Apple's 1984 "Macintosh" Super Bowl ad, 40 years on: the revolution is over.
Personal computing is dead. The revolution has failed... or been betrayed.
[Warning! Rant follows...]
Got talking about this ad today, as we were working on moving files from a parishioner’s computer to mine, and I looked it up and watched it for the first time in years. Hard to believe this iconic Superbowl ad, launching the equally-iconic Apple Macintosh, will be 40 years old when the next Superbowl comes around – and that’s not very far in the future, less than two months in fact: Sunday, February 11th, 2024.
The advent of the Macintosh was also the real beginning of the personal computing revolution. Yes, there had been personal computers before then: Apple IIs, Tandys, TRS-80s. But the Mac’s then-revolutionary compact size and all-in-one (except for mouse and keyboard) configuration, and its intuitive, attractive, easy-to-use graphical user interface – even its sturdy, chunky, pocket-sized disks – brought computing out of the realm of the über-geeks, and made it accessible to ordinary people. A common slogan of the time was “information wants to be free!” This ad was hardly an exaggeration: it really was a revolution.
The bitter irony, looking at it from the perspective of just shy of four decades, lies in the fact that the revolution failed. More than failed: was co-opted and betrayed by the very “Big Brother” types this ad takes sledgehammer-hurling aim at. Including, most ironically of all, the very company that launched it: the “Big 5” tech giants – Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft have become precisely what this ad was directed against. While just about everyone has a computer, now, and most have phones with power and capabilities that dwarf the original Mac, personal computing is basically dead.
When this ad was aired, most computing was still in the age of “slave terminals,” attached by cables to mainframes. Now, 40 years (minus a few months) later, all our shiny, gee-whiz laptops, tablets, and smartphones may be wireless, but they are, for all practical purposes, slave terminals for a network of servers – mainframes, for all practical purposes, though they don’t look like the old ones and aren’t called that – masquerading as “the cloud.” That's not personal computing, as it was originally conceived, when this ad ran for the first time; it is only the illusion of it.
And while software companies are happy to take our money for “apps,” we don’t actually own most of them. Read the small print, and you’ll discover that the majority of them are only leased to us; the company that made them can take them back – and sometimes our data with them – if they so choose, or restrict our access to them.
And even if they’re not, theoretically, only leased, our use of them is so constrained by “terms of service” that it’s hard to conceive that we own them in any comprehensible sense. If you buy, say, a rake at the local Home Depot, you can shorten the handle, replace the handle, modify the tines, even use it as a component to build something completely new. Try doing that with an “app,” and you’ll find yourself in court.
That they also monitor our use goes without saying: surveillance, whether by corporations seeking profit or governments seeking information, is so commonplace we often forget about it, but it is at a level that the despots of the past could only have dreamed of. And let’s not even talk about the terrifying possibilities if digital currency ever takes off! We saw hints of that dystopian future in the Canadian truckers’ protest of 2022, when the Trudeau government froze protester’s bank accounts...
And we’re docile about it – or unconcerned, or oblivious, or swayed by its benefits (some of which are real, don’t get me wrong; the question is, are they worth the trade-offs?) – as we are about so many concerning and questionable aspects of today's society. Information no longer wants to be free – or maybe it does, but far too many people on both sides of the political aisle openly argue that controlling information is a good thing. You can agree with that or disagree, but it not what the information revolution, the personal computing revolution, was supposed to be about.
Personal computing is dead. The revolution, heralded with such fanfare in this ad, has failed.
In part because Apple itself switched sides... or maybe it was never opposed to Big Brother at all – maybe it just wanted to BE Big Brother. If so, it’s getting its wish.
God help us.
Perhaps I need to get back to Linux and a dumbphone…
Let's go full LUDDITE!