Apple’s liberation rhetoric inaugurated a more powerful control society

Evidence

The advertisement that Apple aired during the 1984 Superbowl has become the stuff of legend. In it the company presented itself as a force of liberation, which would counter the Orwellian surveillance state. In lock-step, listless workers – evidently without a will of their own – march into a vast hall and listen to Big Brother’s fanatical declamations on the telescreen. Then the ad shows a woman rushing into the assembly hall, the Thought Police in hot pursuit. Bearing a sledgehammer before her heaving breast, she dashes forward. Full of resolve, she runs straight up to Big Brother and throws the sledgehammer at the telescreen with all the force she can muster; it explodes in a dazzling burst of light. The assembled workers promptly awaken from their torpor. A voice declares: ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.’ But despite Apple’s message, 1984 did not signal the end of the surveillance state so much as the inception of a new kind of control society – one whose operations surpass the Orwellian state by leaps and bounds. Now, communication and control have become one, without remainder. Now, everyone is his or her own panopticon. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 93

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s knowledge of tech-utopian marketing cynicism and with We by Zamyatin re: voluntary conformity; also connects to the general theme in Home Boy and A Very Minor Prophet of the friendly face of coercion. — connects to: Under postindustrial capitalism, increased freedom and abundance produce more sophisticated social control — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 216; The system’s celebrated freedoms function as instruments of domination — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 45; Closed-platform control and tax avoidance mark Apple’s imperial posture — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 189 (+3 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘liberation from surveillance’ product launches of one generation become the soft infrastructure of the next generation’s control — Apple 1984 to the iPhone as panopticon.

Broader Connections

• The system’s celebrated freedoms function as instruments of domination #corroborates (0.90) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 45
• Under postindustrial capitalism, increased freedom and abundance produce more sophisticated social control #corroborates (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 216
• Neoliberal freedom can be a vehicle for governance and domination #corroborates (0.78) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 153
• Control society replaced confinement with self-created open space #expands (0.75) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 51
• Community control rhetoric can serve conservative demobilization as readily as liberation #complicates (0.72) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 100
• Closed-platform control and tax avoidance mark Apple’s imperial posture #complicates (0.70) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 189