I was pretty sure I covered this momentous ad somewhere else. And yes I found it – it was on the occasion of reviewing Coded Bias (a documentary by Shalini Kantayya from 2020). For ease and to not be overly redundant, here is what I wrote back then. The richest man in the world has now gone full techno-fascist lately, supporting right-wing candidates all over Europe and backing Trump.
I think today the discussion around this ad is even more actual today than back then 5 years ago (and with the hindsight of 35 years). And yes, MacIntosh ad also comes from the era when Neuromancer (which I am currently reading for the first time in original), a key cyberpunk thome got published:
“Coded Bias is definitely within the bounds of any socially inflected SF worlds u can think of. Maybe it used to be just the figment of dystopian – Cold War-tinged imagination, but now it is part of ours. Made me actually mentally revisit that primordial Silicon Valley 1984 promo – the ad for Apple Macintosh PC released in December 1983. Feels puzzling how this new televised technological muscle was part of a much wider and concerted Reaganite response to the -(still) Socialist East. ‘Free World’ computing as easily turned and facing off the eponymous Orwellian 1984 villain, a drab, grey, docile citizenry of the standardized monolithic solid-state, the ideological ‘other’ where a repressive & monstrous surveillance apparatus – (be it Securitate/Stasi) enforced obedience & ‘rightminding’. Only that, in retrospect, the newly competitive Silicon Valley product was a launch-pad for a much wider privacy Dragnet and much more insidious scope and certainly fancier in looks & design. Buying into a system of personal, automated & generalized consumer surveillance that also brought the pretense of neutral, un-biased coding.”
TimeSpace Warps 