and clean. It proposes a futuristic lifestyle without attachments or clutter, where mankind is free to chase down every desire, creative and otherwise, free of the “fuzz” of possessions. Like a nomad on the steppe, movement, horizon, and conquest are the only concern.
The room of the modern man is stark, but in its simplicity it exudes wealth and sophistication. There is just a bed or futon and an iPad. None of the old-time accoutrements which signified intelligence, artistic interest, or a curiosity about the world are evident. There are no magazines, books, or records anywhere. Just perhaps some high-priced “products,” a.k.a. toiletries, in the bathroom. Everything he or she needs is on the Cloud.
Things, stuff, and doodads are just hang-ups, after all, which serve to drag us into our past and harness us to prior ideas of who we were and what we are supposed to be.
The Apple world is apart from the old world. It is one where we can be anything, free of the wretched past. Just a being of light and electricity who wafts effortlessly from whim to caprice to passing fancy. Like their room, his or her body is also clean, shaved; streamlined for action. If one has possessions, one is seen to be rather fuddy-duddy and certainly not a sexually vital contemporary being.
The Apple proposition is a sixties futurist-Zen minimalist throwback, lifted from Scandinavian designers like Panton and Saarinen, whose Nordic functionalism was influenced by modernist movements like De Stijl and the Bauhaus.
While modernism proposed ways of dealing with the cataclysmic upheaval brought on by industrialism, Apple’s proposition is the Western capitalist commercial: freedom, ease, sex, and cool control of one’s environment. Apple actively encourages the population to lose their possessions. Music? Store it on the Cloud. Books? Store them on the Cloud. Film, magazines, newspapers, TV are all safely stored in the ether and not underfoot or stuffed in a closet. It’s a modernist monastery where the religion is Apple itself.
Meanwhile, those who have hung onto possessions are castigated, jeered at, and painted as fools. The hit TV show Hoarders (A&E) identifies people with things as socially malignant, grotesque, primitive, dirty, bizarre. In a word: poor. Apple has turned the world upside down in making possessions a symbol of poverty and having nothing a signifier of wealth and power.
This is actually a bourgeois sensibility, an aesthetic of Calvinists and other early Protestants/capitalists. While wealth adornment was a no-no, extraordinary wealth accumulation was a sign of godliness and beatitude. These bean counters were pioneers of the modern aesthetic: owning things = vulgar; having obscene piles of money/capital beyond what one could ever use = divine.
The antistuff crowd invokes Eastern Buddhism and communism-lite in their put-down of possessions and the people who “hoard” them. It’s supposed to be a sign of superstition, a hang-up, a social disease, greedy, sick. People who have things are derided as “fetishists.” Why would one have a record collection when all information is available online to be had by the technologically plugged in (which is, at this point, a requirement for everyone)?
Why would one have a bookshelf when Google has taken all the book content in the world to be dispersed through its beneficent magnanimity? Books are heavy, dirty, dusty, and disintegrate into your lungs. Why should there be encyclopedias when there is the wiki-world? And so on. Why should there be record stores, bookstores, video stores, shopping areas, kiosks, cinemas, theaters, opera houses, libraries, schools, parks, government buildings, meeting halls, et al? Public spaces, markets, and interacting with other people are primeval, germy, and dangerous. After all, it can all be done online, you primates. The only thing one needs is a Whole Foods, some hip bars, and an airport so as to jet to Burma before it gets lame.
This is fine for the cyberelite; they can live as they wish. But why is their ideology impressed on all of us through this shame-based propaganda? Why is the “hoarder” so loathed by the Apple authorities?
Answer: because he or she is feared.
The “hoarder” has “things” after all, items like books and records which are clues to a past when these things were stores of knowledge, signifiers, totems of meaning. The cyberlords want it all destroyed. The library must be cleaned of nasty old books and filled with computers. The record collector must renounce his or her albums and replace them with an iPod. This is an obvious concern if the multibillion-dollar iTunes Inc. is to effectively rein in recalcitrant stragglers in a market it dominates so entirely, selling “songs”—which are, for them, just puffs of free digital smeg-phemera—for ninety-nine cents a pop. No resistance to the realm can be tolerated.
But it’s not only the money they make from iTunes or their various other virtual marketplaces—which have left all physical businesses shuttered (aside from fro-yo places, nail salons, and gin-joints)—that they care about. The computer lords want to control everything, and central to controlling all things is controlling perception. Perception of the way things are, the way things work, and what’s happened in history so that they can frame their version of events and control the narrative; mind-controlling the masses to make them into better, more compliant consumer/servants.
Just as governments spend enormous sums of money on textbooks, monuments, films, and museums which heroize their regime and frame their particular version of history, the computer overlords are concerned about the myths of the culture. Their ascendancy must seem inevitable, brilliant, brave, noble, just, and right.
The “stuff” that the “hoarder” retains, however, might tell a story which refutes or challenges their version of events in some way. The record collection or magazine or newspaper might reveal some clue to a social movement or trend or fashion or sensibility which defies their moronic stranglehold on consciousness. A burp of resistance. A clue to a way out. A signal that life doesn’t actually depend on high-speed Internet access. And the physicality of the item infers that things meant something once, that everything wasn’t always a meaningless, equivocal post on Tumblr.
Of course, the “hoarders” who are profiled on the show are extreme examples of people who hold on to things, but the message is nonetheless clear. Just as Willie Horton was exploited for racist ends and invoked to create fear and distrust of an entire group, the “hoarders” who are ridiculed, shamed, and “saved” on the television are meant to tar all owners of stuff with their brush.
The shaming of targeted “hoarders” is intended specifically to cajole, bully, and embarrass the population into giving up everything they have—not just possessions but ideas, ethics, rights to ownership (both intellectual and otherwise), privacy, decency, justice, fair treatment, and human rights.
In the Apple Internet age we are expected to surrender absolutely everything; anything less is filthy and deranged “hoarding.” All content is free for the Internet lords who dispense it—or not—at their pleasure.
Apple Inc. is often seen to be selling an image or signifier of a lifestyle, but for them Apple is not just the means to life, but reality itself. Apple demands that everyone throw out all their other possessions for their ersatz midcentury plastic designs. These devices, which never stop “upgrading” and are therefore almost immediately obsolete, present a world where there is only Apple through which we get our information, our culture, our relationships, our sense of self, our love. Apple is the big apple—the world, the cosmos, sin, and godliness—and you’ve got to have it every day.
Apple’s proposal would be impossible without the coordination of its dear ally, the Swedish megacorporation Ikea. Ikea, the original “i”-demon, is their ideological compatriot, and both are similarly ubiquitous features of the modern world. No dorm room or young person’s house is free of middlebrow minimalist Ikea things on which to place their iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc. “iKea” manufactures items which paradoxically comply with the iWorld’s “antistuff” doctrine: instantaneous furniture and utensils,
