Confession: I watched the Apple event yesterday, and I’ve watched at least part of every product announcement for the last several years. Apple announcements are the opposite of a guilty pleasure; they are a burden that I take on with pride.  They are insipid and represent everything that is wrong with Silicon Valley and yet I feel obliged to watch them because they let me stare deeply into this heaving morass of Cronenbergian lust for technology. It always feels like we’re one year away from Phil Schiller offing himself with an iGun after screaming “LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!” When I watch Silicon Valley spread out on the Moscone Center stage I feel prideful (to a fault perhaps) that these events just seem so… transparent. They’re so easy to read and so easy to critique they amount to social science target practice.

First lets talk about the sex and gender politics going on here. The parade of white dudes showing sun-kissed blonde girls captured behind their beautiful retina displays sets the tone. Not a single woman took the stage at this event and I can’t remember a time where one ever did. It is no surprise then, that so much of an Apple event is subject to the male gaze. The unmistakable, slow motion ejaculatory climax that occurs at 1:17 of this Mac Pro assembly video is an excellent example. These machines aren’t just sexy: they are sex. The audience is encouraged to grope and gaze at these devices with the explicit promise that “you will absolutely love this.” The devices are simultaneously masculine and feminine, but their queered identity never transgresses normative sex politics. When we want to treat the iPad as an object of desire or a subservient assistant it can be a woman. When it is a “killer” machine capable of productive work the presentation shifts to talking about the collaboration between the masculine user and the efficient machine. Did we mention stuff goes in and out of the ports faster than ever?

The efficiency and glamour of Apple products is also displayed through equal parts Platonic essence of computing and Puritanical cleanliness. No one’s desktop looks as clean and orderly as the demo machines on stage. Our content is never that polished or interesting. Emails are always invitations to sushi and never your phone bill showing your data overage charges. A demo never contains a bad photo of your cat or a tedious expense report. The ideal Platonic form of computing demoed on stage is sexualized but never intimate. We’re seeing the aspirant minority report computer, not the cozy workstation. The iPad is the only divergence from this trend. The “magical and revolutionary device“ was first demoed in a lounge chair. The reclining Steve Jobs described it as “more intimate than a laptop and more capable than a smartphone.” The very first thing he does on it is read the newspaper. He suggests that the tablet might be sitting in the kitchen, waiting for you to pick it up and buy over-priced movie tickets from Fandango.

Framing the machine in the world (rather than the machine framing the world as Heidegger might have it) is essential to giving it distinction and enrolling it in the target consumer’s habitus. Here is a list of people and things that were used as subjects for product demos in this last event:

• Gilt,
• MLB,
• Wives making fun of your clothes,
• American Express,
• Wall Street Journal,
• Mars,
• Walking to San Francisco’s Coit Tower on a sunny day,
• The video editor that did Independence Day
• Photographer for National Geographic & Sports Illustrated
• Music producer for Lady Gaga, Madonna, and The Killers
• Skateboarding in (what looks like) Southern California
• Using the word “killer” to describe something as “cool.”
• A software-based drummer named “Kyle”
• Wind farms

Each one of these isn’t singularly the territory of white middle class America, but taken together they seem to form the unmistakable outline of a Cool Dad from San Diego. Now that Apple events are a “thing” they no longer have to establish products as part of a particular class distinction. Rather they refine and reify their standing in “cool.” The demo isn’t so much a demonstration on how a product works, but rather a demonstration that the product on display is part of a life always aspired to but never totally lived. You are not a National Geographic photographer, but the Mac Pro is the kind of device worthy of someone aspiring to that kind of success. The demo is only affective if you relate to, if not simply understand, the process of using your Amex card to buy something on Gilt. This sort of distinction isn’t necessary for enjoying or using Apple products, and I don’t want to imply that iPhones are a “white person thing” but rather, part of an institution of whiteness. That is why, as Ayesha A. Siddiqi tweeted, “a white centric society will make anyone an expert on the white experience if you feel implicated in an unjust system it’s bc we live in one.” One has to learn to at least read and make sense of this whiteness in order to assess the quality of the product.

Nowhere does capitalism show its absurd paradoxes than in Apple’s reality distortion field. It is a place where Bono can own a primary color and use his profits to play white savior in Africa. It’s where Apple, the most cash-rich company in the world, can still paint itself as the underdog by showing unattributed critical quotes about how the iPad is for “tools.” A sense of embattlement is crucial for maintaining loyal followers. Evangelical Christianity and the Republicans Party are excellent at it. Denying your own success while simultaneously maintaining that you have the superior idea works equally well for the belief that Jesus Christ was literally the Son of God, and that chamfered edges are really cool looking. This balancing act of economic success and philosophical superiority is essential for staving off the inevitable “so over” phase of any trend. There’s nothing surprising about how Apple Events are scripted and why should there be? It is, after all, the ultimate accessory to capitalism.

David is on Twitter and Tumblr. He also just redid his website davidabanks.org