as fools. The hit TV show Hoarders (A&E) identifies people with things as socially malignant, grotesque, primitive, dirty, bizarre. In a word: poor. Apple has turned the world upside down in making possessions a symbol of poverty and having nothing a signifier of wealth and power.
This is actually a bourgeois sensibility, an aesthetic of Calvinists and other early Protestants/capitalists. While wealth adornment was a no-no, extraordinary wealth accumulation was a sign of godliness and beatitude. These bean counters were pioneers of the modern aesthetic: owning things = vulgar; having obscene piles of money/capital beyond what one could ever use = divine.
The antistuff crowd invokes Eastern Buddhism and communism-lite in their put-down of possessions and the people who “hoard” them. It’s supposed to be a sign of superstition, a hang-up, a social disease, greedy, sick. People who have things are derided as “fetishists.” Why would one have a record collection when all information is available online to be had by the technologically plugged in (which is, at this point, a requirement for everyone)?
Why would one have a bookshelf when Google has taken all the book content in the world to be dispersed through its beneficent magnanimity? Books are heavy, dirty, dusty, and disintegrate into your lungs. Why should there be encyclopedias when there is the wiki-world? And so on. Why should there be record stores, bookstores, video stores, shopping areas, kiosks, cinemas, theaters, opera houses, libraries, schools, parks, government buildings, meeting halls, et al? Public spaces, markets, and interacting with other people are primeval, germy, and dangerous. After all, it can all be done online, you primates. The only thing one needs is a Whole Foods, some hip bars, and an airport so as to jet to Burma before it gets lame.
This is fine for the cyberelite; they can live as they wish. But why is their ideology impressed on all of us through this shame-based propaganda? Why is the “hoarder” so loathed by the Apple authorities?
Answer: because he or she is feared.
The “hoarder” has “things” after all, items like books and records which are clues to a past when these things were stores of knowledge, signifiers, totems of meaning. The cyberlords want it all destroyed. The library must be cleaned of nasty old books and filled with computers. The record collector must renounce his or her albums and replace them with an iPod. This is an obvious concern if the multibillion-dollar iTunes Inc. is to effectively rein in recalcitrant stragglers in a market it dominates so entirely, selling “songs”—which are, for them, just puffs of free digital smeg-phemera—for ninety-nine cents a pop. No resistance to the realm can be tolerated.
But it’s not only the money they make from iTunes or their various other virtual marketplaces—which have left all physical businesses shuttered (aside from fro-yo places, nail salons, and gin-joints)—that they care about. The computer lords want to control everything, and central to controlling all things is controlling perception. Perception of the way things are, the way things work, and what’s happened in history so that they can frame their version of events and control the narrative; mind-controlling the masses to make them into better, more compliant consumer/servants.
Just as governments spend enormous sums of money on textbooks, monuments, films, and museums which heroize their regime and frame their particular version of history, the computer overlords are concerned about the myths of the culture. Their ascendancy must seem inevitable, brilliant, brave, noble, just, and right.
The “stuff” that the “hoarder” retains, however, might tell a story which refutes or challenges their version of events in some way. The record collection or magazine or newspaper might reveal some clue to a social movement or trend or fashion or sensibility which defies their moronic stranglehold on consciousness. A burp of resistance. A clue to a way out. A signal that life doesn’t actually depend on high-speed Internet access. And the physicality of the item infers that things meant something once, that everything wasn’t always a meaningless, equivocal post on Tumblr.
Of course, the “hoarders” who are profiled on the show are extreme examples of people who hold on to things, but the message is nonetheless clear. Just as Willie Horton was exploited for racist ends and invoked to create fear and distrust of an entire group, the “hoarders” who are ridiculed, shamed, and “saved” on the television are meant to tar all owners of stuff with their brush.
The shaming of targeted “hoarders” is intended specifically to cajole, bully, and embarrass the population into giving up everything they have—not just possessions but ideas, ethics, rights to ownership (both intellectual and otherwise), privacy, decency, justice, fair treatment, and human rights.
In the Apple Internet age we are expected to surrender absolutely everything; anything less is filthy and deranged “hoarding.” All content is free for the Internet lords who dispense it—or not—at their pleasure.
Apple Inc. is often seen to be selling an image or signifier of a lifestyle, but for them Apple is not just the means to life, but reality itself. Apple demands that everyone throw out all their other possessions for their ersatz midcentury plastic designs. These devices, which never stop “upgrading” and are therefore almost immediately obsolete, present a world where there is only Apple through which we get our information, our culture, our relationships, our sense of self, our love. Apple is the big apple—the world, the cosmos, sin, and godliness—and you’ve got to have it every day.
Apple’s proposal would be impossible without the coordination of its dear ally, the Swedish megacorporation Ikea. Ikea, the original “i”-demon, is their ideological compatriot, and both are similarly ubiquitous features of the modern world. No dorm room or young person’s house is free of middlebrow minimalist Ikea things on which to place their iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc. “iKea” manufactures items which paradoxically comply with the iWorld’s “antistuff” doctrine: instantaneous furniture and utensils, created by slaves, that disintegrate or explode when moved.
II. Ikea’s Conspiracy to Smash Romance
Ikea furniture is necessary for the success of Apple’s antistuff doctrine. Not only because Ikea furniture eschews the future (its nihilistic furniture is designed for bivouac living), but because of its nefarious effects on domestic life.
When one conspires with one’s partner to construct a piece of Ikea furniture, it is a harrowing task and speaks volumes of the faith one has in one’s relationship. No matter that faith, it will most likely destroy the love affair or at least irreparably damage it, sewing the seeds for its imminent destruction. The instructions, supposed to be universal and written in pictograms, are embedded with tiny details, extremely easy to miss, that are absolutely vital to the success of the project. Wrong assembly results in nightmarish frustration, squabbling, and despair. The instructional manual always warns of impending death as well, casting a fearful morbid pall over the (ideally) mundane job of shelf building.
Why does Ikea make their manuals into time bombs of discord? Because Ikea wants couples to break up. Each breakup results in more bachelors and bachelorettes, which results in more Ikea products sold. Abandoned love affairs result not only in abandoned dreams but abandoned furniture, abandoned apartments, abandoned housewares, abandoned throw pillows and end tables left in the rain on the road or given away as Craigslist clutter.
Breakups are attractive to the Apple-iKea alliance for the isolation they ensure. An isolated population is more easily manipulated, misled, shorn of its possessions, its self-respect, and its sense. Romantic dissolution is the ultimate example of the imperialist’s tried-and-true “divide and conquer” strategy. These corporations want the desolation of love: a population alone, miserable, confused, and in a state of self-loathing sexual desperation.
Both Apple and Ikea are closely linked to the pornography industry, aesthetically, philosophically, and economically. While home computers’ popularity and ubiquity stemmed from their use as cryptoporn proliferators, both Ikea and Apple’s designs stem from the ideology which spawned modern-day “adult” programming: Nordic functionalism. Indeed, the ideas of Nordic functionalism—a design idea which eliminated the buttresses, gilding, and facades of old architecture in preference for clean lines and modernity—resulted in the modern pornographic paradigm. Though functionalism began as