Apple introduced the iMac in 1998. According to Steve Jobs, the lowercase "i" stood for "individual" and "inspire", among other things. Unstated but obvious was its connection to the capital "I", as in my self. Anyway, that was the start of "i" being at the head of Apple products.
A few years later, in 2005, YouTube was launched. Here the personal pronoun was undisguised. It's a proverbial tube, like what we call the TV set, but it's all about you.
There was a certain kind of individualist idealism at play here. Phony and patronizing, to be sure. But the technology had to be marketed and sold with the promise that it would empower you, raise all its users to the level of tycoons and princes.
That seems a long time ago now. Tech barons have taken to making Bond villain-like threats about how much their creations are going to destroy and make obsolete. Underneath, the attitude has always been "I'm more important than you." Now it's "I matter. My Tamagotchi matters. You do not."
2 comments:
That's a very interesting interpretation of how the Apple company came to use 'i'/'I' as its corporate 'ID' (which notably resonates with the Freudian term). Not only that but Tube decided to use 'you' so you as an individual could have TV all about.. You. Finally anybody, including you, could be a star of your own TV show. Of course, doing so still required a video setup of some kind along with associated equipment and expertise to operate it and get the result on-air as it were. For a long time Youtube was made up of mostly high quality video - beginning in the 80s and right on through until the advent of smarter and smarter phones - 'i' or otherwise. Extrapolating where this will go next is somewhat alarming .
Now the tech barons and their techy minions are one upping each other with iterations of AI.. A'i'.. A'I'. Ai yi yi yi yi!
Maybe eventually everybody will go fishing or gardening or read some books leaving them to the narcissum of their toys. You know what they say happens if you look too long into the abyss.
I hadn't really thought about the connection between ID as identity (corporate and otherwise) and Freud's id before. Probably an accident but it might be a revealing one. Creating videos that were all about you and putting them on the interwebs was at one time a somewhat demanding skill. With the right phone it seems like something pretty much anyone can do now. This leads to the question of how much of your life you can air in real time to the public and still be living.
The latest I heard was that Sam Altman of OpenAI was planning to start a social networking site to rival Twitter. Sounds great if you're a big fan of bots.
The Dead Internet theory has been around for a while and it may have seemed paranoid or fanciful at first. But it's a plain fact that there's a lot of content out there without any thought behind it, and perhaps no thinker. Fishing and gardening look better all the time.
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