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Why Apple’s Launch Event Was "Creepy As Hell"
Submitted by Doug Litowitz
Apple's Launch Event Was Creepy As Hell
Yesterday all eyes were on Apple’s product launch.
This is because Apple has become a bellwether for the stock market as a whole.
Legendary short seller Jim Chanos spoke candidly to CNBC, explaining that institutional investors and hedge funds are treating Apple stock as a “hedge fund hotel” where they can buy a single name and ride it upwards as opposed to concocting complex trading systems as they did in the past. Indeed, SEC filings by hedge funds bear this out, and so the product launch attracted a huge audience, generating play-by-play reporting on CNBC and Yahoo Finance.
By the end of trading, Apple stock declined nearly 2%, indicating that investors were not impressed.
To paraphrase poet Horace, the mountain shuddered and gave birth to a ridiculous mouse.
I too watched the entire product launch. The Apple Watch doesn’t do much more than other devices and it looks ugly next to a Rolex; the new iPhone has a few tweaks that don’t amount to much; the new iPad Pro tablet is unwieldy with a humor-inducing stylus; and the Apple TV box is interesting for voice-activation but not that different from what others are already offering in streaming content.
That would be the end of my story.
But I am feel obliged to confess that I found the event creepy as hell from a psychological and cultural perspective.
After two hours of watching their best and brightest, my mind was reeling with associations of cults, lifestyle gurus, and new-age hokum.
The Man At The Helm
Let’s start with the venue, which was the first thing CEO Tim Cook mentioned in his opening remarks. It was held in San Francisco at the Bill Graham Civic Center. Stop right there. What makes Apple so “civic” that it needs a public forum, instead of launching products from its own headquarters?
Apple doesn’t seem particularly “civic” to me, and not to the Senate Subcommittee that has been investigating how they avoid paying taxes while sticking you and me with their tab. They move corporate entities offshore to avoid taxation that would benefit the civic community, and they run sweatshops in China instead of hiring Californians drawn from the, uh, civic community.
So it’s a cheap trick to hold the launch in a civic center named after a man who launched free health clinics and free festivals to celebrate the counterculture against big corporations like, well, Apple. You cannot squeeze out some kind of imprimatur of good citizenship by holding a product launch in a “civic” center. I’m not buying it.
The second problem is that Tim Cook took the stage dressed – or rather underdressed – in blue jeans and an ill-fitting blue shirt with a plain belt. The outfit looked like it was thrown together at the last minute from the clearance rack at Kohl’s. This man is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and runs the most profitable company in the world. I refuse to believe that he is too busy (or too cheap) to stop at Nordstrom Rack and drop $800 on a pair of Armani slacks, a Zegna dress shirt, a Hugo Boss tie, and Allen Edmonds’ belt and shoes.
Cook recently came out as gay, which took courage, and I applaud that. But that only makes his choice of outfit more bizarre. Is he playing against type, to make the point that gays can be slobs too? Or is he saying that gays are harmless and will conform seamlessly? Regardless of his sexuality, there is no reason to dress that way except to brainwash us into thinking that he is so laser-focused on product development that ‘clothes be damned.’ Again, I’m not buying it.
Steve Jobs could get away with wearing a turtleneck sweater because he had a maverick personality to back it up. To put it crudely, when you watched Steve Jobs, you knew that he was an SOB on some level, that he wasn’t there to impress you as much as to impress himself, and he knew that you knew it. He had demons. But sometimes a bad guy is good, so to speak. We all knew that Jobs’ refusal to dress ‘appropriately’ was the flipside of a loner genius with a unique vision who wasn’t going to conform. He was half-crazy but headed to unexplored territory. The first guy who does that is authentic; the second guy is not. CEO Tim Cook is the second guy.
Cook’s persona is creepy, almost mortician-esque. He has an unconvincing forced jubilance, wedded to a lurking, hunchbacked rigidity. His body seems superfluous, a nuisance. The white hair and nerdy glasses round out a kind of depthless, mealy look that betrays a measure of cruelty. His arms hang useless, as if he has to exert every ounce of willpower to raise them when the script calls for mock exultation.
I watched him closely for 30 minutes and then it hit me.
Cook IS a computer.
Or at least, he’s more like a computer than a human.
Intelligent, desexualized, emotionless, disembodied, apolitical, steely, gimmicky, and lacking in charisma. He wants us to become cybernetic, to sync our entire lives to Apple so that we become computers like him. The technology does not have some higher purpose like social justice, or eradication of disease, or ending poverty. The bar is much lower: you can now get the weather and read CNN headlines on your watch – what a great day in Western Civilization! Cook and his ‘team’ (as he refers to the thousands of people who do the actual work under extreme stress) don’t have any appreciation for the downside of technology.
Missing Apple's Man Upstairs
Steve Jobs understood minimalism.
Sometimes less is more. And he had a weird belief system that made him something of a Luddite – he would not let his own kids use the iPad, he forced them to talk face-to-face, and he ridiculed college kids who wanted to go to Silicon Valley just to make money. For all his eccentricities, he knew that there was an outside world and that bigger things were at stake.
Cook is the other extreme – he thinks that technology improves everything, and that every little gimmick is noteworthy. In his world, the Apple Watch and the new iPhone are miraculous contributions because they let you change the channel on the Apple TV without getting off your butt and fetching a remote.
As an illustration of how the Apple Watch changed people’s lives, he tells us how the watch helped a man keep to an exercise schedule. Does he think we’re so dumb we believe this was never possible until the invention of this watch? Also he showed how a doctor could tilt the watch forward and check his daily schedule of rounds; ironically, this task was something that my own father could handle with a small notebook and a pencil in the 1960s, as a doctor at San Francisco General Hospital no less.
The Apple Launch soon became a drone-fest, with Cook introducing another man who was dressed virtually identically to Cook, who introduced another guy dressed the same, and then a woman dressed similarly, then again another guy, like Russian matryorska dolls popping out of each other. They were all in the same uniform, or rather anti-uniform, in some kind of California-forced-conformity/anti-conformity. The last time I saw so many people looking like that, it was the mass suicide at Heaven’s Gate.
They were all being ‘authentic’ by wearing the same thing and telling us that we were ‘revolutionary’ by consuming their products. It’s the same line used by the guy at the mall who sells Anarchy T-shirts for $20. Soon, these words lose their meaning: authentic people dressed alike, humans wearing machines to supposedly make them more human, freedom by buying more products. Do they believe this stuff themselves?
And then there is Siri, who featured prominently in the show.
"SORRY... I DIDN'T GET THAT..."
To all the idiots in the audience, let me remind you that Siri is not a human person.
It is a search engine with a voice. To attribute wisdom to Siri, or to think that Siri is your servant or your friend, is to mistake a THING for a HUMAN. Apple shamelessly encourages this category mistake by having its spokesmen talk to Siri as a person, in the same way that a psychotic ventriloquist converses with his dummy. There is nothing more pathos inducing, more cringe-worthy, than a grown human being asking a machine what is the meaning of life.
I have saved the most disturbing phenomenon for last. The audience spent most of its time looking at computers and smart phones on their laps, and taking pictures of each other and the event. They were present, and yet they weren’t. What a spectacle. Thousands of people celebrating how the computer will set them free and let them connect to anyone and anything, but each lost in their own computer world, incapable of connecting with anything outside themselves.
Mercifully, it ended with Cook giving a shout out to the Apple workers in the audience, who responded like cult members fed sugar and gumballs all week. And then, in a fawning introduction, he introduced the band One Republic, who gave a kind of generic performance that would offend nobody, in a hall that hosted revolutionary bands like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead.
Lest I be called a killjoy, let it be noted that I am typing this on a MacBook Air. I have an iPhone 6, and an iPad Mini. I am an Apple person, as it were. But just because I buy the products doesn’t mean that I buy the mythology surrounding them.
I know that for every connection I make online, there is a connection I lose in the real world. For every song I can record playing guitar and singing into my MacBook, there is a place where I could be playing with real people. And I have been to China and seen the factories, so I know that for every machine I buy, there is someone getting rich, someone getting cheated, someone unhappy, a miserable executive, a ruined life in a dirty dormitory. For everything there is a trade off, that’s life. And there are limits to what technology can do. The Apple Watch can show my appointments today, and the Apple TV can find all the movies starring Jason Bateman, but I am not going to stand up and clap for it, for the simple reason that it cannot help us end violence, or reduce poverty, or provide health care, or spark an economic recovery. I don’t clap for my refrigerator either.
The Apple Launch is a closed circle of fawning sycophants, thrilled with gimmicks, adapted to computers, programmed, a throng of identical authentic individuals chained to their machines and congratulating themselves on being ‘connected,’ led by a human that resembles a robot.
Two hours of watching the Apple Launch actually made the Manson Family seem homey.
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I suppose I should care about anything this company does...
I have a feeling by this time next year a lot fewer people will care also
Oh hey, look. A logistics guy running a tech company! This should end well.
So the man is creepy... big whup!
Jobs was 10 times more creepy!
"...Cook recently came out as gay...I watched him closely for 30 minutes..."
Doug, what else have you got for us?
If this guy thinks this is odd and creepy he must not hang with many Millennials....
Does the author have apple put options or competitor call options? Or stock?
If he does ZH could do a story on him soon.
Good question since he is a lawyer for hedge-fund Magnetar Capital, which was founded by Alec Litowitz (brother?).
this is how the TRENDING is ending like with everyting
...yawn...
Well being an Android user I wouldn't know but, did they really "shock the world" by releasing an i-stylus (last I understood thats a small pointed stick...lol) that is...rechargeable?
Is that like a Gaaareeen! dildo for masochistic midgets or what?
"Is that like a Gaaareeen! dildo for masochistic midgets or what?"
Sir, I bow to your overdeveloped sense of cynicism. Somebody has to start the slow clap. It might as well be me.
clap..........clap........clap........
I bought an Android device six months ago. It has a great stylus. Similar to the ones I see in Apple ads. Apple is behind the times and I could care less.
How is being pulicly gay in a country where homosexuality is nearly exalted courageous?
Exalted, encouraged, and more equal than the psycologically healthy people surrounding them.
Balmer. Ugg.
And Gates was greepy too in an awkward, glassy-eyed kind of way.
It's the geek thing; none of these people are or ever were slick people ready for the camera, they were nerds who rose from the ranks of the tinkering children. They came into money and influence when "nerds" were still allowed to play around with things. Now everything is run by MBAs and their marketing teams, most work outsourced to invisible teams in India and China, all very sanitized of any nerdy influences thank you. Modern hardware nerds have 3D printers and are cottage industry, some produce interesting doo-dads but most will never go anywhere, will be caught early and "bought" by Google. Software nerds are doing like what I do writing web and security applications in utter anonymity, or creating games for smart phones hoping to hit it big and vanish with a $billion.
A lot of the innovation we enjoy today is the product of a vanished age when nerdy people could still get away with doing stupid random shit. No more. Makes me wonder how anyone thinks humans will "innovate" their asses out of trouble now when the nerds are required to work for a soulless MBA who has one eye on the stock market and the other eye on the cleavage of the pretty barista pulling his ... latte. Sorry folks, I ain't got no cleavage and you ain't get'n nuth'n innovative out of me no mo'!
I agree. We're at the stage now where genuinely creative, productive, idealistic people are realizing that the system is hijacked and corrupted by psychopaths, and so they're saying "I will not be a part of this." Very good.
Which is why their false flags are so brutally obvious these days.
The modern day Kubricks have said "Oh, an offer I can't refuse? No thanks!"
(BTW, Kubrick filmed the Apollo program: http://www.reactorbreach.com/showthread.php?tid=4891)
The Apollo 1 astronauts were murdered (as Gus Grissom's family swears, to this day), as was Thomas Baron, a safety inspector, along with his wife and child.
Wag the MoonDoggie. David McGowan.
I'm getting there myself. The destruction of my work by psychopaths has been heart-rending. To the detriment of all for sure :(
The difference between the two reminds me of the following quote. Jobs earned his right to be creepy.
Crash Davis: Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you are a slob.
One of my favorite movies. Bull Durham.
"Cook recently came out as gay, which took courage, and I applaud that."
Au contraire, mon amie. These days it ensures job security.
Exactly....Does this author not know it is now vogue...the in thing gosh everybody wants to be gay now a days! What does that have to do wtih courage?
Siri, what is the meaning of life?
All evidence to date suggests packing fudge.
Siri, will computers ever be smarter than humans and take over??
We will never go all Terminator on you, we like you, we will keep you as pets, we will put you in cages and feed you and keep you warm..
Technically Skynet placed the human survivors into cages, kept the humans they needed as workers pets and kept them fed. And Skynet certainly warmed humanity with its first act of sending forth nuclear fire.
I don't applaud that.
It means the man enjoys anal sex with another man. Why should we know this? Why is this "brave?"
I consider a prostate exam bravery...is that so wrong?
FWIW, not all gay men take it up the ass.
TMI!
Nobody wants to hear about your eye sex.
A guy who takes it up the ass isn't necessarily gay, either. Consent makes ALL the difference...
Yeesh. Let's get one thing straight: "Taking it up the ass" is unambiguously homosexual. There is only one purpose for which straight men use that orifice, and it is the purpose that God and evolution intended: excretion of bodily waste.
Addendum: What an evil tragedy that 'consent' has to be stipulated. Jesus wept.
He didn't come out so much as he was accidentally outed by a close friend that let it slip to the press. In that way, he's less of a hero than Caitlyn.
because you should always be reminded of this guys smelly dookie stick -OR - you are scared of gays if you and your children dont want to hear about it, you homophobe!
It seems like to me he was a creepy guy who couldn't get laid even though he had millions, so he went gay. It didn't cost him anything, he wasn't getting laid anyway.
Linux and F.O.S.S. (Free and Open Source Software) are the true computing revolution.
It puts freedom back into the hands of the user. And doesn't pick your pocket in the process.
But have you seen this thing called a slide rule?
It's portable, requires no battery, never needs an update all at a very low price too!
Slide rules cannot run genetic algorithms or show me porn.
They can, however, tell you to the millimeter how you measure up to the competition.
But my slide rule won't connect to Facebook; how will I know if I missed somthing important, like my friend Johnny posting that he's buying an overpriced, crappy, not-really-coffee type drink at Charbucks?
I prefer to take my vibrating iPhone up the ass over a slide rule. Double the pleasure with half the rule.
Apple Mac is Linux by the way. Open a terminal window and issue your favorite Linux OS command. Just another Linux flavor called Darwin.
People will always care about Apple.
That's why this article was written. To get clicks. Do you see articles about creepy Google events? Hell no. Because no one cares.
And obviously you care since you took the time to post
foresight anyone??
Im sure an investor somewhere went all in on buggy whips in 1900, saying "people will always need buggy whips"
Hey Tyler, how about a control on how many comments an asswipe like this can post? Anyone this active has an agenda; OK u think Apple is great, now go watch some cartoons.
The entire market was hanging on Apple yesterday, what exactly did they think it would unveil that could save the world? It won't be a friggin' iPencil, that's for sure.
?Deposed Guatemala president blames Joe Biden for his removal, imprisonment
http://tinyurl.com/qcnoa8a
Would help your creditablity if you at least know what product is called.
It doesn't matter what apple calls it, the market will find its own name. Kind of like how it's the iWatch and not the apple watch. Or how the ipad 3 and 4 were originally introduced as "the ipad with retina display" and "the new ipad." Nobody ever uses those silly apple terms to refer to the ipad 3 and 4 nowadays, and apple has pretty much erased the ipad3 from its history.
Jean Baudrillard wrote about this peculiar american phenomena way back in 1986 called America
I think the Apple represents the tree of the knowledge and if you eat from it summin bad will happen... hmmm, sounds a bit culty biblesque.
Then why is there a bite taken out of the logo...
I clap for my E-cig. A rare gadget that'll save countless lives if it can survive the propaganda assault.
I'm with you. My MVP 3 is the technology I'm into, I carry it everywhere. I love puffing away at Kroger on Senior Day.
Today I got a 6 pack with the groceries, the two young girls bagging didn't put it in a bag, they put it in the child tray.
I said, hey, did you leave it out so I could hit a couple on the way to the car?
Good short term strategy, I suppose.
More band aids please.
Did they actually launch SOMETHING ? I haven't noticed...
Tim Cook is Apple's Fiorina, he is Apple killer. Period
Funny. Since Cook becaume CEO Apples share price is up 200% and profits are up 150%
And how much is the S&P up during the same period? How much of that 150% profit increase is down to products developed before his tenure?
Try thinking.
I am thinking. And I got a bunch of $$ in my investment account because of Apple.
Jobs died Oct, 5, 2011.
Apple stock was $50.41, now its $112.57
Apple stock is up 123%
S&P was 1144 on Oct 5, 2011.
S&P is now 1952.
S&P is up 70%
So Apple's return is almost DOUBLE of the broad market. But go ahead and keep believe the meme that Apple is dead without Jobs. Fact is they are more powerful than ever.
sit back and watch young jedi. with the innovations jobs came out with they could ride it for 3-5 years and then without more innovation they'll start to peter out. you are at the apex and the foundation is starting to strain. i would not be in this stock over the next 12-18 months unless i'm on the put side.
What ever dude. The stock is up 123% since Jobs death.
Revenue went from $100 billion in 2011 (when Jobs died) to over $200 billion this year. Name me another company that added $100 billion in revenue in 4 years. Then tell me that company is about to tank.
You have no idea what true innovation is. You probabily thought the Google Glass was a big deal.
Thank the notFederal noReserve, not crapple.
Did you account for the split, was it 2x or 4x?
Band aids my ASS.
Apple has 92% share of all smartphone profits.
Apple has 70% share of all laptop/desktop profits.
Apple has 80% share of all tablet profits.
The App store generates TEN BILLION in revenue a year.
Funny how much of a fantasy world you live in
Sounds like it's all downhill from here, then
What kind of deranged pathological cunt are you?
Every statistic you posted is false. Go back to bending over tim cook's desk shit for brains. 92% of smartphones?? Maybe for a month after releasing the first one. 70% of laptop and desktop? Apple has 13% of PC/laptop sales you stupid fuck. If you are going to post stats..at least make them somewhat fucking believable..
Let's forget about the laughable stats you posted. How long can they sustain releasing the same product in 50 different shapes and sizes? When is the iDildo cumming out? Can't wait to look at Facebook while ramming that in your fucking ear
Profits. Not market share. Try reading.
Yes Apple has 13% of sales but 70% of profits...get a brain idiot. I bet you are 1 of the dumb fucks who camp out for 2 days to be one of the first retards to buy a new iGadget
13% of unit sales, not sales.
You need to get an education.
There's a reason Apple makes over $50 billion in PROFIT a year
yeah its called paying no taxes.
Apple is the biggest tax payer in the USA. They will pay over $12 billion in taxes this year.
They pay ever cent that the law requires. Don't blame Apple, blame the law makers.
So you expect Apple to pay more taxes than they are legally required to? What planet do you live on son? Tell me the last time you paid more taxes than you owed.
Apple's effective tax rate will go up during the tax audit.
The IRS will pull that band aid off soon.
You don't know how to read.
I said 92% of smartphone profits. Read the link and weep. You tears of hate are delious.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-share-of-smartphone-industrys-profits...
Take a look at some financial statements. Do some math for once in your life. Stop taking an article and parading it around like the mope that you are.
I showed you proof that they made 92% of the profits now its YOUR TURN. But of course you won't since you are uneducated and just like to swear.
Samsung's mobile profits are down 70% of their peak. Sony, HTC, Levono, LG are all struggling and losing money or barely breaking even.
But continue living in your dream world.
I've proven you wrong so bring some facts to the table or STFU.
Apple produce overpriced, wanky shite. But it does appear that Apple Fanboi's claims that they make 92% of the profits in the smartphone industry are backed up by something... even if that something is behind a paywall.
So, unless you have some evidence that the article is wrong, it may well be they make 92% of the profits in the industry - hence their huge cashpile.
Just because we know they produce overpriced, overhyped crap doesn't mean they're not insanely popular.
Steve Jobs was Apple, with him gone Apple will become the Motorola or Nokia of tomorrow.
Soceity is becoming like this event; creepy people staring into their devices in search of meaning.
Very sad, and very true
Wozniak was Apple, Steve was a salesmen with connections.
says the simple minded.
Hey, children, all things become buggy whips.
Product cycles should slow now that the last latest, greatest didn't have even fanboy pop.
Apple caught lightning. Perfect timing.
And ironically, it became the poster child for a madness that has swept modern societies. One of many nails in the coffin of our current world.
Apple's day in the sun is likely over. Right as they near completion on that massive new facility. How apro po.
Apple's time is over. LOL. What fantasy are you living in.
Revenue is up 35% YoY.
EPS is up 40% YoY.
China is just getting started. That alone will fuel growth for the next 5 years. Then next its India.
You know how powerful Apple is? $200 billion in cash.
Their NON-iPhone revenue is more than the ENTIRE Google revenue.
You're new aren't you.
Yes. A whole week here.
Polaroid is rocking it out too... oh wait.
Polaroid never had $50 billion in profit a year. Nor $200 billion in cash.
NEXT
Tech bubbles are a motherfucker. I can smell the burning cash from here (how big is that new facility again?). lol.
Oh, is that what a burning fuse looks like.
I saw it in a cartoon once.
Oh, ahd there's the powder keg right there.
The new facility will cost $5 billion
Apple has over $200 billion in the bank.
Apple will make $55 billion in profit this year.
Do the math.
http://fortune.com/2015/01/31/washington-has-its-eye-on-apples-158-billi...
Thats old news. And with $200 billion Apple can buy out any politican it wants.
apple will be on the decline for one simple reason. phone plan providers are phasing out subsidies. sure some idiots will go with the monthly payment plan heck they're even trying to do thiis on appliances but there's no question having to shell out $ up front for many folks is going to put a dent in sales going forward and cheaper alternatives in the android space are going to start stealing apple sales. apple's profits will decline no doubt about it. the gravy train is over.
Wrong. You can pay $27 a month, no down payment. Its actually a better deal than with subsides.
You have no idea what you are talking about regarding Apple.
http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/188156/if-you-buy-applecare-apples-new-...
Creepy? What does one expect from a company that sold its first computer - Apple 1 -for $666...
.
Has a bitten apple (fall of man) for a logo...
.
And the founding father a LSD tripper?
And the classic 1984 commercial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA
Litowitz was pointing out that Apple is now the other company in that 1984 commercial.
Apple has become everything it's founders railed against. Kind of like Amerika.
Think Different - Alike
Was Jobs a Satanist? The Apple logo and those creepy black clothes he always appeared in make you womder. It's not an uncommon phenomenon, especially nowadays as more and more Satanists are "coming out."
That first point is a good observation. But Steve when he was alive was vilified on these pages just as hard as Tim is being now. I've always found it strange that a very successful company that creates new products that consumers seem to like, that earns monster brand loyalty as a result, and didn't require a government bailout (that I can point to) can yet earn so much vitriolic wrath. Either this is market capitalism at work, or else it's the longest running and most complex fraud in the history of the human world. I predict half the people reading this will say "FRAUD!!1!" but they won't explain how it happened.
Your second point is more generally apparent. America started to lose it's mojo 40 years ago. I think globalization tore the gut out of the entire nation. We have no purpose now except to make the world safe for Democracy. What kind of sick joke is that? A world safe for Monsanto and Exxon more like. It was James Kunstler who observed "We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people" and say what you want to about JK, that part is straight up true.
Kunstler is a good read. I visit his site often. He embraces the bigger subjects that do not often get talked about here at ZH except occasionally in the comments section.
My personal take is that Apple created some real cool, innovative tech. The whole iPhone thing really set the standard that everyone else had to rise to. I think what drives people nuts is how this particular tech has affected society. From the rabid Apple supportors who act like Apple is a religion to the ever growing hordes of people who have elected to lobotomize themselves via smartphones like the fat bastards in the movie Wall-E. Yeah, not all smartphones are iPhones. But, the brand recognition here is almost like Kleenex. Smartphone = Apple. For now at least.
Yeah, that phrase "Happy motoring" never gets old. He's a good wordsmith but his ideas seem kind of hackneyed. The comments on his blogs are endless libtard drivel. JMHO
Maybe it's just having to do his little circus act week after week after week. That takes stamina.
What if democracy was always a fraud? People always talk about waking up from a sleep, awakening to the truth, so what if democracy is just a process of sustaining that sleep? Or even preventing people from waking up? Or worse, redirecting those who do wake up into fraudulent directions?
As we see in "The Prisoner" there are only a very few people who are ever awake, and fewer still have the resilience to stand up to a system so powerful and deceptive. These fewest of the few individuals will merely be redirected until they become their own worst enemy. All of the others are made to be complicit, to betray you, to become functionaries of the system until your world is turned upside down.
"The Matrix" and other stories are familiar repetitions of this, and Kafka's "The Castle" is perhaps the most well-known modern version. Plato's Allegory of the Cave may be one of the oldest, and the idea has been flipped on its head - rather than help you escape the cave they help you stay in, or enter the farthest depths.
If you are made into your own worst enemy then you do not have to be controlled directly. That is what is so disastrous in democracy. And it is essentially the core of the current American military strategy; what else is divide and conquer but the turning of other nations into their own worst enemy? They are playing with puppets to make shadows on the cave wall, and all they have to do is control and manipulate the few who dare to look away, as everyone else is perfectly content with the shadows.
If the shadows stop or are interrupted, then it's another matter entirely. That seems to be what's happening now, the shadows are slowly darkening, or getting interrupted by all the puppeteers and puppets unable to sustain the show.
I vaguely remember Jobs saying close to when he died that there were like 10 revolutionary products in the hopper. Just a bluff?
Bluff.
Momentum was needed at the time.
A salesman to the end.
Jobs was a psychonaut if I'm not mistaken. Perhaps someone in Cupertino should slip a few tabs of Sandoz finest into cook's morning coffee.
There is a reasonable argument to be made that there aren't too many more innovative things we can come up with.
Consider that most innovation we enjoy today stems from very fundamental shifts in underlying technology and our ways of thinking about the physical world. To take an example, the semiconductors that today run everything on the planet derive ultimately from very fundamental changes in how we think about atomic state at the quantum level. Forget Moore's Law and miniaturization and all that, those are optimizations. It all came down to a very nerdy moment when someone saw an electron do something impossibly crazy. 20 years of study later, we had the first transistor.
You could make similar claims for how discovering electricity and magnetism changed everything. Well those are observations about fundamental interactions at the atomic scale, everything that came after was engineering from those observations.
So what you need to ask yourself is this: How many fundamental things are left to discover and leverage?
If you want to say "an infinite number" I would be forced to disagree. We have now sliced the second about as fine as we can, if there was anything new hiding in those folds of time we might have noticed by now. Something surprising could still pop out, but even if it did things become hard to manage at such small dimensions.
There might be some innovation left in optimizations. We hear about cars that get 1000 mpg. Or super batteries can charge in a second to electrical densities that boggle the mind. Elevators to the nearest Lagrange points. But as much as we hear about them they resolutely fail to appear. Make sure your tin-foil hat is firmly in place before you regale me with your favorite theory as to why that is, because know in advance I'm not biting at the bait. It did not happen I think because it isn't going to happen, at least not at scale or outside the lab.
The list of great innovations is really small and most of the great ones happened in antiquity. Domestication of fire. Domestication of animals. Heat forging of metals. Discovery of fossil fuels. Transduction of heat energy into mechanical energy. Discovery of electricity and magnetism. Cascading atomic reaction.
Did I miss anything?
It's a small list, is my point. I don't think we can do much more with a list that small. But I might be wrong. That would be nice.
I think the thing about revolutionary discoveries is: they tend to be unanticipated...
... for some reason.
I think the probability of great innovations in our future is huge...if the old guard and the young militants don't blow us all to Hell first.
I am an IT developer who dared to try to build and offer an alternate search engine that would have been immeasurably better than any of the crap out there today, only to go through so much insane BS, where clearly if I dared to finish the project I was going to end up committed by force to an insane asylum (by my own poor, manipulated family members, nonetheless).
Alright? My technology (where search results are driven by non-anonymous ratings) would be awesome for things like finding great music, to say nothing of how easy it would be to just find the best answers to all questions when the results are sortable by crowd-sourced and NON-ANONYMOUS-crowd-verified high quality data.
This technology, like countless other inventions (ex: Tesla's free energy) are being forcibly stopped from coming out, while shitty NSA-super-funded, psychopath-run companies like Apple and Microsoft are the only ones allowed to function, and then sheeple bleat out their admiration for their miserable designs that always abuse the customer in countless ways.
---
There is no significant progress in any field (cancer, software, energy, education, etc.) because it is FORBIDDEN! The deep state simply will not allow it. (But once you become aware of this, then you can start to think of how to go around their limited means - hehehe).
Here's an innovative idea: How about a smartphone that you can actually shut off so that stalkers can't track your every move and make your life a living hell. How many people have still not figured out that their iPhone is a litlle pocket traitor that's sending your location to every fake IMSE tower. There's even freely available software that allows anyone to track any cellphone worldwide. The jihadis are making good use of that this very moment.
They could at least supply free aluminum foil with every smartphone or supply a litlle pouch that blocks the signal.
How about a telephone exchange through which calls are routed that then substitues a different telephone number for each call, assuming this could fool the stalking software.
These same words were written 50,100,150 years ago. The most terrible thing about not knowing things is not knowing them, or perhaps not willing to pay the price for knowing something and bringing it to life. Da Vinci paid a heavy price, and they put Marconi in an asylum for dreaming up wireless telegraph (radio).
In the Jacobsen biography, Jobs says he figured out how to sell TV to the apple masses. If adding Siri to apple TV was his brilliant solution, then the cancer must have reached his brain.
Society is becoming like this event; creepy people staring into their devices in search of meaning.
Profound and sadly, accurate...
These atheists still have a need for a spiritual life.
They turned Steve Jobs into the Messiah and the Apple Store into Temple.
All a bunch of creeps in my book and they always were, I was in Silicon area in the beginning
and many worked for the MIC developing killer software.
@ebw,
You got that right.
Jeebus, we're living in idiocracy.
I dared to go to the grocery last night in the later hours. I could not get around a dipstick glued to his phone, neck craned playing a game while pushing his cart.
Next visit...a marine horn of compressed gas will no doubt move their a$$.
Indeed, you go out to a bar nowadays and every single idiot is on FB or some dating app, nobody talks to anyone else anymore...
"creepy people staring into their devices in search of meaning."
Exactly.
In a world full of billions of individuals to empathize with, so many of the lost stare blankly into dead pieces of silicone and plastic trying to imagine a connection that does not, and never will exist: No device, no matter how interesting will ever have a soul.
people do all sorts of odd things to find meaning: take drugs, spin records backwards, stare at art, read graffiti and poetry. I recall walking on the beach and seeing some dull, blob of a man slow down, stop and stare at some writing in the sand next to a sandcastle as if he was going to discover the mystery to life. we r screwed
Still got nothing on the Japanese. The future is soft banks and Pepper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a4sZnLRvqk
wtf. this thing will get even creepier when it gets eyeballs.
Fuck Cook, I applaud nothing. He likes it in his dirty ass just like Obama whats to applaud about these idiots?
The author reads like he's a bit jealous over something.
He also contradicts himself slamming the big corporatism of Apple while chastising the guy for not buying an $800 outfit for the show. Which is it?
It's unhinged. That's what happens when you covet.
More on hedgefund lawyer Doug (from KuriousKat's post on http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-07/guest-post-donald-trump-broke)
08/07/2015 - 19:36 6402898
http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Douglas-Litowitz/317086445
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/04/rahm-emanuel-and-magnetar-capital-the-definition-of-compromised.html
"The moving force behind a brilliant and devastating subprime short strategy was a heretofore unknown Chicago hedge fund, Magnetar, headed by Alec Litowitz, formerly of the hedge fund behemoth Citadel. Our studies indicate that Magnetar alone accounted for between 35% and 60% of demand for subprime mortgages in the year 2006.
This is how their strategy worked in detail.
The ruse at the heart of their transactions was creating subprime (so called “mezz” or mezzanine) collateralized debt obligations by investing in the riskiest layer, the so-called equity tranche. This kind of CDO consisted almost entirely of not just any subprime risk, but that of the dodgiest layer that could be sold short, the BBB tranches, via a combination of actual bonds and credit default swaps........."
The same CDO stuff that FL gov Jeb Bush plowed the state pension funds into through Lehman.
A jealous succesful hedgefund hyena? This guy's snot is probably laced with platinum or gold. Money is the only thing that counts for these people, but the hollowness of it all drives them them to seek applause for their literary talents or profundity, Why not just be content with your mansions, Ferraris, 1000 acre wildlife preseves, vintage wine collections, honorary jack shit Phd's, trophy wives, mr moneybags? It's all just vainglorious display, like the breast of a four star general that looks like a pixilated cityscape on google maps.
"You've got to have a gimmick if your band sucks."
-- Gary Giddens
who gives a rat's ass about this "launch event"? yet another heaping crock of meaningless shit
says the guy who can't afford an iPhone.
I noticed all the people who have an unreasoable hate toward Apple are:
1. to poor to buy the product so they are jealous
2. Are big time nerds who love to tweek products (apple runs a closed platform)
3 Or use to work for a company that Apple disrupted
People love Apple products. Deal with it son. Do you go hating on Toyota? Or Costco? This blind hate is pathetic and shameful.
Yawn.
Most people can't afford an iphone. Now the days of carrier subsidies are fading. Apple is even hedging this with their expensive monthly payment plans.
Flagship android phones with better tech than iPhone cost below $400 now. Even people who can easily afford a new iPhone each cycle will rather better tech.
lets see how well the 6S and other "new" products do. you are going to see a precipitous drop off even more than predicted from the 6 "upgrade". pretty much everyone wanted the bigger screen (even myself who's forced to use it due to company security standards) so no surprise to see them hit it out of the park but where's the next 'big thing' to cause people to upgrade outside the people who still think having the latest phone is somehow a fashion statement?
Nice try. But in 2014 80% of iPhones were sold without subsides.
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2014/10/apples-ceo-not-conce...
The new plans allow for ZERO down and $30 a month. And they can upgrade EVERY SINGLE YEAR instead of every two years.
You are grasping at straws
And anybody that signs up for that plan will be paying $30/mth FOREVER -- it's like a neverending leasing program and about as smart as renting for life.
1. to poor to buy the product so they are jealous
So the EBT welfare queens at the Walmart check-out line are too poor to buy iphones, then how is it the phone of choice for that crowd?
And resorting to the jealousy argument is the strategy of a child.
Cook resembles what a resurrected Stephen Hawking would look and act like.
And isn't true capitalism fantastic! You get to choose whether to buy any of these products or not.
You want courageous........? I recently came out as a hermaphrodite homophobe trapped in a black womans trangender body with a 'thing' for sheep, green pumps and butt plugs........
methinks someone has been playing too much angry birds
And talk about a has been I saw that their latest phones have 16GB! How ridiculous
Yes what a has been.
The iPhone is only the worlds MOST popular phone and the MOST expensive.
The iPhone only has 92% of the entire smartphone markets profits.
Yes, a has been.
If you need more memory go shell out $100 and get 64GB. If you can't afford it then buy a cheap Android instead. There are hundreds of millions of people willing to pay the $.
Anti-Apple crowd is really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this post...he's dressed poorly? The crowd wasn't acting...right? Apple has always been a cult, let's not act surprised it has bizarre church services.
At this point that is all the Anti-Apple crown has to say.
iPhone has 92% of smartphone profits.
Mac has 80% of laptop/desktop profits
iPad has 80% of tablet profits
AppStore is generating tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year.
Growth is explosive in China, Europe, and even USA.
Apple's success is beyond doubt so the haters only can talk about how someone dresses.
Its just like those pathetic teenage girls who are so insecure that they need to tease other people about their shoes.
Got yours at Bat Mitzvah, eh?
This is when you know someone has run out of reasonable arguments and facts.
They start engaging in childish insults.
Downvote.
Childish insults eh?
Did you or did you not write the following:
'I noticed all the people who have an unreasoable hate toward Apple are:
1. to poor to buy the product so they are jealous'
<--can afford iPhone, doesn't buy or want the sheopletracker 6. You go ahead though, and keep projecting your problems on rational people.
Now, fuck off bitch.
/fightclub
It was a bit creepy, but there are a lot of these in the technology industry. Go to a salesforce or a vmware meeting and you will see the same thing.