The Apple ad that brainwashed America

Four decades on from Ridley Scott’s Apple Mac ad, its message of human liberation seems, in hindsight, risible. We do not live in the utopia promised by the Super Bowl ad, nor in the liberating world the Think Different campaign foretold, but in a conformist  dystopia more nightmarish than those of Ridley Scott ‘s best movies. 

True, the fall of the Berlin Wall five years after the Apple Mac was launched did herald the end of rule by the real-life Big Brothers of the Soviet bloc, but in our current world of digital surveillance and data mining, in which your every key stroke exists in the cloud, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we live in something if not quite as totalitarian as Orwell’s dystopian nightmare, then something similar. We are ruled not by Big Brother but tech bros such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and current Apple CEO Tim Cook. 

But here’s the twist. Big Brother needed electroshock, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, drugs, rats in cages and hectoring propaganda broadcasts to keep power, while his Ministry of Plenty ensured shortages of consumer goods so that subjects were in an artificial state of need. Today’s tech giants have more effective tactics to ensure we do their bidding. They have ingeniously made us desire our own domination, glutting us with must-have goods. So, at least, argues Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book Psychopolitics, in which he distinguishes between 20th century totalitarian control and its 21st century successor. 

“Confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure,” Han argues. “Smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers.” Well, not quite. Torture chambers still exist. But the point remains: control of the masses beyond the wildest imaginings of real-life wannabe Big Brothers including Hitler, Mao, and Stalin has been achieved largely by more subtle means.