Apple is a company that tells us they are revolutionary, rather than committing revolutionary acts—like making their products user-friendly. Fighting for the user and empowering them—the ethos that the microcomputer revolution began with when Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was exploiting Ma Bell's telephone routing system with a Captain Crunch whistle and hand-winding the circuits for his own logic gates in a garage—has been abandoned for the mass-production of silicon wafers which are housed in a casing that is so subpar that it always has to be covered with rigid prophylactic. There are no visible screws on these devices because you’re not supposed to take them apart. Ever. Even when they break. That work is best left for people who could only be described as “geniuses.” The software on these machines is similarly well-guarded.
Nothing says "customer oriented" like a wall of disembodied faces.
Last week at the 2017 September Event, Apple Inc. revealed their next generation of fetishized Palo Alto techno-baubles. Apple's textural and aesthetically slick infomercial was supposed to elicit excitement for their product line but I found it inspiring my cynicism more than anything. This annual event likes to pretend that it's inspired and innovative but it's really just a multi-camera megachurch worship service for the next generation of selfie-machines, live from the brand-new Steve Jobs coliseum. The fruitarian Stations of the Cross begin just down the hall in the "unbelievable hands-on area."
Now, former revolutionary engineer, Steve Wozniak, sits in the Steve Jobs coliseum during the unveiling. His presence is supposed to lend a credibility to the event that it wouldn’t have otherwise. The fat man lazily claps at each new product revelation. These days, he is tired of thinking differently and gets his thrills from Segway polo and dancing with the "stars”. Wozniak has earned the right to retreat to the spoils of his prior innovations (and he gets an eternal pass for funding the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), but his presence alludes to exactly what’s missing from Apple’s corporate culture and from almost every other mainstream technology vendor; like Google, Samsung, Sony, et all.
These companies are no longer in the business of manufacturing hardware or developing software because it is fun or interesting or empowering to their users, they are interested in, precisely, two things:
- Pimping thousand dollar sales platforms that are guarded by intellectual property law
- Making a selling point out of added features that no one has asked for
This year's example of a feature (no reasonable person would ask for) is the always-active camera that unlocks your phone while you are staring at it. At least, for the narcissistic consumer, the ability to turn emojis into selfies takes the sting out of constant visual surveillance.
"Haha, we're shitheads!"
Do any of Apple’s new features not impede on our privacy? In a world where the NSA, black hats, and even local police are eager to exploit television sets that are always watching, virtual assistants (read: shopping kiosks) that are always listening, live streaming baby monitors, mobile phone tracking, and internet service providers who are always taking notes; any supposed security that these modern tech giants provide is as superficially substantial as the manhole cover that hides the G-men lurking in our sewers.
Pop music celebrity and privacy enthusiast, Sia, forewarns of Face ID in 2016
The truly revolutionary act in this day and age would be to create a platform that is not necessarily sleek or “user-friendly” but chunky and large (perhaps sized for those of us not graced with smaller Asiatic hands). It would have visible screws and a hardware manual that explained what was contained within. It would be less slick than a glass bar of soap. It would be a modular platform with interchangeable pieces. It would be repairable. Its software would be exploitable and modifiable to its more advanced users. It would be custom fit and long-lasting. And, it would grant users control of the bundle of sensors that was constantly in their pocket. This hypothetical Apple platform would be something that would motivate the next generation of users to enter the field of technology design and engineering and not a glowing fetish object for one year before becoming e-waste for an eternity.
Apple Inc. is free to make edge-to-edge television paperweights/NSA periscopes for people—who have spent almost thirty years in an increasingly technological society without ever learning the basic principles of computer technology, but the user-oriented revolution is coming and it’s inevitable and it’s going to replace "innovative revolutionaries" like Apple Inc. Perhaps, in the next five years; we, the users, will break out of intellectual property and EULA jail and harvest riper fruit from platforms that are user-driven, like the Raspberry Pi and Adafruit Industries.