Suppressing protests in China and censoring Twitter in America.
The largest lockdown uprising in China took place at facilities run by Apple’s Foxconn supplier where workers had previously jumped to their deaths. After thousands fled the Apple gulag, making their way through the woods and rural areas to freedom, other employees battled with Communist authorities over abusive conditions and treatment in the iGulag.
Apple had nothing to say about the rights of those workers who thought differently enough to break free and fight back. If they were foolish enough to have iPhones, there’s little doubt the company would have eagerly helped authorities track them down to be imprisoned or killed.
“Think Different”, Apple’s slogan, actually means collaborating with a Communist dictatorship where thinking differently is a crime. And it also means suppressing free speech in America.
That’s why Apple is threatening free speech on Twitter just as it’s threatening it in Shanghai.
But that is what the company has always been behind the reality distortion field of its ads. “Think Different” has never meant anything other than, “Shut up and do what the visionaries tell you.”
In the 90s, to celebrate the return of its co-founder, Apple launched an ad campaign with the slogan, “Think Different.” The campaign with its images of Einstein, MLK, Lennon, Edison and Picasso was meant to suggest that Apple was a unique creative company for aspiring geniuses.
And soon Steve Jobs joined the pantheon of those geniuses. But behind the ad campaign meant to appeal to narcissistic hipsters with disposable incomes was a harder truth.
Jobs, the talented marketer who had positioned Apple as the company fighting totalitarianism with its 1984 ad, was aggressively offshoring the company’s labor to Communist China.
What China had to offer was mass production under a ruthlessly totalitarian system that would, when Jobs decided to revamp the iPhone a month before launch, wake up 8,000 workers at midnight for a 12 hour shift.
At an Obama dinner, Jobs bluntly confirmed, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
“What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?” Apple’s supply manager asked.
The dorms, where 12 workers live to a tiny room, everyone is monitored and so many have committed suicide that nets were put up to catch the bodies, were the real “Think Different”.
Steve Jobs loved China and the Communist dictatorship loved him back. His famous black turtleneck appeared to echo the Mao suit. There are golden busts of Jobs in China looking like a Communist dictator.When Jobs died, there was hysterical mourning in China. There was no mourning for the deaths of workers at the Foxconn plants where Apple products were made.
A year before Jobs died, fourteen men and women jumped from buildings at Apple’s Foxconn Chinese contractors. Their deaths occasioned much less interest than the outpouring of grief for the author of their misery.
In a notion that could have only come from a satirical story by Kafka and Philip K. Dick or a real life Communist dystopia, workers were forced to sign contracts promising not to kill themselves.
Afterward nets were hung up to catch the falling bodies.
Think Different.
After Jobs’ death, his widow took the money to build the Emerson Collective, pushing social justice in the fine tradition of atoning for evil with more evil, while CEO Tim Cook developed an even more incestuous relationship with Communist China that included signing a secret $275 billion pact to help Communist China develop “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and vowed to use even more Chinese technology in Apple’s products.
When the Hong Kong protests began, the streets filled with young men and women, most of whom not only owned Apple products, but believed the hype that it was a noble company that didn’t just make gadgets, but aspired to harness human creativity for a better world.
Instead, Apple quickly moved to suppress the protests by removing an app used by the protesters to avoid police. Apple sanctimoniously declared that the protests were endangering “law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong” and claimed that it was responding to “concerned customers” worried that the popular protests threatened “public safety”.
That statement could have been and may have been written by the Communist regime. It should have been enough to finally expose the myth that Apple is animated by a creative spirit, rather than power, greed, and a willing collaboration with Communist mass murderers.
But with protests breaking out against Zero COVID tyranny breaking out in China, people were once again surprised when Apple rushed to aid Communist China’s crackdown by preventing protesters from using AirDrop to communicate and coordinate their activities.
The company wasn’t just once again collaborating with a Communist dictatorship responsible for the murder of countless millions, but it was screwing its own users, the naive students who had paid premium prices for its slave labor products because they believed in Apple.
They believed, like so many Americans and Europeans, that Apple stood for something.
And Apple does. It stands for tyranny.
That’s why Apple is threatening Twitter’s place in its app store because under Elon Musk the platform has begun to offer the very thing Apple is helping China stamp out: freedom.
It’s a mistake to believe that Apple is just doing what it’s told. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the company as unfortunate as the one by the protesters risking their lives while believing that Apple wouldn’t kick the chair out from under its users and their movement.
Apple isn’t a great American company, it’s a great Chinese company. Its fundamental worldview is Maoist. Its simplicity of control isn’t just about manipulating interfaces, but people. Its ad campaigns, from ‘1984’ to ‘Think Different’, have always been regime propaganda. Jobs, unlike his genuinely talented co-founder, Steve Wozniak, held people in contempt. His vision of technology was essentially Communist: depriving people of control for their own good.
China had always understood Steve Jobs, with his Maoist turtleneck, his minimalist aesthetics, ruthlessness and conviction of his own genius, far better than we ever did. The real message of “Think Different” wasn’t that everyone ought to think differently, but that geniuses are a superior group who ought to have the unlimited power to rigorously implement their vision. That is what China offered Jobs. And what Apple offers the Communist elite is the power behind their vision.
Americans haven’t cared very much about Chinese workers hurriedly assembling smartwatches in freezing temperatures or children laboring in mines, but Apple’s tyranny doesn’t stay in China.
Apple’s vision for America isn’t any different than for China. In both countries, Apple helps a leftist elite implement its collectivist vision by offering customers a poisoned chalice of convenience in exchange for data harvesting and control. The company doesn’t empower its customers, it tricks them into giving up control so that they can be better controlled.
That is why it’s coming for Twitter and threatening it over its newfound free speech.
“We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology,” a Big Brother analogue intoned in Apple’s famous 1984 commercial, “secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts.”
Jobs was a fan of Orwell’s book. Unfortunately he viewed it as a manual.
Apple has used its illegal app store monopoly to create a walled garden of apps along a pure ideology, secure from contradictory thoughts. Now, much as China is purging political opposition, the company that helped define its new age, is doing the same thing here.
Jobs, who once claimed that PCs were totalitarian and Apple was “the only force that can ensure their future freedom” helped build an oppressive operating system tethered to an app store calculated to deprive users of their freedom. That integrated hardware and software monopoly is one of the great threats to freedom in America and China.
As we approach a 2024 election, more legislators are waking up and fighting back against Apple’s walled app store of ideology. And if the Communist collaborating company comes after Twitter, it may discover that the whirling sledgehammer from its 1984 ad is coming its way.
Wellington says
All things considered, mankind would be better off if modern electronics starting with television (I’ll give radio and land line phones a pass) had never been invented. The negatives have far outweighed the positives and one of those negatives is the dumbing down of the general population and often with the concomitant result of the breakdown of the family. To go to a restaurant and see what’s left of a family, with parents and children each on their dumb phone, is to witness in microcosm how deleterious modern technology has been.
The positives from modern electronics simply aren’t worth it. Not even a close call. And yes, I enjoy e-mail, but I’d give it up to go back to a time before it—and before so much else. The rot continues. Apple of course is part of this rot.
Westman says
I sometimes wonder if the rot was always there and modern communications provided the tools to burrow behind the facade, discovering the emporer has no clothes and little morality.
Technology has certainly brought us to this strange point in our human history where our choices will preserve or destroy the Republic and perhaps have the same effect on the human species, as well.
Social media wastes an enormous amount of time, so much that it must be a factor in declining education levels.
I can’t buy a simple car that I can repair without special electronic tools and one-of-a-kind electronic parts that become obsolete. A flame-throwing EV won’t be any better.
My government can’t conduct a sustained technical war when the sophisticated tech weapons are used up because it takes too long to make replacements.
My community has no backup plan for failure of basic services including electricity, water, and electronic cell phones. A solar CME, weather storm, or war could all cause failure.
Researchers are doing their best to create a machine smarter than humans and have it become sentient. Maybe, instead of causing Chinese workers to become depressed and jump out of windows it will push them out at the command of the Alpha Machine.(sarc)
It’s a Brave New World, even beyond the predictions of Orwell and Huxley. Glad you’re in it Wellington.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I have mixed opinions about modern tech, coming as I do from the tech field (the real tech field I’m talking about – I was in semiconductors, not the world of Facebook, Amazon, Yelp or Snapchat). It actually had reached an optimum point in the late 90s, early 00s, before things started going to where they are now
I’ll start w/ computers. In the late 90s, they were pretty slow, so didn’t last long, but one really had to be proficient using it for anything, whether it was email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations or browsing the internet. Then once Microsoft merged the Windows 98 and NT codebases into Windows 2000 and then XE, computers could now use multiple processors and became more powerful. That increased the lifespan of those devices, much to the detriment of PC manufacturers, lessening the need for us to buy a new one every 2 years, but it also opened up new capabilities for AI, which is what has brought us to this surveillance state
That is why as much as I love my toys (I list them separately below and how I use them differently), I’ve made it a point not to use the AI capabilities of any of them – be it Alexa, Siri or Cortana. I’ve seen all the horror reports of police using Alexa to detect criminal behavior that the owner wasn’t even aware of (this is not to condone criminal behavior, but it is creepy to have things that one bought & paid for spying on them, good or bad) or Target shipping an underaged girl pregnancy gear once she bought one pregnancy related item from them, and being confronted about it by her angry father. Similarly, I stopped at iPhone 8: once Apple introduced face recognition to substitute fingerprints, I stopped right there: it’s really creepy. The key thing here is to control how one uses these things, rather than just follow the instructions that greet you when you turn it on
Similarly, I remember decades ago when I was a teenager, I had a car book that explained all the things that go into a car. But that was in the 80s, when cars didn’t have anything like the sort of electronics that they have today. As a result, if one had to be simply a mechanical engineer then, one has to have some computer expertise today to handle those things
I always loved tech, but I started having a problem once companies stopped focusing on making better toys or software and started getting interested in applying their creations to things like politics. Or when Amazon went from competing w/ the likes of Borders or Barnes & Noble or the likes of Microsoft to wiping out much of the Retail industry w/ their single click shopping patent. One thing that always annoyed me was that even in the 90s, many tech companies tended to veer left – Apple, Netscape, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Oracle (Larry Ellison used to be a member of the Democrat Leadership Council – the group that gave us Bill Clinton, even though today, he is a Republican). But it wasn’t one sided the way it is today: there were a fair share of at least Libertarian, if not conservative companies like Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Hewlett Packard, Intergraph, Intuit and so on. Unfortunately, today most of those companies are dead, and the ones that are still around have mostly gone woke
As a product of tech, I love all the toys I’ve bought, but know how to limit my use of those things: the only social media that I do is watching YouTube or Rumble videos, posting opinions on those videos as well as here. Beyond that, I’m not even on places like Gab, even though I have an account there. That I think is key that everyone needs to learn – how to limit their time there
Westman says
Interesting read, Infidel. Tnx. Apparently some airports are now using AI facial recognition to verify passengers with the, not believable, promise that the scans will be deleted. We know where this really goes. All the agencies will want it.
It reminded me of the scene in Minority Report where the Tom Cruise character is recognized by an advertising sign scanning his transplanted eyes with, “Hello, Mr. Yakomoto”
James Lincoln says
࿗Infidel࿘ says,
“… I remember decades ago when I was a teenager, I had a car book that explained all the things that go into a car. But that was in the 80s, when cars didn’t have anything like the sort of electronics that they have today.”
Car owners manuals from decades ago – then around 30 pages – could be easily read in one evening.
Today’s owner manuals are hundreds of pages. It can take an hour of research just to figure out how to turn on the defroster…
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Westman
One of these days, I’ll watch Minority Report. As I once said, I’m not much of a movie guy
Lincoln
Very true. But even w/ all those 100s of pages, I can bet you that there are undocumented ‘test mode’ features of auto testing or repair that are not published for users, since they are only meant to aid in the repair of cars, not day to day activity. Unless one is a trained pro in the field, fuhgeddaboutit!
Wellington says
Thanks for your comment, Westman. Much appreciated.
Yes, rot always lurks right beneath the surface of human existence, a “feature” of the human condition addressed by such notable “elements” as the Bible, Shakespeare and Hitchcock. The trick is to keep the rot in check and modern electronics has no built-in brake or wisdom here to do this, contra the Bible, Shakespeare and Hitchcock. Seems it appeals more times than not to the worse angels of our nature. Give man power of all kinds without morality and self-awareness and, a la Dostoevsky, anything is possible. So perhaps, actually very likely so, better off without such power in the first place.
We’re witnessing all this now in our era. The descent continues. The time is out of joint.
Westman says
Daniel Greenfield has it right.
Jobs, the son of an Iranian entrepreneur, with whom he didn’t establish a relationship, was a driven person who eventually drove his partner, Steve Wozniak out of the business. Wozniak was the technical brain who created their first basic language computer which was demonstrated at a local computer club. He was a master at creating low chip-count devices, dubbed, “gutless wonders”. Kudos, Woz.
Jobs was always the pusher who forced things to happen. He was an absolute capitalist who sold the false Woke image. Wozniak was the technical, humanist. There is no question that Apple would not have the same success, or even still exist, without Steve Jobs. An interesting side note is Jobs didn’t put license plates on his car to avoid being recognized. This would have required some understanding with the local police and CHP.
I remember, during the early days of Apple, artistic friends who thought Apple graphics were the only way to go, and they bought heavily into the idea that Apple was Woke. And now its contracted Chinese employees jump out of widows to their death because because they are oppressed. Some change.
Why do todays Woke still line up for days to get the latest iphone? Yeah.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
No, Jobs was biologically born to a Syrian, but his adoptive parents were White. There is no need to ethnically credit his achievements to any Middle East country, much less islam (since he himself was Buddhist)
Westman says
My apologies Infidel, I was remembering from an old faulty memory. Jobs father was Syrian and mother German. I would not have mentioned the father except to indicate that Jobs wasn’t big on creating any personal relationships that didn’t interest him.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
As for the latest phone, the latest phone that I have is an iPhone 8, which was the last phone where you could use fingerprints on the home button to log into most apps. Once iPhone 10 substituted that w/ facial recognition, I stopped
Initially, there were good reasons to update – the earlier iPhones had either inadequate memory or storage: one quickly ran out of space for all the apps one used. But once I got one w/ 256GB of storage, I got what I needed, and have never looked at upgrading
Westman says
I hear you. My phone does everything a tablet does just with a smaller screen and different aspect ratio. I could add fingerprint unlocking, but no way. I cover the cameras on all computers unless using the camera and disabled the assistants.
Interestingly, I received a few thousand requests for campaign money in this last election cycle, all of them with privacy notices which effectively said they(the 3rd party spamming contractor!) would sell the personal info to whoever paid as a, “partner”. Then the campaigns wondered why they didn’t get as much money as expected. Unreal.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Years ago, in India, one vendor that I worked w/ told me that his customers had him snip the cable connecting the camera to the motherboard. This despite the fact that it could be disabled from the computer using Windows settings. If you recall, older laptops used to have special switches that one could use to disable things like camera, WiFi and so on. In the name of cost-cutting, more recent computers took them off (although I suspect it was more to prevent non-savvy customers from disabling them)
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I now have all the devices – Apple iPhone, iPad and Mac, Microsoft Surface Pro, an Android tablet and a Chromebook. On top of that, I have my 8 year old laptop running Linux
I enjoy the Apple devices I have, and use them mainly for FaceTime and WhatsApp video calls (since all my family doesn’t have iPhones), as well as sharing photos and videos. And I have some games on my iPhone, in case I’m waiting in a restaurant or a doctor’s office or am otherwise idle in a place outside home.
I was gonna give up on Windows completely, but there are some devices (like my label printer) that will only work w/ Windows, so as my old laptop became too slow, I bought this Surface book. There are some great organization apps there like To Do, OneNote that make it really nifty, so there it is. I wanted to also use it as my e-book, but Nook’s functionality there is not at par w/ either iOS or Android: it’s still made just for a PC, not a tablet, so I still use one of the other tablets for it
On my Android tablet, I have a few YouTube accounts which I use to watch videos. My Chromebook is used for work, since my office has a gmail based email system, so I use other Google apps, like Chat and Meet, in addition to the normal Mail and Chrome
My good old Linux laptop that I’m typing this on – now this is what I use for all my social media. I’m not on Twitter, but if I did return, I’d do it here, not on any of my Apple or Google or Microsoft devices. While I have disabled tracking on my Google devices, it’s not easy to type on a tablet w/o a keyboard, so I just use this laptop for that. Result is that the bulk of my computing gets done here, whether it’s social media, online shopping, checking out my individual accounts and so on. Some exceptions: I do some things like online banking or checking my Verizon account on my iPhone, but am perfectly capable of doing it here in case I got more paranoid about Apple
Beneath the Veil of Consciousness says
Excellent read! Very informative!