The People’s Republic of Apple
I think analogy can be a powerful tool for building understanding when employed sparsely, and when the real parallels provide something at least a bit interesting to say. For the sake of brevity, I will break down the analogy at the start, which I hope will invite questions to be answered by the end of this piece. Perhaps that goal is ambitious — but I think the metaphor I am trying to propose requires a fair bit of ambition.
This idea came about through a conversation I had with a friend involving the “walled garden” of the Apple ecosystem of products and software. The argument has been invoked so frequently that I won’t mention anything about it, but the crux of of our conversation was that the uniformity of their operating system and phone hardware has enabled Apple to catapult itself far beyond its Android competitors. While I suppose I’d understood that point in terms of app development on Apple phones (the Snapchat camera, for example), the augmentations extend to more ubiquitous capabilities like privacy and user protection. A great example of this is the data-free Find My app that will be included in MacOS Catalina, which will use the Bluetooth features of other Apple devices to build a sort of self-contained network, allowing even turned-off MacBooks to be located. That kind of innovation can only take place in an environment where hardware and software choices are highly centralized.
The discussion switched to a much larger conversation on the pragmatism of homogeneity versus the freedom of decentralization. Apply that thinking to the modern government systems, and you get something like the authoritarianism versus representational democracy dichotomy in which in China and the United States are the two emblamatic players. While, in the west, that conversation has always presumed the superiority of the sort of laissez-faire, free-market, majoritarian systems of power (although there was, of course, always in-built dissonance), technology has changed this field quite substantially as 21st-century bureaucracies have become more challenging to run.
While China might make only “iPhones” in its political system, the ubiquitousness of them has enabled decades of fairly stable governance, particularly after the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the late 20th century. Contrast this with the United States, which promises a more democratic system of representation by the people, and it becomes clear how the lack of ubiquity, the competition within the landscape it created, the ways in which the perverse incentives of capital have shaped it, have in many ways stagnated the expansive potential of democratic governance. Because there is no hard and fast rule on things like security and the rule of law (for both face perspective divergence in a deeply divided system), they have a tendency to go to the highest bidder. And it’s in that landscape that things like income inequality, social stratification, and political instability thrive.
Google faces similar problems to the United States, particularly because it is a company that has massive reach and extremely narrow modes of revenue generation — advertising. Last year, Google made more than $100 billion in ad revenues while also spending about that amount (while still making a profit) on the operation of the company. An advertising-based business model implies the need for high decentralization so as to maximize the number of advertisable properties under its control. While this does have the effect of making Google an extremely prolific technology company, the lack of centralized technological capabilities and the need for advertising revenues over something more concrete (like making expensive phones in the case of Apple) has made it challenging to pursue the ambitious technological projects that Apple has been spearheading (i.e. facial recognition on phone, automated Bluetooth integration like with AirPods and Beats, IoT integration of devices).
While this kind of problem can be broken down into a sort of unbridled trust in the corrective ability of the free market (both in the case of Google and the United States) versus a sort of directed, centralized market-making entity (in the case of Apple and China), the more compelling discussion comes when you consider how the perception of both has been transformed in recent years. While western democracies have crumbled and fragmented, China has entrenched its role both as a domestic and global force. They have embraced new technologies, and have thus become a global leader in all things technology, from quantum computing to artificial intelligence to genetic manipulation. When those technological advancements are build in systems of centralized ethics and collective action, the Westfalian arms race that has come to define the modern world begins to crumble at its base.
Most things in the world can be reduced to a few key topics which are vastly different in scale but radically similar in form. We as individuals are predisposed to interpersonal conflict, and so governments tend to be plagued with a scaled form of conflict that is both self-sabotaging and counterproductive. We strive for the betterment of the friends and families with whom we surround ourselves, and so in-group/out-group mentalities underly nationalism and the international system in ways that, if viewed microscopically, would be difficult to discern. As we move into a world even more deeply integrated with technology, we may come to find that it will not be a story of east and west, freedom and control, power and concession. New problems will arise, new conflicts will become clear. We will have to start considering what really differentiates fundamental ideas of human freedom and the equally fundamental drive we all have towards progression and self-betterment. The metaphor may collapse — and better ones may take its place.
Robert Jett
