The Other Problem with the 2017 Keynote
People are freaking out about the annual procession of soon-to-be-quotidian dystopian possibilities, otherwise known as the 2017 Apple Keynote. The ensuing mania over the iPhone X (the outrageous price point! the terrifying facial recognition cyborg future! the missing ninth generation!) is warranted, but Apple’s vision for the future of retail in the looming technocracy has gone largely undiscussed as a result. It’s a problematic new theory of space that I’m still trying to sort out, but in the spirit of opportunism, here are my initial thoughts.
At first blush, Angela Ahrendts’ presentation seemed like nothing more than a continuation of The Fruit’s late tendency to overcomplicate the already simple (I need how many adapters and dongles now?! And damn you for condemning me to using the word “dongle” for the rest of my life). They’ve swapped out the typical brick and mortar lingo for an extended metaphor likening an Apple Store to a town square. I mean, a Town Square, which sits at the heart of a “Plaza.” Where do you seek technical help? Not in the seedy impersonal corners of a Genius Bar, but in the Genius Grove. Where can you cruise the latest products? Not in the aisles, but along the Avenues, of course! (And here Ahrendts added that these displays “change seasonally to always feature our newest products,” as if this weren’t basically the definition of a retail display.)
With this fumbling and already-hackneyed metaphor, Apple does more than attempt to reimagine a paradigm simply through renaming; it projects an eerie vision of actual cities and towns of the future. Ahrendts described these newly urbanized stores as bastions of thought and learning , coopting another space, this time from cities of yore: the Forum. And she described the stewards of this new space saying, “The Creative Pro is now to the liberal arts what the Genius has always been to technology.” Then I knew we were headed somewhere extra dark. Apple isn’t simply creating an analogy; it is swallowing the entire concept of a city, and spitting out a vision in its own image. Turning Stores into mini cities is just the prototype.
It’s not as if the corporatizing of the liberal arts and academia hasn’t been a long time in the making, as professorships are deprofessionalized and predatory for-profit universities continue to lure droves of disenfranchised students. And there’s something to be said for busting higher education out of the ivory tower. But Apple isn’t democratizing (hello, did you see these new price points?); it’s coopting and branding another area of human thought.
To me, this looks like a takeover, however splashy the video or make-the-world-a-better-place-y the presentation. In this re-gentrification of discourse, it is perhaps most telling that Apple has gravitated towards reinventing exclusive spaces that have historically masqueraded as public or semi-public (the forum, the salon).
Can we take a second to just inhale the irony of Apple’s projected stewardship of historic landmarks and urban design? Their plans to restore historic Parisian hôtels particuliers and Milanese piazzas… and then turn them into retail outposts? Slowly branding the urban landscape, trademarking history, and creating fences more treacherously invisible than their flagship glass cube. The first time I heard Ahrendts describe Apple’s newly-acquired Parisian “atrium” as its largest forum, it was hard to stifle a laugh. Apple, you did not invent the salon. Let’s not even try to make that claim in Paris. Still, it’s fun to imagine Gertrude Stein coming nose to nose with Silicon Valley’s best. And maybe it’s fitting for this new class of self-made cyborgs to be leading the way, imagining they’ve invented something new.
Slipped in right before the grand finale announcement (an enormous new development on the Chicago waterfront), Ahrendts unveiled plans to restore the Carnegie Library in Washington, DC, and, of course, turn it into a store. “We can’t think of a better place for ‘Today at Apple’ programs,” she exaggerated, “than a building originally created for the city to access knowledge and unlock their potential.”
Not fully discounting the possibility that this might have been a subtle attempt to throw some shade at the current state of affairs, let’s continue through the most apocalyptic version of this story because it’s bad. This project is the emblem of Apple retail’s dangerous blending of metaphor and vision, an act of coercion disguised as appropriation. How ironic that Apple should choose now to dub DC, under the petty influence of this avowedly anti-intellectual administration, a seat of higher learning. And yet how utterly fitting that such knowledge should come emblazoned with the logo of one of the largest corporations in the world.
(By the way, my first thoughts on the Keynote were hastily thumbed into an iPhone. 👀😬)
