One Dimensional Apple

Apple banned Phone Story. In doing so, they attempted to keep control of the space of ideas that you can access in the Apple space; whether you believe Apple's story (that the app violated their terms because it depicted abuses of children or other violations of the terms for the App Store) or the dev's story (that the app was banned because it was critical of Apple), the truth is that Apple was putting boundaries around what the thoughts are that they want people to have while they're using Apple devices. In particular, Apple wants to set outside the realm of thought the possibility that owning an apple device has a moral or ethical cost alongside a monetary one (or that abusing children is entertaining), and to prevent people from believing that a world without Apple devices might be a better one. This is an excellent example of Herbert Marcuse’s ideas from One Dimensional Man.

A little background: Herbert Marcuse was a part of the Frankfurt School of sociology. The Frankfurt School was a group of mostly German sociologists (who ended up working out of the United States as a result of World War II) who were neo-Marxist in orientation. In essence, they weren’t satisfied with Soviet Communism, but neither were they willing to accept that the final word had been entered and that Capitalism had won the day. Instead, they believed that both arrangements were defective and destructive to the humanity of the people who participated in them. In particular, Marcuse argued that the arrangements of modern capitalist life were just as totalitarian as those of Soviet Communism, but that instead of being imposed by the threat of force or punishment, they were enforced in capitalism by people trading cheap rewards for the more profound freedoms they were giving up. In other words, people are willing to be enslaved to the capitalist machine, as long as they have (in Marcuse’s day) TV, microwave dinners and cars or (in our day) an iPhone or Xbox or porn on their PC, etc.

Marcuse argued that the reason these things are totalitarian is that they make people forget that to get those things, they have to toil at wage labor their entire lives, and that in the end, their spiritual well-being and human development aren’t helped by the possessions and cultural materials they consume. This is very similar to the scenario depicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World . For instance, Marcuse makes a distinction between the idea of “relaxing” which is an activity you fit in between sessions of work in order to enable to to do more work, and “resting” which is something you undertake solely for the purpose of personal solace and development. When you get drunk on Friday at Buffalo Wild Wings so you don’t have to think about work on Monday (or spend time playing video games or watching movies), Marcuse says you’re not actually resting and restoring yourself. What you’re doing is numbing yourself to the fact that you spend your whole life toiling essentially to neither rise in society nor to become a better person.

So, most of us think one dimensionally when we say, “I know that Foxconn is a terrible place to work, and people are miserable there, but if they don’t work there, I don’t get my iPhone, so really, that’s just how the world is and I might as well take advantage of the fact that I’m well off enough to buy the iPhone.” This is one dimensional, Marcuse argues, because at the same time as we acknowledge that things are flawed (e.g. the people at Foxconn are miserable) we cut off the possibility of acknowledging that there is another arrangement possible (e.g. we say “but that’s just the way things are”).

We, Marcuse argues, have difficulty adding another dimension to our thinking, the dimension of which “negates” the way things are now. In other words, we never consider that a world might exist in which the people at Foxconn aren’t miserable, or in which people might be happy in general, rather than some people being “happy” by buying things at the expense of others’ misery.

Marcuse says, then, that this is one dimensional thinking. He says that all of the parts of a capitalist totalitarian economy are built to prevent people from questioning the rightness of the capitalist totalitarian nature of their world. Phone Story is an excellent example of something not one dimensional, because it uses the iPhone to make the argument that iPhones are bad; it questions the goodness of the technological and capitalist world.

Apple banned Phone Story. In doing so, they attempted to keep control of the space of ideas that you can access in the Apple space; whether you believe Apple's story (that the app violated their terms because it depicted abuses of children or other violations of the terms for the App Store) or the dev's story (that the app was banned because it was critical of Apple), the truth is that Apple was putting boundaries around what the thoughts are that they want people to have while they're using Apple devices. In particular, Apple wants to set outside the realm of thought the possibility that owning an apple device has a moral or ethical cost alongside a monetary one (or that abusing children is entertaining), and to prevent people from believing that a world without Apple devices might be a better one. This is an excellent example of Herbert Marcuse’s ideas from One Dimensional Man.

A little background: Herbert Marcuse was a part of the Frankfurt School of sociology. The Frankfurt School was a group of mostly German sociologists (who ended up working out of the United States as a result of World War II) who were neo-Marxist in orientation. In essence, they weren’t satisfied with Soviet Communism, but neither were they willing to accept that the final word had been entered and that Capitalism had won the day. Instead, they believed that both arrangements were defective and destructive to the humanity of the people who participated in them. In particular, Marcuse argued that the arrangements of modern capitalist life were just as totalitarian as those of Soviet Communism, but that instead of being imposed by the threat of force or punishment, they were enforced in capitalism by people trading cheap rewards for the more profound freedoms they were giving up. In other words, people are willing to be enslaved to the capitalist machine, as long as they have (in Marcuse’s day) TV, microwave dinners and cars or (in our day) an iPhone or Xbox or porn on their PC, etc.

Marcuse argued that the reason these things are totalitarian is that they make people forget that to get those things, they have to toil at wage labor their entire lives, and that in the end, their spiritual well-being and human development aren’t helped by the possessions and cultural materials they consume. This is very similar to the scenario depicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World . For instance, Marcuse makes a distinction between the idea of “relaxing” which is an activity you fit in between sessions of work in order to enable to to do more work, and “resting” which is something you undertake solely for the purpose of personal solace and development. When you get drunk on Friday at Buffalo Wild Wings so you don’t have to think about work on Monday (or spend time playing video games or watching movies), Marcuse says you’re not actually resting and restoring yourself. What you’re doing is numbing yourself to the fact that you spend your whole life toiling essentially to neither rise in society nor to become a better person.

So, most of us think one dimensionally when we say, “I know that Foxconn is a terrible place to work, and people are miserable there, but if they don’t work there, I don’t get my iPhone, so really, that’s just how the world is and I might as well take advantage of the fact that I’m well off enough to buy the iPhone.” This is one dimensional, Marcuse argues, because at the same time as we acknowledge that things are flawed (e.g. the people at Foxconn are miserable) we cut off the possibility of acknowledging that there is another arrangement possible (e.g. we say “but that’s just the way things are”).

We, Marcuse argues, have difficulty adding another dimension to our thinking, the dimension of which “negates” the way things are now. In other words, we never consider that a world might exist in which the people at Foxconn aren’t miserable, or in which people might be happy in general, rather than some people being “happy” by buying things at the expense of others’ misery.

Marcuse says, then, that this is one dimensional thinking. He says that all of the parts of a capitalist totalitarian economy are built to prevent people from questioning the rightness of the capitalist totalitarian nature of their world. Phone Story is an excellent example of something not one dimensional, because it uses the iPhone to make the argument that iPhones are bad; it questions the goodness of the technological and capitalist world.

Good read.  Can't say I agree with Frankfurt school, their agenda is about as clear as Apple's, but a decent enough connection.

I thought on this more throughout my workday, and I have to fully disagree with the description of modern art as an opiate rather than a provider of catharsis. I hear plenty of stories of people who just want to play Call of Duty to 'escape' from their life, I played tabletop RPGs with someone who enjoyed them because 'I don't have to be me' which is obviously destructive and unhealthy. But I play games, watch film and read fiction enjoy catharsis. The description herein that the absorption of art and culture is a designed distraction from toil is a gross misconstruction.

@Brodehouse: I'm not sure it's necessarily required that ALL art/culture acts in this way. In fact, Marcuse emphasizes that "negativistic" art (art that questions or attacks the arrangements of the totalitarian capitalist organization of life) is a way out of one dimensionality. That is in fact what Phone Story is doing; it makes the suggestion that the human misery resulting from the production of the iPhone is not justified by the phone's utility.

I also think that to Marcuse's way of thinking, catharsis is probably bad of itself, since in a way it only adds another barrier to the free expression of your true humanity, by having you act yourself out in a "fake" way.

Finally, I think Marcuse probably wouldn't demand that art/culture are "designed" with an intentional desire to produce one dimensional thinking; instead, he seems to suggest that one dimensional entertainment arises as an emergent property of people dealing with the conditions of capitalism.

In any case, I don't necessarily agree with Marcuse about any of this, but this article presented a good example of Marcuse's ideas. As a sociology prof, I always need ways to tie the course material to contemporary life, and this post is a sort of exercise in that.