One lesson from Apple v. Samsung (and other recent events)

An interesting lesson from the entire Apple v. Samsung affaire was that there are certain things that cyberpunk got right. And there are other things that the literary-cultural movement got wrong. But it got much more right than it got wrong.

The movement in computer technology drifts not, as technoutopians (including many cyberlibertarians) would have it, toward greater openness, greater flow of information and ever-increasing substantive degrees of personal freedom, as government structures founder ineffectually in a rusty, industrial-age obsolescence. Instead, the apostles of personal computing and networking have ushered in the same Coke-and-Pepsi choices that have characterised the rest of late-capitalist modernity. The vast majority of computer users have the choice of Windows versus Mac OS, PC versus Apple. And that choice constrains to a significant degree what you can and cannot do, unless you have a degree of willpower and technological savvy which allows you to do end-runs around proprietary structures and programmes which govern not only your machine, but the potentially infinite number of other terminals and users to which you are connected. Rather than being empowering, this level of technology only erects another dimension of illusory choice.

Aesthetically, as well, Apple in particular set the trend toward a superlative form of modernist design: sleek, monolithic, monochrome capsules which exude ‘trendiness’ and ‘convenience’, which less-enlightened megacorporations are seeking to emulate. Note that, for the Apple product, the end user is of secondary importance, even an afterthought – Apple Corporation tells you what is and isn’t ‘cool’, what is and isn’t ‘hip’, what is and isn’t allowed. What do you mean, you want to use Adobe Flash? What, you want to add more memory to your white-and-chrome monolith than the extra 512 MB that the Corporation very generously deigns to permit you to purchase built-in? That would totally throw off the design, man! Begone, vile square (pun intended)! Megacorporations may not have taken up the brutalist glass-and-steel-ziggurat visual style in the exact way envisioned by, for example, Blade Runner and The Matrix, but Apple’s vision is every bit as hypermodernist, consolidated, monolithic and dictatorial, even if the sleek, smooth curves put a slightly friendlier face on the aesthetic.

But the real audacity of Apple was to tell its consumers through a clever and insidious advertising campaign that by conforming to its consolidated, top-down, end-user-optional vision of computing, they are being ‘rebellious’ and ‘countercultural’ (just like Einstein, Dr King and Gandhi!), and generally ‘thinking outside the [PC] box’. Put this way, of course, the technoutopian vision looks downright naïve.

To their everlasting credit, the likes of William Gibson, Philip K Dick and Edward Neumeier did envision a future where this level of interconnectivity and corporate dominance served to keep people quiescent and constrain people’s choices in a sort of dystopia, rather than liberating them. They fell prey to the same error as the technoutopians they critiqued, however, in that they thought that government would be made obsolete as networking increased and computing became more ubiquitous and sophisticated. (OCP doesn’t run the cops, per se, but they do have free run of the courts and the legislature, as the concerted efforts to pass SOPA and PIPA, as well as DMCA-prompted crackdowns on file-sharing websites, have borne witness!) Coming from the other angle, of course, we have Evgeny Morozov pointing out how networking and social technologies are tools which determined and savvy authoritarian governments can potentially use to their advantage. There are certain elements of Facebook, indeed (particularly the ways in which it compromises user privacy), which could very readily adapt themselves to a corporatist form of authoritarianism.

There are a number of other things we have seen cyberpunk get right in the meantime, one of which is the rise of activist forms of cyberanarchism, represented by the likes of Julian Assange and Anonymous. They aren’t exactly hard-boiled, hard-drinking cybernetic ninjas… that I am aware of. But even so, they do seem to be motivated by a sense of rather understandable dissatisfaction with and alienation from the (increasingly consolidated, increasingly opaque, increasingly unaccountable) direction technologies and their applications have taken.