On Sunday, 22 January 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated the Washington (then) Redskins 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII. With the exception of a few aging Raiders’ fans, what we all remember better from that evening 40 years ago was one advertisement that set the tone for a techno-optimism that would dominate the 21st century.
The ad showed an auditorium full of zombie-like figures watching a projection of an elderly leader who resembled the Emperor from 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. A young, athletic woman in red and white (the colors of the flag of Poland, which had been engaging in a massive labor uprising against the Soviet-controlled communist state) twirls a hammer and throws it through the screen framing the leader’s face, just as armored police rush in to try to stop her.
The ad explicitly invoked George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan, then president, was launching a re-election campaign based on his boldness in facing down the totalitarian Soviet threat while amplifying the risk of global nuclear annihilation.
That month, Apple began selling a personal computer that would change how we think about computing technologies in our lives and would channel many of the ideological changes that set the 21st century in motion. In many ways, the long 21st century began this week 40 years ago.
In addition to rising in fits and starts from a garage-based startup in Cupertino, California, to what is now one of the most valuable companies in the history of the world, Apple changed the way we experience culture and each other. While it’s not the only force to do so, if you look at the other dominant forces that made their mark in 1984 – like Reagan – Apple was part of a massive shift, in how we would come to see and govern ourselves over the next 40 years, and still influences daily life to an extent few could have imagined at that moment.
Before the debut of the Macintosh, Apple was well regarded among computer hobbyists for producing high-quality and innovative desktop computers like the Apple II (1979) that would run programs using a standard operating system of the time, Apple Disc Operating System (which resembled MS-DOS from a then upstart little firm called Microsoft) and could be programmed in languages like Basic.
Although companies like Texas Instruments and Atari had introduced user-friendly computers into the home before the Macintosh, and IBM and Commodore had produced desktop computers for businesses, the Macintosh promised something different.
The Macintosh created a mass market for usable computers that appeared to be more magic than machine. By hiding the boards and cables and presenting a sleekly designed box, the Macintosh set the design standards for what would become a sealed box like the MacBook or – the most influential and profitable of all of Apple’s products – the iPhone, launched in 2007.
The iPhone represents so much of what is attractive and repulsive about life in the 21st century. It’s a device that does nothing other devices and technologies could not do. It just offers them all in a controlled, proprietary environment that masks all the actual technology and the human agency that created it. It might as well have tiny elves in it.
Billions of people use such a device now, but hardly anyone peeks inside or thinks about the people who mined the metal or assembled the parts in dangerous conditions. We now have cars and appliances designed to feel like an iPhone – all glass, metal, curves and icons. None of them offer any clue that humans built them or maintained them. Everything seems like magic.
This move to magic through design has blinded us to the real conditions of most people working and living in the world. A gated device is similar to a gated community. Beyond that, the sealed boxes, once they included ubiquitous cameras and location devices and were connected through invisible radio signals, operate as a global surveillance system that Soviet dictators could never have dreamed of. We bought into a world of soft control beyond Orwell’s imagination as well.
Gated communities began their rise to popularity in the US during the Reagan era, as they offered the illusion of security against an imagined, but never defined, invading enemy. They also resembled a private state, one with an exclusive membership and strict rules of decorum.
Reagan won a landslide re-election in November 1984. His triumph established an almost unshakeable commitment to market fundamentalism and technological optimism that even his critics and successors like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama largely adopted. Beyond the US, ostensibly leftist 20th-century leaders like Andreas Papandreou of Greece, François Mitterrand of France and Tony Blair of the United Kingdom limited their visions for change to what the growing neoliberal consensus would allow.
By the dawn of this century questioning faith in the techno-optimism imposed by Apple or the neoliberalism ensured by Reagan’s dominance over the world’s political imagination would seem like a fit of grumpiness or crankiness. Who could question the democratizing and liberating potential of computer technology or free markets?
Well, a quarter of the way through this century it’s clear that the only promises kept were those made to Apple’s shareholders and Reagan’s political progeny. Democracy is in tatters around the world. Networked computers drain pleasure and humanity out of relationships, communities and societies. Economies are more stratified than ever. Politics are evacuated of any positive vision of a better future.
We can’t blame Apple or Reagan, of course. They just distilled and leveraged – and sold back to us – what we craved: a simple story of inevitable progress and liberation. Had we heeded the warnings of Orwell’s book rather than Apple’s advertisement we might have learned that simple stories never have happy endings.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. He is also a Guardian US columnist
