We are all the sledgehammer
Apple does like to tell its fans. We are all disruptors hurtling toward one great screen, breaking the iron-fisted hold that other tech firms want to impose on us. The hellscape dystopia world of Apple’s famed “1984” commercial modeled after George Orwell’s seminal dystopia 1984 never really came to pass. As silly as it is to say, Apple was right. We didn’t win some nebulous liberation, exactly. We won a whole different soup of tech-based dystopia.
Despite what your perpetually online uncle rails about at the dinner table
We have not yet landed in a mass, totalitarian regime of doublethink and newspeak (though the jury’s still out about Big Brother). Instead, Apple, and the other major tech companies, have offered us a different flavor of big tech dominion, one both more insidious and less in-your-face than Orwell’s take. That’s right, it’s the old Huxley-Orwell debate your English 101 professor mentioned in passing back in freshman year of college.
Today, tech companies pander to people’s worst impulses to siphon as much money from their users as possible
It’s a model envisioned by Aldous Huxley. His 1932 novel, Brave New World, describes how average folks would seek their own oppression for the simple, mindless pleasures of drugs and technology, reducing their capacity or even desire to fight back against that which took away their autonomy. Yes, as much as it sounds like doomerism, today’s current tech environment tracks much more closely to Huxley’s crapsack vision than Orwell’s.
