The beginning of 2025. One year ago, on January 24, 2024 the Mundania-book was launched. It was 40 years after Apple’s iconic 1984-Commercial was aired during the Super Bowl. Much has happened since 1984. Much has happened since January 2024. Organisations, politics, businesses, and the world has transformed. Below is an excerpt from the Mundania-book that reflects on the dynamics of tech-related transformations and stasis.
Ding! Another email arrives. This time it is a brief notification. It tells me that an amount has been withdrawn from my credit card. This specific withdrawal happens once a month. Every time I feel a slight relief that it works. Seamlessly. Simultaneously, I feel a slight annoyance. A feeling of dependence. This withdrawal gives me access to cloud storage for one more month. It means that files, films, photos, works and apps are stored somewhere in a distant data centre. What if I would like to change this deal? How would I end this subscription? How should I start moving files and start to deal with all that which has taken place beyond my attention for some while? Which bindings are connected to this cloud account? Which relations? What are the implications to end this? Often one deal would affect several others. The thought provokes a slight vertigo. It is not impossible, but quite troublesome to leave a brandverse. Sometimes I feel like a mindless drone that just keep on paying to get access to some labyrinthine relationscape that I can neither escape nor live without. How did I get here? Gradually I guess, step by step, file by file, click by click, nudge by nudge.
Through the years a kind of tentacular embrace has taken form. I have confirmed agreements that I have not read in detail. I have confirmed that I agree to terms and conditions by restlessly clicking when I have started to use some service. Clickwrap agreements are all over Mundania. To the technological and economical ungraspability of Mundania, we can add the legal. These circumstances started to build up some time ago.
A certain year that is often evoked when it comes to matters of control, dominance and systems hard to escape is 1984. At that time, Apple aired a television commercial for their Macintosh- computers that has become iconic in advertising circles. It appeared on television through several outlets, on one occasion in a break during the Super Bowl, the final of the US National Football League (NFL). The commercial was partly aimed towards new creatives who wanted alternatives to the business machines provided by the computer giant of those days, IBM. In the short commercial directed by Ridley Scott a theme from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty- Four was taken as the point of departure to convey the message that Apple’s small ‘more human’ computers should break the regime of the prevailing computer industry. The plot takes place in a large industry-like environment, in drab and uninviting corridors and halls. Grey colour in the corridor, and when entering the hall, a cold bluish hue. IBM was called ‘Big Blue’, and the corporation was hinted at as a kind of Big Brother in the commercial. Rows of drone- like bald and uniformed people march in rows and sit down in front of a gigantic screen (Wikipedia, 1984 (advertisement) n.d.)
In this blue- grey bleak environment, something pops out. A blonde- haired woman in athletic clothing comes running. She wears a white top and bright red shorts. Her colours are graded differently than the rest of the footage. She looks bright and colourful against all the drab darkness. In her hands, a huge sledgehammer. She is hunted by threatening men in protective gear. They appear as militia or law enforcement officers from the dictatorship of some dystopic science-fiction film.The sound of the commercial is based on heavy boots against the floor, a siren or horn that repeatedly sounds and reverberates in the hall. On top of that a male voice. It has an authoritative and commanding tone. The voice of a leader, possibly Big Brother, who also appears on the huge screen. The voice announces that:
Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology – where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!
Before the voice shouts “We shall prevail!”, the woman spins round and hurls the hammer. Like an athlete from the Olympic Games. The hammer hits the screen with an explosion. White light spreads through the room. The rows of people stare, shocked, with open mouths at the disruptive action. Then comes Apple’s message in text and voice- over: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’” (Wikipedia, 1984 (advertisement) n.d.). The commercial ends with the Apple logo, which at the time was rainbow coloured.
This was around forty years ago. The ideas about tech- based creativity, as promoted in the commercial, have to some extent taken over much of computer business and the way consumer electronics are understood. Now there are new giants reigning. One of these is Apple. The underdog has grown into a powerful position. Sporting a more cheerful and laidback appearance than earlier providers of business machines, but yet very powerful and influential. There are also new stakeholders, roles and business dynamics. Much has changed since 1984, but much has also remained. Revolution and disruption, as it was evoked by Apple in 1984 for example, has become routinized, almost fetishized within Big Tech and digital cultures. Cheerful colourings and cartoonish appearances have become the main tenor of several of the prevailing brandverses. Even if Apple has changed its rainbow-coloured logo to a sleeker monochrome appearance, the colourfulness appears in many other places of their brandverse. Power and trustfulness are often conveyed differently in the 2020s than forty years earlier. One of the world’s most powerful corporations, Google, can have a brand identity colour-coded more like a preschool than earlier global business conglomerates. But the question is what remains, under the cheerful colours and playful designs. How would you escape the entanglements of conglomerates and brandverses and the rhythms they instil?