There are some alarming trends I have noticed while plunging into the world of Mac. The most frightening would be the philosophy of Apple to have its users to relinquish control of their own media. It seems to be part of the credo, that you the customer are only an end user of your media, and that it is Apple’s job to take care of everything in between.

This credo worked wonders for a company that built its empire on usability — something for all those people who didn’t want to see a text prompt or format a hard drive. It was a good idea in its time, and great commentary on what the business world was being sold. But in a world where a usable OS has become the norm (thinking here of Android, maybe Windows 7, and even some flavors of Linux, such as openSUSE with YaST), how far does Apple need to take it?

Its easy to imagine how a lack of choice inside an operating system can be a detriment. We have done it again and again in Sci-Fi. From William F Nolan’s Logan’s Run, to Aurthur C. Clark’s 2001, the idea of great harm through lack of control has long been on our minds. This of course is not Macintosh. There aren’t any homicidal AIs running OSX (that I know of). But such speculation allows us to envision futures in which we have taken a wrong turn.

It’s that wrong turn that I am weary of. I want to guide technology, not be guided by it. And my traditional means of doing that is by selectively buying the most versatile technology.  A big part of that is having something that works very well, and lets face it, Macs work VERY well.

But another part of that versatility would be allowing me to use the tool to its potential. This is where Apple is failing. Time and again Apple has made choices that support the sales of their products, while detracting from end versatility. This can only continue as long as people care more about stability (and style) and less about versatility. This is why I am questioning exactly what I care about.

I am using some fantastic hardware right now made by Apple, and the price for using it is to give up a huge amount of choice and follow Apple down a very methodical path that ultimately turns me into their ideal customer. I will be using excellent and stable hardware that maximizes everything they have to sell me, and minimizes my potential for finding alternatives, or using my media in other, non-revenue generating ways.

These choices are numerous and telling. I have listed a few of them separately on another page if you are interested, but in a nutshell they are:

1. The tactics employed by Apple to have its users only use iTunes, its primary portal for continual sales of media.
2. The crippling of hardware, such as the Airport Extreme vs. Express, in order to get the user to buy both, redundantly.
3. The lack of administrative access (copying, moving, deleting) to media on the iPhone, so that the media on the device cannot be manipulated without the use of iTunes.

These are all choices that Apple has made. None of them are necessary for ease of use. All of them detract from the full potential of the hardware,  and all of them benefit Apple.

What then, is the effect of these choices on the user? The effect of technology is hard to see objectively, but it obviously does change us. We expect difference things as technology meets our needs. There was a time some three decades ago when you couldn’t reliably call someone because they just might not be home. There was a time one decade ago when you couldn’t solve a mystery or argument by referencing Wikipedia from your pocket. These changes alter the creature that we are, whether we can see it up close or not. Guiding those changes may be a crucial part of healthy development into the beasts of tomorrow.

One group that was heavily critical of changes within the modern world and how they reflected changes within ourselves was the Situationists. As an international intelligentsia of the late fifties and nineteen-sixties, participants of this movement were at odds with the fake realities that they saw portrayed in advertising and mass media (fake realities still ubiquitous today, such as video commercials where an actor pretends to be a real person in order to sell you something). I cannot claim to have a deep understanding of the Situationists. They were brilliant and verbose and cryptic and beautiful. But elements of my life have been influenced by their traditions, and they have helped me to understand more about the many splintered world that surrounds me.

One thing I have learned is to be highly critical of a business practice designed to condition me away from choice and toward dependence, which was reflected heavily during the movement, and can be found in their literature.

Here is an excerpt from a book by a Situationist, Raoul Vaneigem, entitled The Revolution Of Everyday Life:

“Similarly in the realm of consumption: it’s not the goods that are inherently alienating, but the conditioning that leads their buyers to choose them and the ideology in which they are wrapped. The tool in production and the conditioning of choice in consumption are the mainstays of the fraud: they are the mediations which move man the producer and man the consumer to the illusion of action in a real passivity and transform him into an essentially dependent thing.”

Which leads me to my final question, and indeed the question that started this post.  Are we, the Apple users, being smart? Or are we just buying (into) the smartest marketing? The machines are good. The styling is fantastic. I don’t know about elsewhere, but here in San Francisco, being a Mac user is totally cool. But is there anything at stake for us in making this dedication?

For Apple what is at stake is no longer the usability of the machine.  Soon everyone will have that in many different brands and ways.  What worries me to think is that Apple is now fighting to control the usability of the user. We are becoming the product, and in that dependency, unless they begin to put their user’s needs above their marketing goals, we, and eventually they, will suffer for it.