll simply start choosing sites that have already (and plenty are) forsaken the Flash player for one no Apple rival currently controls. This will either force Adobe to submit to Jobs, just as the recording industry did long ago, or die. Either way, that’s one more slice of the pie belonging to Jobs’ control. In our modern technological lives, there really are few slices of the pie he doesn’t. That should scare the fuck out of you. When it comes to the world of technology and media – a fairly governing realm of modern life – you live in a world where a CEO controls it all. Grasp that for a moment.

But the most frightening thing of all – yes, it gets much worse – is that the final slice of the pie now lost in the arrival of the incredibly useless iPad is news media. That’s really what the iPad is. It’s a bomb dropped on media – the one world that, until now, Jobs has had no control over. This is not just about a bunch of stupid people hypnotised by a flashy but stupid piece of machinery. This is about the nature of media itself, and the corruption of truth. That is the difference when you apply the Apple model to media, instead of music and film. We’re not dealing with a song or a blockbuster movie, here. We’re dealing with a channel that holds a great power over this society, because it is the very voice of authority, of truth, of our reality. Jobs now has a stake in what is and isn’t real. And he’s already flexed his muscles. It has begun. The entire lead up to iPad hitting the shelves has been among the most disturbing wave of propaganda the contemporary commercial world has ever seen. There is hardly any dissent. Every day, I cringe to see another once reputable news source bow down to the new media overlord. Ironically they have been forced to sell the iPad to consumers, convince them that this meaningless device has great meaning – cornered into creating the reality that will make sure the iPad achieves its stronghold that will nail the coffin on his control over them. They know it. But there’s nothing they can do. They are too afraid, and the business reality of news and media has come to be its own demise. They are too afraid that, without the Apple platforms and machines to be consumed by the consumers who keep their business alive, they will die. Jobs has effectively held a gun to their head, demanding; “Tell the people to buy the iPad.”

“But if they do, we are giving our power to you,” they respond.

“Do it,” he says, shaking his gun at them. “Do it, or you die, anyway.”

And so, they have.

One by one, deals are signed. The media are allowed into the Apple world, given access to the channels the world of consumers will be searching for media on and through. And in return, they chant their hollow slogans.

And this is not just the trash media we’re talking about here. That’s what is so sad about this. It’s all of them. Every lefty, supposedly “independent” news source there is left is now chanting the slogans. And they’re chanting them through advertorials that exploit the validity the general public give to “news” and “reviews”. It is propaganda of the most thorough kind. Jobs now has a voice of truth as the microphone through which to hypnotise the masses, leading them to buy his machines, which lead him to own it all.

The Guardian, this week, ran a series of full page ads for the iPad, as well as signing a deal that placed them in official iPad subway posters (they’re the website viewed on the machine for the product shot). It featured a daily article by a selection of its journalists, all heralding the arrival of “the future” of our lives – a “future” that rests on in this over-priced heap of shit that does nothing but restrict what we’ve all been able to do for years now. 24 hours after Li Hai threw himself to his death, one of the most respected newspapers in the world chose not to publish this story, but instead placed on its front page what it declared as “the final verdict” on the iPad, titled “Me & My iPad”. In it, a selection of journalists and celebrities were given free iPads, and then asked a series of questions that obviously a bunch of copywriters had answered for them. While Hai’s body was taken to the local morgue, UK media celebrity Jonathan Ross had this to say of the iPad:

“It’s very beautiful to look at. I have a variety of laptops and some are very chic and easy on the eye, but the iPad looks nicer when waiting to be used in, for example, the front room. Also it’s very pleasant to hold. The apps I have on it are dreamy and reading/sending mail on it is lovely. I have a Kindle as well, but the iPad’s colour screen really trumps that for comfortable reading, and of course photographs and artwork really “pop” on it, so it’s by far the best digital reader for magazines and comic books.”

Never mind that it’s screen resolution is half as clear or bright as a laptop – I just can’t wait to have one, sitting there looking so gorgeous, in my front room, can you?! And nice weaving in there of its main reader competitor, Kindle (which is a far superior reading device).

Even artists – to appease that often resistant arty crowd – were bought out. Apple copywriters, pretending to be funky artiste David Hockney, came up with a true gem:

“It has a better relationship with the hand. The iPhone was limited by the relationship with the hand and ear, not an interesting one like the hand and eye.”

Oh, baby, that’s… Arty™ and shit. He even would have us believe he uses not only his iPad, but his iPhone, to – wait for it – draw his art! Despite there being no such application, beyond a cute app (designed for children) that allows one to Create™ in what is best described as a modern version of the Magna Doodle.

Despite it’s processing power being in the dark ages in comparison to not just laptops but nearly all notebooks, writer/director Graham Lineham, was impressed mostly by its “speed”:

“It just springs to life and waits for you to catch up. The opposite of our normal experience.”

Goodness, it’s changing life as we know it!

Even the BBC happily sold out. It sacrificed Rory Cellan-Jones to announce this dazzling lie:

“The sheer delight of doing just about everything I can achieve on a laptop in a much more intuitive way – watching video, controlling my home audio system, using a photo editing app.”

Actually, Rory, it can’t do any of these things in the same way your laptop does – far from it. Not only does Apple’s battle with Adobe mean that, far from watching video “more intuitively” than a laptop, you mostly can’t watch web video at all, it is Adobe who manufacture the world’s dominating – and far superior – creative software (including photoshop, etc). You can “control” your home audio system, so long as you don’t use anything other than Apple devices and libraries. Neither is there any way to store any music on the device that has not been purchased or imported through iTunes. And let’s not mention document production and editing – needless to say, Microsoft are not allowed to play in the Apple sandpit either, and Word is incompatible and unavailable for the iPad platform.

But it was The Guardian’s own India Knight – who has penned some decent articles in her time – who came out with my favourite piece of propagandist dribble:

“Everything looks so beautiful. It’s like holding the future – especially if you’re interested in newspapers.”

Newspapers, like, say, The Guardian? Who currently have the biggest deal with Apple for content distribution – and advertising – and even their own iPad content delivery app?

My favourite reaction to India’s futuristic declaration came in the furor that did, thankfully, erupt in the comment boards, as a response to these ads masquerading as journalism. FunkyBadger had a question for Miss Knight:

“’It’s like holding the future in your hands’… But is it made of otter’s paws and stardust?”

Others were more damning. In fact, it’s where I first came across the story of Li Hai’s suicide (linked to by a disgruntled Guardian subscriber). These reactions are out there, most definitely. An awful lot of people, it is at least refreshing to see, are not this stupid. But they are mostly those from the world of IT, and are not Apple consumers. A handful of angry tech-savvy anti-Apple mobs are yet to make a dent in iPad’s sales (it has already outsold the far more useful iPhone). As it was, whilst The Guardian generally leaves comment boards open for days after the publishing of its articles, I returned to its selection of Apple advertorials to find a recurring announcement: “Comments on this article have now been closed.” The consequent video of The Guardian editor in chief – yes, they gave him an entire video posted on the front page of the site – where he, what a surprise, heralds the iPad as the future (and The Guardian’s own iPad app as the best on the market!) didn’t even have the option to comment, in the first place. Guess they’d learned their lesson.

Of course, all these articles have now begun taking the standard advertising and marketing approach of hiding deceptively – but only implicitly – antagonist statements within these advertorials. Many of them now begin with a seemingly unimpressed commentator who expresses their concern over this new device. But they all end with telling us we are witnessing the future of civilization itself! It’s a psychological, and very deliberate, trick used in most marketing, these days; it’s because the marketing industry has caught on to an evolving consumer awareness of advertising corruption, and that people have at least grown to mistrust anything too glowing. The compromise is to throw in a statement that, whilst eventually completely drowned by the praise, acts as an assurance to your fears (“Oh, this must be real – it said something vaguely negative amongst the 15 slogans”). I find this requested in many of my briefs, these days, and a lot of the marketing I write will deliberately appear to knock something in the middle of selling it. You’ll see this approach at its most extreme form in what is called “anti-marketing marketing” (yes, quite the paradox!), such as The Commonwealth Bank’s latest campaigns that poke fun at major marketing firms producing deceptive ads for banks. The ad itself is a fictionalised scenario made by a major marketing firm.

Our very own ABC has used this approach, when it unveiled its own glowing reviews of the device (ABC has plans for its own iPad app, needless to say). The honour was given to Nick Ross, who began his article, “iPad: Hot or Not?” by sounding as if he was about to give us the world’s first critical review from a mainstream media outlet; “regardless of what I say, heaps of people are going to buy one.” True, perhaps, but what he then went on to say was that it was a wonderful thing that he “can’t imagine not owning by the end of the year”, describing himself as “hooked” on a device full of “guaranteed winners”. He even managed to get a mention in of The Guardian app, which, Ross tells us, is “mesmerising”.

But with much less screen resolution than your laptop, a slaughtering of multi-media capability, and that ultimately smaller screen, the hard fact of the matter, away from this propaganda, is that even this website you’re viewing right now trumps anything on the iPad hands down. You can browse this website on your iPad, sure. But you can’t watch any of the videos I embed, and the whole thing will be in lower resolution. For something that claims to be the world’s best “reader” device, that just makes absolutely no sense. The Kindle, with its specially developed ink-screen, is a reader. This is just a glossy screen (that you cannot even see at all in the sunlight – but my how pretty that gloss makes it), showing images at a resolution from eight years ago. This is not a revolution. It’s an ad. They’ve sold backwards steps as forward. Buy it, knowing that is what you’re taking. And yes, the official Apple answer to these gripes is that what you’re getting is a machine that is “ready to power up and go”. It’s lack of capability means that you don’t have to boot it, as you would a notebook or laptop. But once you’ve turned it on and are ready to go, it goes at much less speed and power anyway. So if your idea of speed is to not have to wait an entire 30 seconds, to get into a system with nowhere near the power as one where you do have to wait 30 seconds, then… well… you deserve your iPad.

Apple vs Darcness

The thing is, I’m by no means a PC boy from the standard anti-Apple world. If anything, I’m the perfect Apple demographic posterboy. I work in the commercial creative field, I’m an early 30’s trendy inner-city dude, and I even wear funky sneakers in the office. Furthermore, I already own Apple products. I write this on my Macbook Pro, and I also own an iPhone. But my love affair has been fading, over recent years, and has, with the advent of the iPad, finally come to a head. That’s the thing about companies with a black heart of greed the size of Apple’s – they deteriorate as they dominate. The symbiotic deterioration and domination of Apple has reached a point where the two of us, like jilted lovers, are no more.

There have been plenty of quarrels, leading up to this moment; but one of them happened quite recently, when my ridiculously expensive Macbook Pro, just six months after its purchase, decided to die. This is hardly a shock to anyone who knows Apple products. Another testament to its marketing hypnosis is that this brand still manages to sell the products it does, even though people now have an expectation that there’s basically a flip-a-coin chance your device is going to one day, probably not too far away, simply not turn on. The iPhones are notorious for it – even all these generations later – and dead iPods are all part of the parcel.

But this was not even my gripe in this experience. My gripe came when I had to do something about my broken computer. As it was, this was my second Macbook Pro in a year, and the first dealings I had with Mac support were, without exaggeration, traumatic. At least that time, however, the problem was my fault – sure, they still acted atrociously, but hey, it was my foolishness with a glass of red wine that led me to have to deal with them in the first place. But this time, it was their fault. The hard drive had decided, with no help from me, to commit suicide. I expected them to respond to this, considering it was a six month old three thousand dollar computer, in a manner that was both apologetic and accommodating. I expected them to be friendly. But you only get that when they’re taking your money. Or, as I would eventually find out, if you threaten influence over the other people they take it from.

Firstly, I find it appalling that any company uses slave labor in Indian call centers to deal with local business, but a company the size of Apple – who last week finally surpassed Microsoft in share prices, to become the world’s most lucrative technology giant – is unnecessary and abhorrent. Of course, if you choose a selection at the initial automated prompts that relates to you purchasing a product, you don’t leave Australia. Got a problem? Off to India you go.

Thus began six hours – count them… six – that I paid for (I explained I had no land line and was paying literally hundreds for the call, but they refused to call me back instead) that ended in nothing more than a great big bunch of lies. My greatest concern was that all my data had died with the computer. I could see it still on there in disk utilities, and before anything was done to it, I wanted to make sure I had that data back. In the modern world, it was my fucking life – a confronting moment, as it was, to consider that our existence now sits inside a piece of metal that can die, and kill the last few years of our existence, along with it. Yes, I’d made a backup, but the screwed up hard-drive had corrupted the external hard-drive as well. I wanted my laptop working again, and I wanted my life back. Considering it was a six month old, three thousand dollar computer that was still under warranty, I did not consider this an expectation I did not have the right to put forward.

They, however, did not agree. Every time I would put forward that I knew enough about computers to know the hard drive had shit itself, the unpleasant man would promptly interrupt me; “if it is a problem with the hard drive, sir. It sounds like it could very well not be.” We’d try another way of getting it to work – based on the idea it was not a hard drive problem, but a software problem (which they take no responsibility for – even though it’s still their software, as well) – but to no avail. “It’s the hard-drive! C’mon!” I’d repeat at increasingly aggressive volumes.

At one point, I was told to purchase a new external hard drive and ring them again, so we could put the new plan of rescue into action. I did. It cost me $200. I was assured this wonderful idea would work. It didn’t.

“C’mon!” I shouted at them. “I mean, really, c’mon! This is a fucking joke. Your computer fucked itself – can we just admit that now and help me here?’

“I’m afraid I’ll have to terminate the call, sir, if you use language like that.” At roughly $50 mobile phone cost for every vein attempt, I felt quite within my rights to use whatever language I fucking wanted to.

At one point, I demanded to speak to someone higher up. I was refused. Instead, I was placed on hold for 20 minutes, until I was told that “regretfully, after speaking with our customer relations department, there is nothing we can do, at this point, until you follow the next steps.”

These next steps – because they still were not prepared to entertain the thought that something was wrong with the actual machine – was to take the laptop to a data recovery specialist (they take no responsibility for data loss, even if it is their fault), then “zero out” the hard drive (basically killing the whole thing, to start again – and something that only works if it is a software problem and not a hard-drive problem). Frustrated, I hung up the phone, and faced the terrifying thought that I really did have no choice but to submit.

I rang three data recovery specialists and the cheapest quote I could find was $2,100 (almost the cost of the laptop itself). Fortunately, one of these specialists was kind enough to ask me a series of questions that led them to assure me that the Apple support knew full well that this was clearly a hardware problem. “They’re lying to you,” I was told. “But that’s Apple, that’s always their first approach.”

I was not prepared to give up. I decided to somehow get through to the Sydney store, so I spoke to India one more time and demanded a local number. I got it.

“Welcome to Apple Sydney,” the unsettlingly serene voice welcomed me.

“Oh, thank fuck,” I sighed.

“Press 2 if you are experiencing technical problems.”

Oh, I am. Indeed, I am. 2.

“Hello,” said the Indian voice, “I am Trevor.”

No, you’re fucking not.

Okay, take two.

“Press 1 if you would like to enquire about an Apple product or service.”

1.

“Welcome to Apple Sydney!”

Thought so.

This time, I played hardball with a language Apple understands: publicity. I had used it to some effect, during my last battle with my wine-soaked Macbook. I should have used it from the get go, this time – silly me for expecting to be treated on the basis of my legitimate consumer merits.

I explained that I was an IT journalist who had written for digital marketing publications (true, after all – though they would hardly be interested in publishing my “Apple shit me” story, alongside my digital marketing how-to’s) and been published by Sydney Morning Herald (again, true – but they’d care even less). I explained that I had always been a follower of Apple (semi-true) and had even written favourable reviews in the past (okay, a complete lie).

“Can you bring the computer down, right now?”

Thought so.

Not only was I personally walked up the glowing staircase and bypassed through the appointment listings for the (I love this) Apple Genius Bar™; I was offered a beverage, engaged by several staff with absurdly transparent chit-chat about my “line of work”, and even apologised to for the stools being “not very comfortable” (somewhat different to the Chinese workers denied any stools at all). Within five minutes, it was declared that – whaddya know – I was suffering from a hardware problem, and not to fear, because they would personally extract all my data off the hard-drive, right there and then, before my very eyes. And they did. What I was told was “utterly impossible”, just two hours earlier, was suddenly happening in no more than five minutes. I waited for the data to copy over, was handed the external hard-drive (and my digital life) with more apologies, and told that my laptop would be fixed as soon as possible, to ensure I could continue writing my IT articles (praising Apple?). And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, after discovering they didn’t have any of the hard-drives required in stock, they personally removed one from an instore laptop and replaced it for me, ready to pick up, the very next morning. They even pre-loaded it with a bunch of apps for no extra cost. How terribly, terribly kind of them.

“We’re so sorry,” they said for the five-hundredth time. “We hope we’ve restored your faith in Apple!”

“Oh, totally! I’ll be sure to write something extra nice!” I winked.

And it’s funny and all, but really, what if I was just your everyday consumer who didn’t have it in him to pull this off? What if I were you? You’d be screwed. You would have been paying literally thousands for the data, and waste more pointless hours with the next steps of zeroing the machine. Then, you’d end up in a cue, to finally have the thing sat on a shelf out the back until your part arrived and someone got round to fixing it.

I still had to pay for the original mobile calls, mind you. $387.26. That’s more than twice what most of the factory workers in China – the ones who are flinging themselves of roofs – make in a month to build these things.

So I know all about what publicity means to Apple. My, what a different world it is, when you’re in the club! I can just imagine the pampering that goes on with these real journalists – even if their companies don’t have a gun held to their head in regards to their future in content delivery (which they do), its amazing how easily we can be bought out. Apple knows it. If they can buy you out, they will. Everyone else can get fucked. If you don’t like it, speak to India.

I hate them. But yeah, I got my laptop working again – in exchange for being part of the propaganda machine. It works like a dream, now – like… I don’t know… the future or something. It’s a revolution, I tell you! A fucking Revolution™!

I’m writing this article on it, right now.

“We know the rules, and we’re gonna play it.”
Rick Astley

Is Rick Astley the God of Internet? Well, that’s the latest term being thrown around in cyberspace and (therefore, any minute now) in the press. Seriously, people, Rick Fucking Astley! If you have no idea what I’m talking about (which kinda makes me smile, to think of where your head must be at, right now), then you are officially disconnected to the vibe in cybertown. If you do, of course, then I’m not entirely sure what it says about you. Or what it says about me, I guess. But yes, Rick Astley has returned. I know he famously sang that he wouldn’t desert us, but I, for one, thought he was joking. Over fifteen years later, whaddya know, Rick comes back into vogue. And, really – what, with the war, and the economic collapse of civilisation, and all – I can’t think of a more appropriate time.

It’s a beautiful story, as far as I’m concerned. It goes a little something like this…

Like the ageless battle between the Darwinians and the Bible Bashers, perhaps we’ll never be sure how the second Age of Rick Astley was born. Some forum boards lay claim to this origin; but it’s hard to pinpoint the beginning of this phenomenon. It is not about an individual, anyway. It is about many – a genuine meme, of sorts, that has yielded incredible things. But somewhere, somehow, for whatever reason, the RickRoll was born. What’s a RickRoll? Well, I’m going to tell you. Then, you can officially consider yourself plugged into the cyber vibe. Lucky you.

Okay, so first, you choose a subject matter that you know thousands – preferably, millions – are searching for on youtube. I remember my first RickRoll, as if it were yesterday. Actually, it was a fortnight ago. Time flies, when you’re being RickRolled. I was searching for footage of Tina Fey, like everybody else was – and I’d no reason to believe I was about to witness anything else than the contents of the title: TINA FEY DOES PALIN – FULL!!!

Imagine my surprise (or, if you’ve also been RickRolled, I’m sure you’ll recall the sensation) when, instead, I was confronted with Mr Astley, doing that gorgeous little shuffle-dance that, truth be told, I based most of my club moves on. The blow-wave, the casual suit, that peaches and cream – and, um, paste – skin. At the end of the implanted video, the viewer would be informed, “You’ve been RickRoll’d”. Maybe you just have to be there; but, as someone who was 13 and wearing doc martins when this song was originally released, it sure made me smile. Followed by the obvious question, of course: “What the fuck was that?”