As a lifelong mac-hater who now uses a mac for work because it was the best option on offer, I applaud this post and I feel like I could hear the mic drop at the end from all the way over here.
The Cult of Mac has always irritated me. In my younger and more irreverant years I got an Apple sticker from a graphic designer friend that had one (the old rainbow colored style!) and stuck it on my car with one of those “Calvin peeing” on a Ford logo stickers, lovingly modified. On the other side I had a “Linux Inside” sticker, a riff on the Intel logo, heh. Hoo boy, the road rage incidents that I expect that little gimmick was responsible for!!! The cult gets angry when you take a stab at it!!
The blind eye they turn to all the ills of Apple reminds me all too well of other cults we’re dealing with. The inability to be able to identify and admit to the faults of products you use anyway, or to people or organizations you still support in some way, is a fundamental problem. Identity seems to have a great deal to do with it. I use a mac for work now because it was the best option from what I had to choose from for various reasons, but that is not my identity. My preference would be to have a linux laptop, but that isn’t my identity either (Linux Inside sticker notwithstanding!)
If “Linux” could or did enshittify tomorrow, I would turn my back on it just as quickly. These things are mutable for me. Maybe this explains why I’m the kind of person who doesn’t get tattoos because finding those truly immutable truths is challenging and once you get there it seems like some pretty pretentious shit for a tattoo!
There is something interesting to me here about labels and race, and judging people by their deeds rather than the color of their skin. Brands have worked extremely hard ($$$$$) to elevate themselves above all other concepts of identity, race included. The fact that the behavior of people who are hung up on labels and race remind me so much of the people who are hung up on brands can’t be a coincidence. Inherent in both seems to be a desire to paint the world in simpler terms than what actually exists. Black bad. Apple good. There is no room for White bad and Black good and Apple bad and Microsoft good to also exist for these people. I believe some of this is related to authoritarianism and defering to it. Authoritarians won’t get very far on nuance. Some people want to just be told how it is, they pick a guy, and they will just do what he says (and let’s be honest, it’s usually a guy, and usually a white one). I’m afraid there are far more people like this than one might casually expect. I think of it as kind of a default state of man. The world is a big scary place and you just want mom and dad (yes, mostly dad) to just tell you how it is. Escaping from that basic paternal knot feels like the eternal struggle that everyone not deferring to an authority is engaged in, i.e. growing the fuck up. Some people have to just keep on finding a new daddy (no kink shame, giggity), or sky dad, etc.
You can’t defeat authoritarianism by becoming the benevolent dictator and giving all these people the “correct” simple answer instead though, because that’s still authoritarianism (i.e. how do you know it’s correct, how virtuous are you, and the more people you involve, the less authoritarian it becomes).
Critical thinking and nuance are hard. They’re exposing. They’re exhausting. You’re going to get it wrong a lot. But it’s absolutely neccesary because there is no other alternative.
This is the kind of stuff your blog gets me thinking about, lol, good shit!!
