The paradox in this article is not really such a fresh perspective, its is a story we already know. But it is well told, and the full quote of the 1984 ad is very paradoxical. Apple is ideologically driven, they represent a fundamentalist ideology that holds together and drives the Apple machine. It is a strength, but I bet it will be this very strength that will ultimately be its downfall.
The outgoing Apple CEO’s genius was in embracing the precise corporate values to which the Apple brand was ostensibly opposed, writes Andrew Potter
BY ANDREW POTTER, OTTAWA CITIZEN AUGUST 27, 2011 6:09 AM
Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple on Aug. 24, just weeks after his company surpassed Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable corporation in the world. Yet for all his success as a business executive, Jobs’ most enduring legacy is not as a corporate but as a cultural visionary.
From the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad, Apple products have installed themselves in the battle gear of the contemporary creative class, serving as a virtual synonym for networked independence and stylish non-conformity. Steve Jobs is perhaps the most successful brand manager in history, and he did it, paradoxically, by embracing the precise corporate values to which the Apple brand identity is ostensibly opposed.
Think back to the famous “1984” commercial that trumpet-blasted the arrival of the Macintosh computer. Before legions of dronelike workers arranged in orderly rows, Big Brother appears on a giant viewscreen, addressing the crowd: “Today, we celebrate the glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”
Everything in the ad is black and white, except for a blond woman wearing bright red shorts, who runs toward the viewscreen pursed by riot police. She screams, then throws an enormous sledgehammer through the screen, which explodes in a flash of light. A pitch for the new Macintosh computer scrolls into view. Thanks to the Apple Computer Corporation, we are assured, the year 1984 will not be like the book 1984. The spot was directed by Ridley Scott, and was honoured by Advertising Age as the best commercial of the decade.
While the “1984” ad ran only once, during Super Bowl XVIII, it nailed Apple’s ideological colours to the mast. Ever since, the brand has stood as the definitive statement of the rebel sell: the individualized resistance of political authoritarianism and cultural conformity through the adoption of non-standard consumer goods.
Here’s a pop quiz: what company is being represented as “Big Brother” in the “1984” ad? Most people, when you ask them, answer Microsoft. Except the real target of the ad is actually IBM, a company that was already on the cusp of obsolescence by the time the Macintosh appeared. Since then, a succession of companies have cycled through the typical lifespan from spunky young startup to lumbering corporate behemoth – Microsoft, Google and now Facebook – and each time, they have found themselves criticized for all manner of monopolistic and even Orwellian activities.
But it is worth emphasizing that the existence of standards in the computer industry is, by and large, the consequence of choices that people have voluntarily made. Network effects, where a device, application, or operating system gets increasingly useful as more and more people adopt it, are extremely powerful, and merely underscore the fact that not all uniformity is a bad thing.
Yet there is one thing that the “1984” commercial glosses over, which is the fact that there is no “Information Purification Directive” in our society. Or at least there wasn’t until Steve Jobs came along. More than any other company in the industry, Apple exerts a tremendous amount of control over its customers’ user experience. From the tethering of the iPod to a specific iTunes account to the way Apple jealously guards applications (and hence, content) for the iPhone, the Apple ecosystem has become its own “garden of pure ideology.”
And therein lies the paradox of Apple under Steve Jobs, and the key to his company’s unbelievable success. For the past quarter century, Apple has retained its credibility as the flagship brand of techno-cultural cool, even as it treats its customers with a darkly paternalistic attitude that some have dubbed “iFascism.”
Why does Apple get away with it? One answer is to say, as many have, that under Steve Jobs, the Apple user community has become something near to a cult, with its infantilized members tolerating all manner of indignities in the blind service of the leader’s vision. But that misses the central point, which is that Apple products make their users feel freer than they do when they are using other operating systems, other computers, or other devices. As The Economist pointed out in an editorial a few years ago, the most salient feature of Apple products is that they work.
Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This, then, is the deeply ironic magic that Steve Jobs has conjured: through rigid centralization of design and strict control over the user experience, Apple has enabled a deeper freedom for its customers – the freedom that comes from a technology that enhances the scope of choice and opportunity in our lives, while layering itself, simply, almost invisibly, upon the operating system of our world.
Andrew Potter is the author of The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves, out now in paperback from McLelland & Stewart.
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