The contrast could not have been starker this past weekend. On Saturday morning, April 3, 2010, it’s almost Easter. I am mindful of the eternally recurring, that Jesus is lying in his tomb, awaiting the glorious resurrection at midnight. The next morning the stone will have been rolled away and the open tomb will be discovered, the symbol of freedom and new life for untold generations.
I, however, am in the Apple Store with dozens of the faithful to something other, the latest Apple device. Billed as a compact liberator, the entrance to a universe of information and enlightenment, this sleek, hand-soothing bit of streamlining suddenly reveals itself as utterly closed. Closed as in prison and the tomb with the stone blocking the entrance firmly in place. Nothing is open or alterable. Competing browsers cannot be downloaded, familiar iPhone apps will not work, many if not most videos will not play. Access to a many sites is restricted. One is being channeled into rings of an unfamiliar but comfortable inferno – Apple World.
One submits willingly because the whole slide is so comfortable, but then one reflects on the core meaning of the enterprise of modernity – all feeling is to be stripped away, and simplification leads to impenetrability, confinement and death. Foreseen by Piranesi’s prisons and continuing through Speer’s Zeppelinwiese in Nuremberg and Mussolini’s E.U.R., documented by Simon Starling's representation of the public cemetery in Stockholm with its massive ovens installed in the early thirties, years before Auschwitz, we now have the virtually perfect closed system, the iPad that millions will be carrying around to remind is of our fate on earth.
Thanks, Albert. Thanks, Steve.
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