VOTE APPLE PARTY IN 2008

Photo: Jim Wilson/NYTimes

Much has been said of the bizarre and religious dedication many Mac users have to their platform of choice. As a Mac fan of many (10?!) years, I have witnessed it first hand. I feel it every time I look at my Power Book, which is a lot. But I’m no zealot, and really, there is something about Apple worship that is deeply, deeply unsettling. This struck me yesterday as I was watching Steve Jobs deliver the Macworld Expo keynote, an event at which he wows the crowds with his renowned charisma and speaks to the faithful of successes past, the glorious present, and the unbearably rapturous future, the last of which is usually studded with gleaming round-cornered hardware and bejeweled with software to dazzle the eye and invigorate the soul. People love it. They cheer for his market share pie charts, they clap for strong second quarter unit sales, they ooh and ahh at the staggering improvements and mindblowing innovation that will set 10.4 apart from 10.3. The raw capitalism, the corporate, competitive, profit-oriented nature of it all is not lost on the artists, teachers, soccer moms, and recently sysadmins and Slashdotters who make up the Mac faithful. Indeed, it has become an article of faith. When Jobs announces how many iPods they sold last Christmas, impregnates his pause with the virility of ten rutting yaks, and then reveals the markedly larger number they sold this year, the crowd’s joy is genuine. These are the units by which their faith is measured.

It’s all a little ridiculous. I mean, I’m not anti-capitalist, not even necessarily anti-corporate. But getting this excited over a company? Shouldn’t we laugh at Jobs’ third trimester pauses and trademarked catch-phrases (“Oh, and one more thing…”) just as much as we laughed at Steve Ballmer’s transformation (or lapse) into Monkey Boy? It all seems way too 1984. Which, uh, was the year the Mac came out, and, er, was heralded by a Super Bowl commercial . . . based on 1984. Actually, it seems like something much worse: a Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign rally. A room full of believers, most of them near-religious believers, hearing what they want to hear from their charismatic commander-in-chief. Who cares if Bush is talking about putting us further into giga-debt by antagonizing our enemies or denying rights to our fellow citizens, while Jobs is talking about digital music players with no displays and office packages with no spreadsheet app. The crowds are equally overjoyed to hear the bad news.

Now, Jobs is not openly political, and he may be the CEO of a large corporation, but anyone who has “spent time in India,” lives and works in the Bay Area, wears black jeans and turtlenecks, and makes cuddly little computers couldn’t possibly like Bush. I therefore propose that Steve Jobs run for president in 2008. He should run not as a member of any established political party, but as a part of Apple Computer (or, perhaps, the new Apple Party). The campaign will be run by Apple’s genius marketing department, the same crafty men and women who convinced millions of people people to buy a 2 GB music player for $250 when they could have bought a 10 GB one for $50 more, just because the former was smaller and came in pretty colors. Think of it: a president from the people that brought you the iPod. Who wouldn’t buy – uh, I mean vote for that?