User-friendliness and fascism

By The Economist

JOSH MARSHALL highlights a reader's comment on "iFascism", or the question of whether Apple, despite being traditionally seen as the "counterculture, leftist" operating system, actually represents more uniformity and centralised control than Microsoft, traditionally seen as the "rightist, fascist" operating system. "The interplay of aesthetics (which Mac has in spades) and centralised control (which Mac also has in spades) is an interesting one," Mr Marshall writes. There is an interesting kernel here, but it's less about Apple's focus on clean aesthetics than about the seamless interoperability and user-friendliness of the entire Apple product line; clean aesthetics are just one part of that. And that's an issue that really does have sharp relevance for contemporary politics. In many areas—health reform, financial reform, urban-planning reform, and more—efforts to make life more user-friendly for citizens are targeted by both libertarians and by vested commercial interests as vaguely fascistic efforts to centralise control or limit freedom.

Operating systems have been inextricable from connotations of fascism and revolt ever since Ridley Scott's "1984" Macintosh TV commercial during Super Bowl XVIII. (My enjoyment of the ad during its sole on-air broadcast was muted, as I was watching my beloved Redskins get crushed 38-9 by the Raiders.) At the time, the contrast in operating systems was between the imagistic, right-brain Mac, with its graphical user interface, and the dull command-line world of DOS. So it made some sense to depict Microsoft and IBM as uniform totalitarian drones, controlled seamlessly by a giant Big Brother-like overlord. But over time, and as IBM declined, it became clear that Microsoft operating systems were anything but seamlessly coordinated. Microsoft's business tactics were focused and in some cases monopolistic, but its products were not so much uniform as cheap, messy, hard to understand and dysfunctional. They suffered from legacy problems that made them bloated and inefficient. And while the plethora of Windows machines and software theoretically offered users greater choice, the typical non-expert Windows user faced more frequent confusion and struggles with tech support than their Mac counterpart. Once Apple launched the iMac/iBook era, it became clear that Microsoft could not offer anything like the seamlessly integrated hardware, software, and commercial website system of iMacs, iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and so on. And peripherals manufacturers like Sony and Nokia couldn't keep up with the ease of use and interoperability Apple software could guarantee.