Bonus Post: Apple is Losing Creatives

Or, how a classroom full of art school students talked about Apple products--before and after this week's new iPad commercial

I’m not an Apple fan, never have been, and I can’t imagine what it would take to change my mind. Growing up, my father worked in Information Technology and wrote a DOS-based menu system for our pre-Windows home computer. As I showed interest, he encouraged my BASIC programming skills, which I used on Texas Instruments calculators until the advent of the TI-89 and TI-90 series, which rendered all of my hard work obsolete since the things I’d coded were by then native to TI’s array of functions. This, by the way, is how you make an Android fan, a PC user, even a Raspberry Pi dilettante.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Robert Pirsig distinguished between two outlooks on the modern world. On the one hand, the romantic is all about the look, the surface appeal of things. As he saw it, this is someone who grooves with the times and likes doing so. But because the romantic only understands the world’s surface appeal, when the underlying structures aren’t working, he’s left with little idea what to do. A drippy faucet, a motorcycle that won’t start in the noonday heat, proliferating social problems—all of these put the romantic off, racking up annoyance until a major display of ragey revolt against “it all” inevitably ensues. By contrast, the classic sees the world in terms of its underlying structures and functions. Classics care far less for how things look than for how well they work. The classic focuses on logic, order, proper function, and scheduled maintenance. He’s a thinker,¹ a problem solver, a technician—and in his approach there is little surface beauty, though he deeply appreciates the elegance of the way the world works. Also, it’s worth noting that the distinction isn’t hard and fast. Many people are romantics about some aspects of their lives and classics about others. I know I am.

But Apple is a company making products for romantics, with their ‘user-friendly’ interfaces, calligraphy-inspired fonts, and streamlined hardware casing. And that means, for years—generations, really—they’ve been the go-to vendor of devices creatives use in artistic creation. But even beyond creative fields and subcultures, the iPhone and Apple’s gated ecosystem have grabbed a large swath of the everyday user market segment. I imagine many of you are reading this on an Apple device.

Confession: I come to electronics from the classic stance. We own three PCs and their average age is upwards of 7 years old. The oldest is 11 and it runs great. You know why, though? Because I can and do work on it myself. In the decade we’ve owned it, it’s had two RAM upgrades, a hard drive transplant, a fan transplant, two battery replacements, and at least three OS reinstallations. Also, in our last house, which was tiny, I built it a special shelf, where it lived on its edge and worked like a desktop, pushing its output to a monitor mounted on a wall. To keep it from overheating in its little corner, I salvaged and embedded an old microwave fan into the shelf, and that one hack, ugly and noisy though it was, has prolonged the life of that old PC’s silicon and circuits. I did this because I learned some things from the history of computing: the original computers took up entire rooms and were cooled by liquid nitrogen. Same principle. Hacking like a classic isn’t just fun, it breeds a kind of fondness for my tech and sustains my belief that old devices still have something to offer. And that’s reduced my electronics consumption considerably.

But for years, as I’ve worked in classrooms full of students who have no such relationship with their devices—who don’t understand sorting files in a file tree, much less how to create macros, automate updates, change out components, or just generally maintain things—I’ve felt a sense of loss. Our global trash problem isn’t only a consumption problem, it’s also a detachment problem. We don’t understand our devices, we just use them; so when they’re not working for us anymore, we discard them. Small wonder so many people feel like they’re treated similarly—it’s cultural psychology at this point. As an instructor, seeing this in my students has bothered me for years, but I’ve learned to let it go.

You can imagine my surprise then, when, a few weeks ago in Philosophy of Technology, which I teach at an art school, an entire room of students slowly looked at one another and began admitting, one by one: “I hate Apple.” To a person. Reasons were given, too—reasons that sound like mine:

• The company is elitist, exclusive.

• They upcharge people for poorer-performing machines.

• The workers at the factories where their devices are made are treated horribly.

• Video games and other entertainment software are far less available in Apple’s ecosystem, and good deals on them are hard to find.

• And then, there’s the culture of “You can’t.” It’s not just, “You can’t get that software for Apple devices,” it’s, “You can’t open the casing and do your own upgrades.” And that amounts to, “You can’t have a meaningful relationship with this device because only our trained professionals are allowed to engage it in the ways it would take to fully understand how it works.” Call it a “closed-source business philosophy.”

Pro-tip for any Apple execs who might read this (hey, man—I’ve got dreams too, y’know): “You can’t” is a dumb phrase to say, or even to imply, to creatives.

To the artists, it seems the world is not enough for Apple. There’s big resentment toward AI in the arts sector, amplified by a feeling that the technology has been sprung on us like a trap. In class, several students explained how, despite the inconvenience and stress it caused, they resold their old Apple computers and built their own PCs for a fraction of the cost. Several of the animators run Linux. Others have switched to manufactured PCs and are considering dropping their iPhones for Androids, or even dumbphones. What is this new devilry?! I wondered. But what erupted from my mouth was, “Hallellujah!” which startled them a little. Until then, I just couldn’t believe that I’d ever live to see the day when a quorum of my students, much less an entire roomful of them—much less an entire roomful of artists—would confess their hatred for Apple.

And then, Tuesday, the day before the last day of Philosophy of Technology, Apple released its new iPad commercial, “Crush”:

The artists are in end-of-semester mode right now. Last Friday was a major campus-wide show and sale and the work was phenomenal! Many of them are now buried in piles of catch-up work they backburnered in order to be ready for the show, and so few of them had seen the commercial. As they took in what was actually happening, they began to unleash. Boos. Thumbs downed at the screen. “F— you, Apple!” someone yelled from the back. This raw emotion is a symptom of a problem aptly diagnosed by

Damon Beres

and

Charlie Warzel

writing for The Atlantic earlier this week:

Good Lord, Apple, read the room. In its swing for spectacle, the ad lacks so much self-awareness, it’s cringey, even depressing... this is a moment of great technological upheaval and angst, especially among artists, as tech companies build models trained on creative work with an ultimate goal of simulating those very people’s skilled output. It is easy to be offended at the ad’s implication, and it is easy to be aghast at the idea that AI will wipe out human creativity with cheap synthetic waste.²

Readers, there’s a revolt brewing. The creatives are getting technical. They’re thinking about how to poison AI art. They’re learning how to build, code, and do all manner of previously-unimagined things with computers. And through it all, they’re discovering that if users are friendly to their devices, devices need not be so friendly to users for us to live with them. Artists now know how computers and software are made, and working on it in studio means many of them want to leave it behind when they go home.

“Folks, I wasn’t trying to make life difficult for you; I was just trying to help you see that so many things we take for granted aren’t givens. These were what one of my colleagues has called ‘acts of analog resistance.’ And I’d encourage you to create your own acts of analog resistance.”

This semester I assigned two reflective papers in Philosophy of Technology. In the first, my students wrote about the experience of taking a weekend off of screens. Beforehand, they hated the very idea of it. But many rediscovered themselves. They took walks. They lost track of their friends but had fun on their own. They read. They cooked. They sat outside and watched the natural world and the social world move around them. Without the distraction of a phone while waiting in line, a startlingly sizeable minority of them admitted to imagining the personal stories or the inner lives of the people waiting around them—instead of phubbing, they people-watched. And the writing was honest, and self-aware, even wistful in some places over what they felt they’d lost, or hopeful about what they might yet be able to regain.

The second assignment was inspired by

Cristina Vanko 💘

’s 2014 article, “I Sent All My Text Messages in Calligraphy for a Week.” As you can imagine, for a week, my students sent text messages as photos of handwritten notes (calligraphy optional). Some only made it a few days, or limited this kind of communication to their closest friends and relatives, while others applied it to everyone for the entire time. What mattered, though, was the attempt. They realized their handwriting—or their spelling, or their grammar, or the clarity or brevity of their communication—isn’t great. Some even made an effort to rectify whatever the problem was. Some realized that what they normally texted was too trivial to hand-write. Others discovered that although they felt left out of group text threads during the exercise, they had also realized that, for a long time, they’d been struggling with an indescribable urge to respond immediately, an urge the exercise had blunted by making quick responses all but impossible.

Most interesting was the discovery that handwriting messages felt personal, or even came off so personally that their contacts started handwriting and sending photos back without being asked to. In a lengthy reflection on the way standardized fonts render communication “professional,” one student mused that perhaps digital communication was contributing to our society’s widespread sense of isolation. Trivialities sent hastily in standardized fonts: there’s your loneliness epidemic, maybe. And when you get an artist to think about that as a world problem, they see nudges that speed us along and the limitedness of even our myriad font, emoji, and GIF choices as a subtle version of a phrase they hate: “You can’t…”

So when Apple, this week, decided to crush real stuff—paint, and sculpture, and musical instruments—to vaunt its new window to the unreality of the internet, it provoked a visceral reaction. My students want to understand what the digital world really is, which is to say, they want to take a classic view of its underlying structures rather than a romantic view of the experience it creates for people. And then they want to go home to one another, to paint, to sculpt, to make music, to laugh at what’s real, to look at the natural and social world through their eyeballs and not a screen—or a screen with a filter!—and they want to enjoy it. They don’t want to just consume; they want to produce. Everything Apple crushed this week, and everything it made them think of—Reality, with a big R—they want that in their lives, and many of them want to make exactly that, more than they want a user-friendly experience.

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I share this experience here for three reasons. First, if you’re thinking the world is increasingly less real, here’s some hope. The cultural arbiters of the next two decades are showing signs that they won’t let it go that way. Or if they can’t stop it, they won’t let it go quietly.

After we had processed “Crush” a bit more rationally, we discussed the writing assignments I just described. “Folks,” I told them, “I wasn’t trying to make life difficult for you; I was just trying to help you see that so many things we take for granted aren’t givens. These were what one of my colleagues has called ‘acts of analog resistance.’ And I’d encourage you to create your own acts of analog resistance.”

This brings me to the second reason I wrote this extra post: your words don’t only live here on Substack, they echo elsewhere in the world, including my classroom. So, thank you.

Seth Haines

is, of course, the author of the phrase “acts of analog resistance”; or at least, his post “Tiny Acts of Analog Resistance” is where I first read the phrase, scarcely two months after joining Substack. Around that time,

Peco

and

Ruth Gaskovski

offered us their own catalogue of acts of analog resistance with “Sowing Anachronism: How to be Weird in Public, and Private.” From these came the assignments I’ve described above. (And educators, if you’re interested in assignment sheets, DM me.)

Finally, this is a declaration of resistance but not a full-blown manifesto—call it a minifesto.

And if the photo above is blurry, you know what the problem is.

-mic drop | speaker drop | screen drop-

Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.

1. In Pirsig’s book, both the classic and romantic outlooks are attributed to male characters; but it’s implied that anyone could take either stance.

2. Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel, “Watch Apple Trash-Compact Human Culture,” The Atlantic (8 May 2024): 4-6.