Infinite Loop

Is OS X the End of the Postmodern Mac? Part One

"Once, when Caesar saw some wealthy visitors to Rome carrying young dogs and monkeys around on their laps and petting them, he apparently asked whether the women in their country did not produce children - a right royal rebuke of those who waste our innate capacity for love and affection on animals, when it is due to men."

Thus begins Plutarch's "Pericles" in his Parallel Lives. The point of course rests in the earlier Greek bias that what separates man from the animals is reason, and thus to place "love and affection" upon objects which cannot return and do not deserve it is irrational. It makes as much sense as yelling at an answering machine for a message we are displeased with.

Might we say the same about the Mac?

This question is not to be taken lightly, for fear that we might not learn from asking it. Many profess a deep and almost profound "love and affection" for their Macs. True, we mostly see this in editorialists and not among the commoner, if you will. But many a Mac user would, if asked, express the same level attachment, to state it in a counterfactual sort of way.

Technological Change

"Without the clock, capitalism would have been impossible."
(Neil Postman, "Technopoly.")

I do not wish to address whether this is rational behavior or not. To my lights, I have sufficiently answered the question already; my answer is ignored at your own risk. I am uninterested in short, superficial answers about the Mac being "insanely great" or "just feeling right." These keep my attention for about as long as I read the words, and I am a fast reader. A certain level of Mac enthusiasm is rational because of the Mac's symbolism, utility and beauty, and it is just as rational as it is for other kinds of artifacts for which we express affection that possess these important properties. "I love this can opener!!" "Why?" "It looks good and it does the job well."

What interests me, though, is the etiology of this affection. That is to say, many, if not all, talk about what we can do with the Mac. My interest is in what the Mac does to us. For it is a truism that any technology we use changes us as much as it changes the world we manipulate with it. It has to be this way, for technology extends our power and reach in Nature, and as they are extended we begin to view ourselves and the world differently. As Neil Postman says in Technopoly:

"New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop."

Or, as Postman pointedly puts it, "...to a man with a hammer, everything looks like nail."

OS X is a new technology. So it follows that it will change us in some ways. In fact, antagonism to OS X may be due less to a change in the OS and more to resistence of change in one's soul than anything else. As I will show in a moment, the shift to OS X is more than a mere adoption of a new OS: It is a change in one's philosophy on deep cognitive levels. No wonder there is reistence! The point: Mac OS X not only changes the Mac, it changes us, and it does so in deeper ways than has yet been acknowledged.

The angle I wish to take here is roughly as follows. The Macintosh operating system captures important elements of what has come to be called a "postmodernist aesthetic." In other words, there is a body of literature out there which says the Macintosh, in 1984, was the first postmodern computer. But, I think OS X has changed this in important ways... maybe.

Macintosh: The Postmodern Computer

Let me define some terms and give some background first.

"I define postmodernism as incredulity toward meta-narratives."
(Jean-Françoise Lyotard, "The Postmodern Condition.")

What Lyotard means is that postmodernism rejects grand meta-narratives (narratives about us) such as Kantianism, Christianity, Marxism, or any highly general explanation of (1) what a human is, (2) what the world is like, and (3) the relationship between the two. Objective, cosmological explanations of the human condition are rejected for individual, subjective, and relativist conceptions of fragmentation and pluralism. That is, individualist pluralism rules.

So what do we mean by a "postmodern" OS? This is not a new issue, for scholars have written on this in many places. Basically, the concept is defined by way of its complement, modernism. A modernist OS is one with a foundation, linear rules, and certain structures which cannot be violated. It involves calculation within certain rules and structures. We interact with a modernist OS by commanding. It is the Enlightenment, Cartesian notion of a calculating machine, and rests in beliefs about objectivity and reason. So a modernist OS is one with clear rules, a foundation, and linear structures, one which we interact with through written commands, a sort of linguistic (syntactic) interaction within very specific rules. Open up the Terminal.app and you will see what this means. In fact, forget about Unix or BSD for moment, for the Apple II was a modernist computer OS.

But a postmodernist OS is one we interact with on a completely different level. Instead of interacting with it through written commands, the interaction is more personal, and subjective. Here too: Individualist pluralism rules. A postmodernist OS is free-floating and subjective. Calculation is hidden. We do not interact by commanding and analyzing, but by more personal behaviors, such a "negotiating," i.e., finding our way around in it, discovery, exploration, setting our Desktop pictures, and so on.

For example, Derrida, a post-modernist, -structuralist, says that a "text" lacks any objective meaning; it is live, growing, and organic even. Despite the best efforts of a Tolsty, for example, in carefully choosing each word, the text is empty and we infuse it with our meanings as we interact with it. We will set aside the question of whether this theory applies to itself, and thus Derrida's writings themselves lack independent meanings, as interesting as that question is. The important point is that what he says about "text" has been applied to the computer by postmodernist and modernist scholars alike. The Mac lacks a "meaning" or structure until we give it one, partly because its modernist engine lies hidden behind a surface of simulated and virtual copies of real things.

When we interact with a Mac we are involved in a more conversational style of interaction. It's part of the "holding power" of a computer (yes, what we talk about as the Mac mystique actually has a technical name!). It grabs us, attracts us, gets under our skin, and takes on a life of sorts. As a musical instrument is an extension of the mind's construction of sound, and its genesis from our nature explains music's holding power on us, so the computer is an extension of the mind's construction of thought, and this accounts for some of its holding power. Thinking is a part of us and thus the computer creates its holding power on us.

Thus the Mac fanatisizing that we see, to return to the Plutarchian question with which I started this essay.

Screen Captures

To further see the difference between a postmodernist and modernist computer OS, I will use the terminology Sherry Turke uses in "Life on the Screen." She speaks of an "aesthetics of simulation." What this means is that the original Mac OS used real-world metaphors to create certain ways of interacting with an OS. It introduced the Desktop, the File, Folder, and so on. The "dialogue" boxes are anthropomorphized, as if the machine is "speaking" to us. When we open a word processor we see a virtual piece of paper with virtual writing on it which we can manipulate at will by cutting and pasting. It is a simulated environment, of course. There is no folder or piece of paper. They are simulations, virtual realities (as real as virtual gets anyway). This simulated environment changes the way we think. As Turke says, ""I experience a typographical error not as a mere slip of attention, but as a moral carelessness." She continues...

"The Macintosh suggested a radically different way of understanding. Unlike the personal computers that came before, the "Mac" encouraged users to stay at a surface level of visual representation and gave no hints of inner mechanisms. The power of the Macintosh was how its attractive simulations and screen icons helped organize an unambiguous access to programs and data. The user was presented with a scintillating surface on which to float, skim, and play. There was nowhere visible to dive."

To get this we must understand something important about postmodernism and especially post-structuralism, which goes all the way back to Plato (who's hold on us is still quite strong). As you know, one of the most famous philosophical doctrines is Plato's distinction between appearance and reality in terms of copy and original: As a copy is to an original, so appearance is to reality. Post-structuralists especially make a point of rejecting this distinction in its linguistic form (with metaphysical implications of course). The point is that the "aesthetics of simulation" is grounded in the rejection of this distinction, that is to say, simulations and virtualities have come to dominate the realities of which they are copies to the point that the thought of an "original" loses all meaning.

The Mac OS uses copies of originals to the point that the originals are lost (in our thinking), some say. The Mac OS hid the calculations and mechanics of the "machine" and "it made the computer screen a world unto itself." This stands in opposition to modernist, linear OSes in which commanding is the primary means of interaction. It is free-floating, playful, and with a virtual 3D, multi-dimensional, simulated world, not a linear, command line, linguistic environment. Turke: "[t]he Macintosh was consistent with a postmodernist" aesthetic. The Mac operating environment is a Derridian "text" waiting to be infused with personal meanings.

Transparency in OS X

"I've changed my hairstyle so many times now, I don't know what I look like."
(The Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime.")

Ultimately, with Windows winning the day, the postmodernist aesthetic won out in our culture. So much so, some say, that we now have engrained a "simulation aesthetic." Look at Harry Potter's success - it's a completely simulated world.

The danger of the "simulation aesthetic," some point out, is that postmodernism defuses boundaries and borders (and confusion is the game here). That is to say, what is simulated and real, virtual and natural, become blurred and eventually our thinking gets confused and we soon find ourselves noetically detached from the external world. We talk of "netsex" more intense than "real" sex; we create virtual selves in MUDs and role-playing games; we infuse our Macs with our own mark. We have dozens of aliases and nicknames and usernames. I am my Desktop. Some even speak of the window of "RL" (real life): The real world has become merely another open window in a world where the virtual has become the real, and the real the virtual.

At this point, one might wonder, Mac OS X has put all of that behind us. It has, with its Terminal.app, multiuser structure, and file system (basically, its being built on a unix-bsd foundation), buried the postmodern Mac. But is this so?

To begin to answer this question, think with me a moment. Before the Mac people spoke of "transparent" OSes. But what did they mean by that term? It was a modernist notion at first, for a "transparent" OS was one which clearly revealed its modernist, calculating, commanding-line, innards. What the computer was, in reality, was transparent, open for anyone to see; for, when all is said and done, a computer is still just a Universal Turing Machine, right?

The Macintosh hid all this behind a simulated world of virtual folders and desktops. ResEdit was viewed by some as a profanation of the pure and angelic Mac OS! Soon after its introduction, in one of history's more ironic twists, a "transparent" OS began to mean one that was easy to use. So the whole notion of "transparency" was turned on its head thanks to the Macintosh. The Mac was seen as the height of a transparent OS, not its contrary.

So the question we really end up asking here is, "How much transparency is left in OS X?" Or even "Is OS X a transparent OS at all?" The answer is not as cut-and-dry as you might suspect. But I will leave that for you to think about...

...until next time when we try to answer this question.

David Schultz

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