Steve Jobs, RIP
by Steven Hayward
POWERLINE
 The Apple home page right now is exactly what you came to expect: clean, simple, neat—the minimalist style that made the Apple story and Apple products so compelling. I’ve lost count of the number of Apples I’ve had, though I still have an original 1984 first-generation Mac that is signed in the inside of the case. (And in fact I bought yet another one just this week; one of those light-as-a-feather MacBook Airs, as I’m tired of lugging my heavy 17-inch MacBook Pro on my frequent short road trips.)
In The Age of Reagan I wrote about how the arrival of 1984 provoked ferocious ideological arguments over Orwell’s famous novel of that year, and wrapped the Apple story into it. I think the little detail about how the famous Super Bowl ad almost didn’t air is significant:
“Ordinarily these kinds of arguments cannot be resolved, but in this case popular culture trumped arguendo Orwell in the most unlikely of venues—the Super Bowl. Apple Computer placed a lavishly produced 60-second ad during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII in late January, directed by Ridley Scott, fresh off his feature film triumphs Alien and Blade Runner. The ad featured an auditorium of grey-clad men with shaved heads listening hypnotically to an Orwellian Big Brother figure on a large theater screen:
- Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts. Our Unification of Thought is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people. With one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!
“The trance is broken when a woman in orange shorts and white tank top (the only character in color) runs to the front of the auditorium and throws a sledgehammer through the theater screen, whereupon the voiceover narrative says, “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” The ad almost did not air. Some of Apple’s board of directors were nervous about the ad and wanted to scrap it, but Apple’s management went ahead. It was an obvious slap at IBM (though Apple denied this), whose new mainframe “Big Blue” was supposed to be the technological equivalent of Orwell’s Big Brother. Though the ad ran nationally only this one time, Advertising Age would later name the spot “Commercial of the Decade.” Ironically in 1984 there began to come into view the liberating effect of technology that would play a role in the downfall of the Soviet tyranny that inspired Orwell’s dark vision.” |
