Profoundly insightful and precise enlightenment without the exasperated hopeless tone that many cultural commentators take these days. You don’t minimize the threat yet this clear understanding of the workings behind it somehow gives me hope that the human artist will prevail. Wonderful piece thank you.
Thought provoking piece of writing. Certainly worth returning to and brainstorming where some of these ideas might apply. Found this particularly challenging, “…We turn inward and become utterly absorbed in ourselves.”
> If you work in insurance, you hold people’s access to their physicians in your spreadsheets. If you work in finance, you may affect the number of years they yet need to earn before retiring.
In those lines of work nowadays, most toil in how to scam people in paying higher premiums or how to scam people of their pension savings.
And those lines of work are at least somewhat connected to real needs.
Most people just get to work in busywork - the kind that cripples the real productivity of their country, and instead helps move money around and sell useless things to people who don't need them, after first convincing them they'd be happier with them (or, worse, that others will envy them for having them).
And that work is done in an environment closer to a vision of hell than to Piersig's garage.
What a piece. This really shows how far our creativity as a whole has taken a beating. It like Apple is signaling that they want to keep us low and in our place and let them continue to be the “masters”. I’m sharing this with everyone!
I find these Apple commercials deeply disturbing. What they say about the values we supposedly have is nihilistic and grim. It’s not a world I want to live in. I am reconsidering our phone upgrades next year, away from the iPhone.
@Thomas Groot, admittedly, I've never been an Apple fan. (It's a prejudice as old as the one-button mouse, deepened by a business model that implied I wasn't competent enough to work on my own computers. I'm bad at other things, but not that.) But about 10 years ago, the "walled garden" ecosystem started generating an elitism that's increasingly troubled me. The mockery implied by "I'm a PC," "I'm a Mac"; the different-colored bubbles in text groups; the Tim Cook one-liner, "Buy your mom an iPhone." It all added up.
Skip the fact that Apple cozied to creative sectors for a minute.
Now we have this pandering to ethically blind, raw American pragmatism. The long arc of corporate history suggests that Apple sees this "lie to your 'friends'" move as the sine qua non of being elite. This is what it takes: "little white lies." And that pairs well with little white devices. And yes, I think the white color of so many Apple devices is hardly a coincidence in an age of rising racial tensions.
This is how you implicitly class things, if you want to sell them to wealthy (white) people: they're elitist; they're 'secure'; they require someone else to service them (and you); they help you posture and pose; they appeal to your get $#!+ done pragmatism and forget the consequences; they're beautiful; and they're white.
I know that, for a long time, some have associated the Apple logo with *the* Apple, the one from Eden. I've long been a skeptic of that reading. But I've been wrong before...
Profoundly insightful and precise enlightenment without the exasperated hopeless tone that many cultural commentators take these days. You don’t minimize the threat yet this clear understanding of the workings behind it somehow gives me hope that the human artist will prevail. Wonderful piece thank you.
Thought provoking piece of writing. Certainly worth returning to and brainstorming where some of these ideas might apply. Found this particularly challenging, “…We turn inward and become utterly absorbed in ourselves.”
Also, the footnote Easter eggs are my fav.
> If you work in insurance, you hold people’s access to their physicians in your spreadsheets. If you work in finance, you may affect the number of years they yet need to earn before retiring.
In those lines of work nowadays, most toil in how to scam people in paying higher premiums or how to scam people of their pension savings.
And those lines of work are at least somewhat connected to real needs.
Most people just get to work in busywork - the kind that cripples the real productivity of their country, and instead helps move money around and sell useless things to people who don't need them, after first convincing them they'd be happier with them (or, worse, that others will envy them for having them).
And that work is done in an environment closer to a vision of hell than to Piersig's garage.
What a piece. This really shows how far our creativity as a whole has taken a beating. It like Apple is signaling that they want to keep us low and in our place and let them continue to be the “masters”. I’m sharing this with everyone!
...so odd that both them and google are marketing a.i. as a way to lie to your friends about what they told you or see...
I find these Apple commercials deeply disturbing. What they say about the values we supposedly have is nihilistic and grim. It’s not a world I want to live in. I am reconsidering our phone upgrades next year, away from the iPhone.
@Thomas Groot, admittedly, I've never been an Apple fan. (It's a prejudice as old as the one-button mouse, deepened by a business model that implied I wasn't competent enough to work on my own computers. I'm bad at other things, but not that.) But about 10 years ago, the "walled garden" ecosystem started generating an elitism that's increasingly troubled me. The mockery implied by "I'm a PC," "I'm a Mac"; the different-colored bubbles in text groups; the Tim Cook one-liner, "Buy your mom an iPhone." It all added up.
Skip the fact that Apple cozied to creative sectors for a minute.
Now we have this pandering to ethically blind, raw American pragmatism. The long arc of corporate history suggests that Apple sees this "lie to your 'friends'" move as the sine qua non of being elite. This is what it takes: "little white lies." And that pairs well with little white devices. And yes, I think the white color of so many Apple devices is hardly a coincidence in an age of rising racial tensions.
This is how you implicitly class things, if you want to sell them to wealthy (white) people: they're elitist; they're 'secure'; they require someone else to service them (and you); they help you posture and pose; they appeal to your get $#!+ done pragmatism and forget the consequences; they're beautiful; and they're white.
I know that, for a long time, some have associated the Apple logo with *the* Apple, the one from Eden. I've long been a skeptic of that reading. But I've been wrong before...
Here’s a perfect example of the dullardy that Apple’s AI is creating. Of course they have “no comment.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0elzk24dno