The following is a cultural theory piece I wrote in 2012.
“Culture is what we make of the world.” In his book Culture Making, cultural commentator Andy Crouch uses this definition to show how cultural products represent the spirit, desires, and aspirations of the societies they are created in. How does that happen? Some examples seem obvious. We glimpse the ethos behind the ancient Greeks’ pursuit of aristeia by reading Homer. We can sense the disenchantment of the 1960s from A Hard Day’s Night. The spirit of the respective times is undeniably captured in literature, music and the visual arts. But what about parts of culture that are not generally considered art?What about creativity that is hidden in algorithms and in the wiring beneath computer keyboards? Technology. What does technology say about us? What can we learn about our weaknesses and dreams from our cellphones and laptops? To find out, the viewers must take themselves away from the end goal and think about how they got there. Why buy MP3s instead of vinyls? Our artistic ends have not changed, but our ways of reaching those ends have evolved. What do these changes say about twenty-first century zeitgeist?
Steve Jobs once said that Apple was “really shooting at Museum of Modern Art quality.” What does this mean? Can something as seemingly mundane and objective as a computer really be called art? The creative seeds of Apple Inc. offer a brave new worldview in which practical utilitarianism harmonizes with aesthetic beauty. Jobs is famous for giving the world a new computer, a new phone, and a new MP3 player, but closer inspection reveals what really made him a visionary. Jobs gave us a new form of art.
The modern world is a culture of self. In the West today, everything is about “me” – or, more accurately, Westerners are each at the centers of their own little universes. The focus is on the individual. Personal trainers are more in demand than group workout classes. Hyper-customized drinks at Starbucks and Jamba Juice give us the attention we want and make us think we are set apart from the customer behind us. As Joe Fox says in You’ve Got Mail, these opportunities to personalize give us “an absolutely defining sense of self.”
Flooding the electronics aisles is a whole stream of products that boldly specify their self-centralized agenda. iPods, iPads, and iPhones are all about us. They draw us away from the collective and toward our individualized tastes. Instead of buying an album and hearing the tracks in the same order as everyone else, we can pick and choose single songs on iTunes and create and name our specialized playlists. iPhones allow users to recreate the organization of the home screen, select background art, file apps, name the files, and even personalize the use of the home button. Furthering this sense of self, Apple products are geared toward making our lives easier. Because if they really are about us, they should give us what we want, which for most of us is comfort.
But the ingenuity of Apple goes deeper than simply catering to what people want. Jobs hired German designer Hartmut Esslinger to create what Walter Issacson calls “a consistent design language for all Apple products.” Esslinger lived by the idea that “form follows emotion” – meaning that Apple products have a very pointed view of the world they are sold to. In creating Apple, Jobs was telling us that the technology we use every day can be both elegant and efficient. This is what makes an iPod different from a Microsoft Zune. It may be why you have not heard of a Microsoft Zune or have a hard time thinking of an MP3 player that is not an iPod. It is also why Mac users are different than PC users. The spirit of the technology itself reflects the spirit of the user, making different products attractive to different groups. CNN Tech ran an article called “Mac vs. PC: The Stereotypes May Be True.” According to a survey, CNN reported that “PC users’ tastes trend towards casual clothes, tunafish sandwiches, white wine, Hollywood movies, USA Today and Pepsi. Mac users prefer designer or vintage duds, hummus, red wine, indie films, The New York Times and (we’re not making this up) San Pellegrino Limonata.” So while Apple may be successful in part because it understands our society’s love of ease and being “cool,” there is something that transcends its successful functionality.
In the beginning, Mac computers were advertised as easier to use than PCs. Apple wanted to win over the un-savvy through easy-to-use applications and self-explanatory operation. Budding filmmakers, grandmothers, and soccer moms can all use iMovie to create projects that would take a lot more expertise on another program. But now, being tech-savvy is part of growing up in America. iPhones and iPads function on such intuitive principals that it is common to see babies playing with these devices. This user-friendliness is part of the reason kids are so tech-savvy. But babies are certainly not the majority of the tech market and everyone has to learn Microsoft Word at some point. So what continues to attract people to a $1499 Macbook instead of a much cheaper laptop?
Something makes Apple unique enough to compete at its high prices. Why is Apple so special? In his biography, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson explains it like this: “At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.”
Any purposeful innovation is the inventor’s answer to a perceived need or shortcoming in the existing progression of the time. What void was Jobs filling? He wanted technology –something that necessitates utilitarianism and practicality – to be something people want to show off and display. There is a certain feeling associated with pulling out a MacBook in Starbucks. It is giving off a message: this is expensive, this is sleek, cool, sophisticated, cutting edge. While this says a lot about human pride and our excessive focus on appearance, it is also a reflection of how Jobs thought the world should be. One of his old colleagues agreed that Jobs saw Apple products as “an extension of himself.” It is not hard to see how Jobs’ personal beliefs and philosophy were transmitted onto the products he invented and designed.
Jobs believed he was creating art. He insisted that even the circuit boards of Macintosh computers be designed with aesthetic integrity. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible,” he said “even if it’s inside a box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.” When the design for the Mac was finalized, Jobs had the design team’s signatures engraved inside each computer. Bill Atkinson, the graphics developer for Apple said “With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art.”
Jobs wanted to defy the clunky, dismal look of competitors like Sony. To him, there was much more potential to technology than Sony’s industrial impression. He said “The current wave of industrial design is Sony’s high-tech look, which is gunmetal grey, maybe paint it black, do weird stuff to it….It’s easy to do that. But it’s not great.” There was a better alternative, one that would become a successful trademark. “What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white.”
Jobs hated the idea of something existing only for its function. This is perhaps why many artistically inclined people choose Macs over PCs and iPhones over Blackberrys. Apple’s design insists that there is something more than functionality. Apple exists for the same reason that gourmet food exists, because some people see food not only as a necessity, but as a possibly to create and invent. Just as a gourmet dish is not simply a response to hunger, Apple was not just a response to the market. As Jobs said, “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes.” Like all great innovations, Apple products go beyond what we need. They might be something we did not even know we wanted. But they feel right when we have them, because they appeal to very human sensibilities and appreciations of beauty.
Jobs certainly wanted to make something above average, something that would make people ooh and ahh. But can this be called art? Can true art even be useful in the way that computers are useful? In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis said that “The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.” But Apple products are all about the self, so they can hardly be called art by Lewis’ standards. Yet they are pleasing to the eye, designed with aesthetics as a priority, and made in pursuit of excellence.
Apple products are a new kind of art, art that requires a user instead of a viewer. Apple is an art form that requires participation and commands instead of appreciation and surrender. We do not study Picasso to make our lives easier, and we do not buy iPads to discuss and interpret them. But there is still a connection between the two – a spirit of striving for the excellent and rebellion against the precedent. For these reasons, Apple deserves to be called art.
One of the inspirations behind Apple was the real estate developer Joseph Eichler. In the sixties and seventies, Eichler brought elements of the high brow design and expensive genius of Frank Lloyd Wright to everyday families in California subdivisions. Isaacson quotes Jobs as praising Eichler, “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much.” Jobs goes on to sat that this “was the original vision for Apple….That’s what we did with the iPod.”
Apple’s design was also inspired by calligraphy classes that Jobs audited at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Because Jobs was so focused on the appearance of his products, he was not satisfied with the already complex algorithm needed to create circles and ovals on the Mac’s screens. He demanded that his star programmer, Bill Atkinson figure out a way to draw rectangles with rounded corners. Jobs wanted the new shape because he said “rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!” The appearance of the Mac’s screen could not be something alien and removed from real life. Jobs wanted the Mac’s design to reflect its surroundings, thus making the machine more human and more aesthetically comforting than its counterparts. Jobs also insisted on having a whole new collection of fonts for the Macintosh, making it further stand out. The Mac was not a new product, but a new prospective.
Jobs was perhaps most heavily influenced by the Bauhaus movement. Bauhaus was a German school in operation during the mid-twentieth century. Modern design, especially architecture, has been heavily influenced by the Bauhaus idea of bringing all arts together into a “total” art. Bauhaus followed the ideals of William Morris, one of the movement’s earliest influencers, who exhorted “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Bauhaus, also known as the International Style, sought to marry form with function. Isaacson described this look as emphasizing “rationality and functionality by employing clean lines and forms.” Jobs embraced the International Style, following its teaching that “design should be simple, yet have an expressive spirit.”
As a Zen Buddhist, Jobs loved the idea of harmony between an object’s design and its function. There was a practical, customer-friendly aspect to Apple’s Bauhausian spirit. “As with Eichler homes”, notes Isaacson, the “artistic sensibility was combined with the capability for mass production.” One of Apple’s earliest slogans ran “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This design maxim illustrates the way Apple is geared toward making technology straightforward and easy to use. A true child of the Bauhaus movement, Apple is a combination of form and function.
Jobs wanted Apple to be useful and appealing, even whimsical. When asked about his company’s name, Jobs explained “Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ ” Isaacson said “The word instantly signaled friendliness and simplicity. It managed to be both slightly off-beat and as normal as a slice of pie. There was a whiff of counterculture, back-to-nature earthiness to it, yet nothing could be more American. And the two words together–Apple Computer–provided an amusing disjuncture.”
Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. said of Jobs, “His design sensibility is sleek but not slick, and it’s playful. He embraced minimalism, which came from from his Zen devotion to simplicity, but he avoided allowing that to make his products cold.” The result was something highly competitive but equally accessible. Apple products are clever but not intimidating – attractive to both business executives and graphic designers, college students and seasoned professionals. Speaking on Apple’s radical accessibility, Jobs said “Part of the reason we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop is that we can leverage this experience people already have.” Accessibility was not the norm in computers at the time. Terry Oyama, part of the Mac design team, said “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”
In Jobs’ view, creating something necessitated making it excellent. He denounced Sony’s design not only because it was ugly, but because it was “not great.” If he was going to do something, he wanted to do it to the best of his ability. He called Mac computers beautiful. If the design was anything less than aesthetically excellent, Jobs wasn’t satisfied. Once, infuriated by the dullness of the Mac title bar design, Jobs yelled “Can you imagine looking at that everyday?” This is just one example of how Jobs believed that beauty was a necessity, not a luxury. As an artist, Jobs thought beauty should be part of our daily diets. Aestheticism is as vital to a piece of technology as functionality.
In Culture Making, Andy Crouch proposes four questions for understanding the impact of cultural artifacts: what does the cultural product assume about the way the world is, what does the product assume about the way the world should be, and what does the product make possible? Applying these principles to Apple illuminates its meaning and impact within our culture. The first question asks: what does Apple assume about the way the world is? Apple says that we need accessible technology that appeals to more artistic, creative people.
The second question asks how Apple proposes the world should be. Steve Jobs was saying that the things we use everyday should be beautiful. Instead of merely making what was needed, Jobs took what we needed and expanded it into something we did not even know we wanted. He created this new sense of identity that comes with owning Apple products.
In December of last year, CNN Money ran a story called “10 Ways Steve Jobs Changed the World” explaining what kind of technology Jobs believed to be ideal. “For Jobs, how a product looked, felt and responded trumped raw technical specifications. While PC makers chased after faster processor speeds, Jobs pursued clever, minimalist design.” An ad for the iPad 2 declared “This is what we believe, technology alone is not enough. Faster, thinner, lighter, those are all good things, but when technology gets out of the way, everything becomes more delightful, even magical.”
The iPhone makes possible magic like “War In Hipstamatic” published by Foreign Policy in July of 2011. The project, which features images by embedded journalist Balazs Gardi, is a documentation of the war in Afghanistan, told through the lens of the iPhone with the app Hipstamatic. The app is available for only $1.99, making such a project possible for anyone with an iPhone and a story to tell. In 1984 Apple called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” The ad proclaimed that “the real genius of Macintosh is that you don’t have to be a genius to use it.” Technology attempts to make our lives easier, and Apple attempts to make technology easier to use. In the words of another ad, Apple makes possible “the delight of doing things faster and better and easier.”
Not only does Apple make technology easy to master, it makes status easy to acheive. Apple products are cool, sophisticated, relatively expensive, but not out of reach. According to AppleInsider, “Apple products appeared in 30% of all top movies in 2010, more than Ford, Nike, and Chevrolet.” Mac designer Esslinger confirmed that, like most best-selling products, Apple’s DNA was inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex appeal.” Apple products are spotted in the hands of the hottest icons of our day. Ethan Hunt uses an iPhone to discover each mission, should he choose to accept it. Edward Cullen uses a Mac. We feel a resemblance to them – Ethan’s grit and Edward’s glamor – if we too own something stamped with the effortless half-eaten logo.
As if sex-appeal in a computer was not enough, Jobs thought he was actually making innovation possible. Isaacson said “Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect foil.” Jobs said “If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.” In the ancient world, a warrior’s pursuit of glory was called aristeia. If a warrior achieved aristeia, he would be remembered in songs and legends. What makes Steve Jobs stand out as a visionary and culture-maker is his pursuit of excellence. Jobs constantly aimed at something higher than the goals of his contemporaries. That is why he had such an impact on our world. Creating Apple was Jobs’ own version of aristeia. In combining form and function, the world of technology has been changed. Along with this change, our technology-infused and obsessed culture is being taught to love something radical. Apple envisions a new branch of art – one that favors being used on an office desk over hanging in a museum, yet retains a soul of aesthetic sensibility. Apple is a new hybrid kind of art that defies the selflessness Lewis attributed to artistic appreciation. Apple serves the individual. Apple invites us in, making it impossible, even counterproductive to remove ourselves from the picture. And yet, there is a transcendence about Apple that refuses to be categorized with the rest of modern technology. Steve Jobs’ picture of the good life – ease, beauty, even whimsy in the things we use everyday – has permeated our culture. No image of city life is complete without the iconic white earbuds of Apple’s iPod. A college campus would seem naked without the glow of Apple’s logo illuminating every other corner as students write Pages, talk on FaceTime, create iMovies, edit iPhotos, listen to iTunes, share pictures on iCloud, and organize iCalendars.
Beauty and utilitarianism, two concepts that once seemed incompatible, were united in Jobs’ vision for Apple. The result is an almost religious following – something that can be seen from the notes, flowers, and namesake fruit left outside Apple stores across the world after Jobs died on October 5, 2012. Why? Because Jobs gave us a new vision of the world, a fresh philosophy that resonates with our time. He gave us a picture of the good life that we desire, and a promise of the good life that the average American can afford to buy. Apple gave us something we did not think we needed, yet cannot live without. Identity, status, beauty, power, security. Apple gives us all of these, or at least appears to. So not only is Apple a new art, it is perhaps the most shamelessly human kind of art that exists right now. Apple casually caters to human weaknesses and insecurities, while claiming an almost spiritual appeal. Jobs “created these gadgets that changed people’s perceptions of machines,” said a mourner in Shanghai, “but he did not manage to witness the last step in which, through his gadgets, people’s lives can be effectively fused with these machines.”