I know for a lot of people who are going to read this, it’s going to come as no shock that Apple has become very corporate as of late. The moves it’s been making. The company it keeps. It hasn’t been looking great for quite some time. It’s something I’ve been watching for a while, but I kept holding out hope. Knowing that there are no winners but billionaires in capitalism, I was still banking on its culture to keep them out of the noise of the rest of Silicon Valley and the rest of the technocratic companies that are dominating our lives right now.
As a company that took what I viewed as a bold stance back in 2015 when it refused to unlock the iPhone of the alleged San Bernardino shooter, I’ve always held the company to a higher standard when it came to user privacy and consumer protections.
But, over the last few years, that’s kind of dwindled. Now, while I may not be the AI hardliner some on this site are, I still feel that the way in which this current technology has been developed, introduced, marketed, and forced upon us has been a spectacularly epic shit show that only serves the 5 people passing the same $20 around fooling everyone that everything is great.
Apple stayed out of the fray for as long as they possibly could. However, given where it landed, I don’t think it was out of the consumer’s interest, but because Apple just couldn’t figure it out. It seems its now taken the Microsoft approach and farm its AI out to another company which gives it a easier run at forcing all this new tech down our throats again.
Of course, this all became abundantly clear leading up to WWDC. Of course, Apple and Google laid out the ground work at the beginning of the year when both companies announced a partnership around the use of Gemini models to power Siri. This was mainly driven by the fact that Apple just couldn’t deliver on the promises made during the launch of the iPhone 16 line.
And what was shown Monday was just disturbing to me. While I’ll admit some of the features would be very useful, I am vehemently against any tools that create out of thin air. And what I mean by that is its sourcing so much stolen creativity to create something that didn’t exist before. Write an email, whatever. Summarize an article, fine. I know I’ll probably catch shit for that. But I draw the line and writing whole blog posts out of thin air or creating videos of family and friends that didn’t even happen.
Even the editing tools are just weird. Changing the framing of a photo or extending it out is just weird. I only subjected photos of myself or things I own to these edits so not to actively feed the machine (without consent) and while a photo of my server room was fine, a selfie of me “reimagined” a window behind me which made me feel weird knowing what the window actually looks like. I’ve never touched Genmoji and briefly played with Image Playground when it first came out and never opened that app since. I’m still waiting on the Siri AI stuff (on a waitlist), so I’ll get back to you all on how that goes.
But the most disturbing part of all this was in the presentation itself. In all of Apple’s excitement of these new features, I don’t think it was mentioned once if these features are opt-in. I want to say they are as I don’t believe my wife has turned them on. But it’s not like it was even mentioned. Apple will shout up and down about the security, the on-device and private cloud compute of all these features (even though its being reported that they are running on Google’s servers), but nothing about the user being able to opt into these features. It just seems like its coming whether you like it or not.
And that’s kind of what I mean by Apple’s counter culture vibe just not really the same anymore. If only looking at it from a tech standpoint, it does seem like it’s business as usual. A company that would rather get things right by taking its time (with a few slip-ups along the way). But looking back at 50 years of history, Apple has seemed to have lost its creative spark to chase trends like everyone else. It seems like we’re back at the John Sculley days of Apple.
Now, this isn’t to say that I want Steve Jobs back. I couldn’t stand that man. Not even from a capitalist standpoint. It was more from a labor issue and how he treated his employees. Unfortunately, it seems he also was able to bring out the whimsy in the design and engineering teams back then.
With Tim Cook, Apple played it safe. So safe, he’d give the Fascist in Chief a gold and glass present to curry favor.
Now, it’s John Ternus’ turn at the top. Now, I don’t have any hope in C-suite position at any company. Nobody should. But as someone who follows this stuff, I’d be interested to know where Ternus will go in techno-fascist world that’s booming from the likes of Flock, Palantir, Anduril, Meta, and Amazon. Will Ternus bring the counter-culture back. Will he actually stand up the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Karp, and Bezos? Or just take the back seat like Nadella and Pichai?
Or will the employees of Apple seize the means and actually help the people form a meaningful resistance against all this bullshit?
Look, a guy can dream…
