Apple's Sleek Aesthetics Mystify Technology
The religion of technology has become the common enchantment, not only of the designers of technology but also of those caught up in, and undone by, their godly designs.
— David F. Noble.
Technology companies, as Martin Lindstrom points out in his best-selling book Buyology, exhibit all of the ten core tenets that constitute any true religion. They foster a community, possess a clear vision, exercise power over enemies, appeal to the senses, tell compelling stories, have grandeur, evangelize, bear strong symbols, induce mystery and lastly, partake in rituals. This is especially apparent in the case of Apple, whose visual identity has been carefully calibrated to induce a sense of religious and spiritual awe in its consumers. This is manifest, in particular, in the company’s advertising campaigns, architecture, and above all, in the products themselves.
As David F. Noble points out, the technological enterprise has always been “an essentially religious endeavour.” Religion and technology, he argues, are neither “complements or opposites,” but rather “are merged, and always have been.” By embracing this reality, Apple has succeeded in becoming the most powerful and recognizable technology company in the world, whose success is grounded in the strength of its visual identity and evocative branding.
Here, I will explore the myriad ways in which Apple’s aesthetics actively promote an air of religiosity and mysticism in the company’s self-portrayal as a divine, magical and omniscient force worthy of religious reverence. This is achieved through purposeful design, which portrays Apple products as magical objects through a deliberate mystification and an infantilization of the consumer. Despite Max Weber’s famous claim century ago that “scientifically oriented technology” is responsible for ‘disenchanting’ the world, an equally strong case, could be made that the incomprehensibility of modern technology, aided by strategic visual design, is in fact behind a resurgence in mysticism and what could be considered an era of ‘re-enchantment’.
One of the ways by which Apple mystifies itself and its products is through the use of carefully-constructed advertising campaigns, which elevate it from a mere company to a connotative brand that bears a strong religious character. The similarity between advertising and other mystifying systems, namely magic, has been discussed by cultural critic Raymond Williams in his essay ‘Advertising: The Magic System’, who concludes that “advertising is ‘magic’ because it transforms commodities into glamorous signifiers.” Like magic in a bygone era, advertising works on the principle of converting an object of one kind into another. In the case of advertising, commodities are transformed from their literal material reality into evocative metaphors, imbued with strong connotations. More specifically, advertising, according to Williams, functions like magic insofar as it is “a highly organized and professional system of magical inducements and satisfactions,” one which is “strangely coexistent with a highly developed scientific technology.” Quoting Johnson, Williams further claims that “promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement.” Naturally, these promises are typically so exaggerated that they can never truly be kept. The notion that advertisement, coexistent with modern technology, makes large promises is also consonant with the expectation of divine deliverance within religious communities. For Noble, the promise of something unfulfillable is a shared feature of religion and technology alike. Or in his own words, “we routinely expect far more from our artificial contrivances than mere convenience, comfort, or even survival. We demand deliverance.”
The promise of deliverance is communicated effectively in Apple’s branding from the mid-nineties onward. As technology writer Gordon Eubanks wrote at the time,
“When Apple let the Mac become a religious issue more than a tool, the consequence was high visibility and a lot of great press.”
The embrace of technology’s religious essence was spearheaded by the company’s founder Steve Jobs, who purposefully underscored this fact in Apple’s design guidelines. Indeed, as professor Brett Robinson writes, “Jobs avoided thinking of technology and spirituality in dualistic terms,” adding, that “the iconography of the Apple computer company, the advertisements, and the device screens of the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad” should all be regarded as the “visual expressions of Jobs’ imaginative marriage of spiritual science and modern technology.”
The visual association of technology with spirituality and mysticism is particularly conspicuous in Apple’s launch of the iPad in a 2010 keynote address, where Jobs announced the product on stage in front of a screen which featured an image of Gustav Dore’s painting of Moses holding the ten commandments with an accompanying quote from the Wall Street Journal, which read: “Last time there was this excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it (fig. 1.1).” In the accompanying press release, Apple extended this sentiment by describing the iPad as nothing less than “a magical and revolutionary device (fig. 1.2).”
In his essay ‘Get under the hood’, Samuel Arbesman traces the mystification of technology by examining how computers, in spite of their increasing complexity, are nevertheless engineered and advertised as simple, intuitive devices. This deceives the average consumer into thinking that he or she understands their technology, while in fact, the opposite is actually true. Design, Arbesman argues, creates an unbridgeable rift between the average user and their technological devices. This is especially evident in the design of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), like macOS and Windows, which serve as interfaces that allow users to interact with their devices through visual cues and indicators as opposed to typing out text-based commands. According to Stephenson in his essay, ‘In the beginning… Was the command line’, although these graphical interfaces help users interact with their devices, they do so at a cost, namely that they provide users with prescribed experiences of their devices, while banishing advanced functionality out of sight. These graphical interfaces therefore create a wall of abstraction between the average user and their devices. Such abstraction is salient to the typical user’s experience of their contraptions, especially in the case of Apple’s ‘skeuomorphism’, whereby design cues are taken from the real world, so that a note-taking application might take on the appearance of a real notebook. This abstraction, in this case in the shape of a metaphor, facilitates the mystification of technology because, as Arbesman points out, “as we abstract up from one level to the next, we lose fine-grained control and understanding.” We are removed from direct interaction and therefore are forced to cede intellectual ownership of our devices to the designers of technology and their “godly designs.” As Weber foresaw a century ago, “the intellectual constructions of science” do indeed “constitute an unreal realm of artificial abstractions.”
Another way Apple uses design to mystify its products is by portraying their devices as essentially mysterious creations, which work as if by magic. This is achieved by creating “beautiful but hermetically sealed” devices, whose inner workings are hidden out of sight beneath “seamless design.” This is evident in the case of Apple’s iMac (fig. 2.1), which is described on the company website as having a “seamless, precise and super strong join” in its metallic enclosure (fig. 2.2). As Arbesman explains, by concealing the seams of its devices from the user, Apple’s designers ensure that the inner machinery of their products remains an unknowable mystery, “the seams of our technologies are the aspects of our machines that suggest that beneath the shiny surfaces lie complicated innards. Seeing these seams is a hint of understanding what really makes them tick, but we are moving in a direction where designers are trying to hide them.”
The seamless and slick design of Apple’s aesthetics creates an intellectual barrier between the average consumer and the company, which in turn serves to further mystify our understanding of and relationship with the technology that we use on a regular basis. According to Arbesman, “if we see our tablets and phones as mere polished slabs of glass and metal, performing veritable feats of magic, and have little clue what is happening beneath the surface or in the digital sinews, something is lost.” Nowadays, he observes, we value “perfectly operating pieces of technology” to such an extent that we too readily forget that our “gleaming gadgets still have their glitches.” In fact, the mystification of the inner-workings of Apple’s devices is often safeguarded under the threat of a voided warranty if anyone dare venture beneath the surface. The more comfortable we become with our technology, the less apt we will be in ceding our control to a “domain of experts, who overcharge us to fix our stuff, under threat of a voided warranty (Arbesman).” By designing and portraying Apple products as holy relics, Apple succeeds in retaining intellectual ownership over its technology, while prescribing a fixed user experience that “discourages a closeness to the machine.” Indeed, if we are unable to understand the rudiments of how our technology works because of clever design, or “have little clue what is happening beneath the surface or in the digital sinews,” then “something is lost.” Like Weber’s streetcar driver, we may only “count” on the behaviour of our products, while never being properly in control.
The enforcement of an intellectual barrier between consumer and producer is another means by which Apple polices its image as an omniscient entity worth of our adoration. This is especially evident in the company’s self-portrayal as a “priestly class of experts” and in the furtive infantilization of their customers by campaigns which stress the simplicity and intuitiveness of their products (Arbesman). This dynamic creates a dependent relationship between the Apple religion and its adherents, while creating a state of “virtual obsession with technological development”, which is apparent “in our extravagant anticipations of every new technical advance.” As Lindstrom describes with respect to his own personal experience of Apple zeal during a product demonstration,
“For its millions of fervent constituents, Apple wasn’t just a brand, it was a religion.”
This Holy Father/child relationship is nowhere more apparent than in the famous Apple slogan “it just works,” which testifies to the unquestionable authority of the company.
When it comes to the Apple Store architecture, Erica Robles-Anderson, a professor at New York University draws stronger parallels between Apple design and religious experience in a recent Atlas Obscura article entitled: "We Asked a Cultural Historian: Are Apple Stores the New Temples?". In her own words, Apple's unnecessarily oversized doors "are fantastic [...] There's no reason for them." People tend to forget that religious buildings were the most technologically sophisticated places of the day. Apple's large doors are reminiscent of the grand doors found in Medieval cathedrals, "they’re heavy, like church doors, to give purpose and portent to the entry into the space." Once you're through these doors, light and space play a crucial role in making individuals feel united in the face of something transcendent, instilling a profound sense of belonging. As Robles-Anderson puts it, Apple stores "have this beautiful, excessive use of clear surfaces,” adding that,
“You’re always seeing others and being seen by others. And the ways that any employee can serve you feels personal, but it’s going on all around you, in a cacophony of like-mindedness.”
Apple is a religion-- and a religion by choice. When Jobs created the company he was mindful of the affinities between religious thinking and cutting-edge tech. Apple's acolytes eagerly await the next product launch with the zeal and fervour of a rapturous communion awaiting the new millennium. But next time your shiny, expensive Mac breaks time and time again, perhaps we should think twice before we snap up the latest version. And as a Mac owner myself, that isn't the sweetest medicine to swallow.
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https://aeon.co/essays/is-technology-making-the-world-indecipherable
https://aeon.co/essays/computers-are-so-easy-that-we-ve-forgotten-how-to-create
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/we-asked-a-cultural-historian-are-apple-stores-the-new-temples
