As the clock ticks down to Apple’s harmonic iConvergence, gadget sites are serving up a poisonous cocktail: two parts euphoria, two parts curmudgeon, and a squeeze of desperation courtesy the publishing industry.
Cory Doctorow inevitably weighs in on the iPad’s failings. He breezes past points others have covered better: that it’s a closed device, that it will not breed the same hacker culture that previous generations of personal computers did, that Steve Jobs is powered by the harvested souls of orphans, and so on. Doctorow’s most interesting complaint is that the iPad’s design demonstrates “a palpable contempt for the owner”.
With the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother….
The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”
Translation: people who aren’t interested in hardware hacking or programming are sweaty, subhuman potatoes that have no friends. Oh, how times have changed!
Ironically, Doctorow’s pathological contempt for anyone who doesn’t attend Maker Faires helps the closed model gain ground. At the end of the day, most people just want to do stuff. Even creatives (as opposed to consumers) have a broader idea of what that means than the soldering-iron-and-compilers purists. Belittling the people who find a data appliance appealing, and convincing fellow nerds that everyone wants the same hacker toys they do, will only deepen the divide.