Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Most of those people who would go to an Occupy Wall Street protest do not have stocks and bonds and huge investments. I don’t think we need to occupy Wall Street. If it’s change we want, I think we need to occupy Apple.

Steve Jobs is gone. I love my apple computer. I love my ipod. I heard that someone bought their son an ipod and then had to buy them a computer to make it work. It really never occurred to me that I needed a computer in order to drive my ipod, because I already had the computer. But I’d have bought it anyway because I like them all. I like the way they look, like the way they feel, and to be honest I like the way they invest you with ignorance about the internal organs of the things. A friend of mine just made a computer, he said it wasn’t difficult, you just work out the things you need and put them together.

No Mac user ever has to be bothered with building their own. You will never need a garage for your mac. At most you will need one white cable that connects your mac to something else. You might be able to borrow that from one of your friends, but it’s good to have your own. It’ll make you feel a little less powerless if something goes wrong.

I think that some of the grumbling is right. Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street Sub Slogan should be GIVE UP YOUR MAC. Give up your ipod. Give up your iphone. Give up your Solar power unit. Give up your external water drive. Sorry, tank. And your speakers. Sorry, sprinklers. Are we really going to admit that we have bought into the habits of the wealthy 1 percent and stand to lose our quiet bystander status by standing up to ourselves?
I want to know why we are selling power generated by solar panels to the electricity companies. Do they really want to buy it? Aren’t they actually in the business of selling electricity? Isn’t there by now some way that we can sort and bundle all the power of our block?

I want to know why turning off lights and unplugging devices has gone out of fashion.

Couldn’t we start a QUIT POKING campaign to get people not to plug in so many things? Shame everyone into giving up the white cables? I want to know why blackouts have gone out of fashion. I want to know why we all blame Kevin and Julia for not finishing the insulation. I want to know why we are such careless people. But I guess I do know.

This problem is so much bigger than we can manage. Even if we do something, chances are the Chinese and Indians and all the other baddies-du-jour will just use up more, and we likely will only achieve a balance. With us getting a little less and them getting a little more. And actually we don’t care to give things up just to share.
If nothing else we could turn around and look at one particular system and its efforts to become energy efficient and thoughtful about their use of the world’s resources. Apple.

Apple is very cutting edge, and in the eulogies for Steve Jobs we heard that Apple products have been designed some years in advance. What is the Future as Apple sees it. And more importantly, is that future changeable? If we, Apple’s Loving Masses, feel that we need to change, become a little more technologically simplified, does Apple have the flexibility to respond, as it always has, with new product?

Are we still going to be following Steve Jobs, is I guess my question. And we have followed him, through expensive bulky packaging and cables that redesign for each product, and recalls that go by word-of-blog. But we should have got the hang of this beauty thing, this design thing, we should just get it by now. We don’t need to be taught any more, and anyway there isn’t a great IT design guru to teach us. We should get it. What is necessary, what isn’t, what constitutes great design as useability and function and what constitutes great design as line shape and colour. And where the vision of the future is, where you can see the next product peeping out. In fact, we should be ready to design our own.

I loved Steve too. And I spent a lot of time reading stuff and watching stuff and thinking stuff, I wanted to learn from him even if I couldn’t meet him in person. Now I think I’m nearly ready to give him up. I went back to the 1984 Apple advertisment, and I watched it until I understood that it was the kind of lame preppy boy dream of a lecture room full of bored computer engineers fantasising about the babe out the window practicing for the sports festival. Would Apple, if we were to ask them, if we were to occupy their thoughts, make for us a new story, a new narrative, in which we were all liberated from Big Business?

I love my computer, but I do not love my own stupidity. Sure I can simply upload from one computer to the next, never having to start again from scratch, and although the computers have been designed to do this, the cost of having your computer fixed often more than purchasing a new one and sucking the brain of the old one – Apple doesn’t really recommend it.

I find Apple to be a great company, I have many positive experiences with both it and its products. I always wonder about organisations that are difficult to criticize, and so when I find one I examine it. I am old enough to have tried to learn some computer programming at school, without the computer, and to have found it unfathomable and discouraging. I am old enough to have studied Typing at school, and to have avoided shorthand. So it could be that my attachment to Apple is gratitude, for sparing me a lot of discomfort. For not having to be ready to pull the computer apart when it didn’t turn on, but to have to rely on a professional.

Most of those people who would go to an Occupy Wall Street protest do not have stocks and bonds and huge investments. I don’t think we need to occupy Wall Street. If it’s change we want, I think we need to occupy Apple.