Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing has a must-read piece “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t either)” which pretty much steals the thunder I was going to unleash today, World iPad Day. The gist of it is spot-on and what I and my friend Alan noted just after its announcement: it is the uber-Consumer device, in a bad way. Look at the first promo vids for it, such as those Stevie Boy used in his Keynote: people lounging around looking at photos, watching movies, downloading music, playing games, buying e-crap. User-passivity and hyper-consumption is at the heart of its design. The only things in that Keynote that piqued my interest was the ability to use iWork — I could actually do my writing with it — and its use as an e-reader for the PDFs I have of research material and course readings and whatever news items I clip and save. It is designed to breed “Consumers” as defined by cyberpunk author William Gibson (I quote from Cory):
The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”
That’s the literary way to describe what the iPad will do to you. Cory gets a little more technical and historical. He begins with the “infantilizing hardware”: it’s glued, not screwed, which means you’re screwed. You cannot open it up; you cannot mess with it; it is locked down (both in hardware and software) in a way that strictly does not invite innovation by the user. YOU CANNOT EVEN CHANGE THE BATTERIES ON YOUR OWN! Why is this a Bad Thing? Well, Apple began with a revolutionary credo that encouraged you to get into the guts of the machine, to empower the user, to hand her the means of production and to run with it. Remember the famous Apple 1984 ad? All those mindless screen-staring clones in the audience of that ad listening to a speech about “information purification” (= DRM) and “a garden of pure ideology” (it’s “revolutionary” and “magical”) might as well have been beta-testers for the iPad rather than the corporate IBM flock it was lampooning. Apple was all about desktop publishing and image production on your own, without the need for the professional typesetter and graphic designer — the first Apple II even came with a schematic diagram of the circuit board! A generation of creative tinkerers and hackers (the good kind) spawned innovations in software and hardware. Now all you need to know how to do is to access the iStore and type in a credit card number to buy an iApp. To quote Cory:
The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.
And after buying, you can’t even change, swap, or share what you thought you bought to own. You don’t really own it. Cory uses the Marvel Comic app as an example of this devolution of content in the name of progress. In the old-school comic book culture, swapping and sharing was everything. It built (real live) social networks and (real live) friends. Comic books would not have spread without this sharing culture. The iPad, however, allows Marvel — even encourages if not requires Marvel — to put the smack down on sharing e-comics:
So what does Marvel do to “enhance” its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.
Cory sums up Apple’s current status quite accurately: “Incumbents make bad revolutionaries.” This is what happens when you become too big, too successful, too desirous of selling to the LCD (that’s Lowest Common Denominator, not Liquid Crystal Display). I don’t want a gadget just because “even grandma can use it.”
After taking apart and upgrading/hacking a Dell Mini (not to mention several Macs before they became increasingly difficult to get into), stripping down and cleaning out two old Brownie Hawkeye cameras, building three pinhole cameras from scratch, developing paper negatives and 120 film (will do 35mm this weekend), designing websites, and so on I don’t think I need to regress to an iPad. I’m sure it will offer a spectacular consumer experience. I’m sure I will even want one at moments (my couch potato consumer-driven moments). But I have a ton of digital gadgets already; this one isn’t going to revolutionize my life any more than my iMac, MBP, MacHackMini, and iPhone already do.
Now, back to writing my book (on my iMac). After my quota for the day I get to finishing building my latest pinhole, one that’ll shoot 5×7 paper negatives.
UPDATE: Un-friggin’-believable! No sooner had I posted this I got my predictable email urging from Apple. Big Brother is indeed watching:
Truth in advertising: it is not “revolutionary” or “magical,” unless you mean the kind of revolution that ends up with a dictatorship and the magic is that of sideshow illusionist adept at making your money disappear.
