Technology and the Individualization of Consumption- Final

Technology and the Individualization of Consumption: Consumption: the development of Personal Computing

Alvaro de Miranda University of East London Abstract The development of personal computing, with a particular focus on the history of Apple, is analysed. It is demonstrated that under a capitalist system of production and consumption a fundamental contradiction exists between the idealised promise that technology will contribute to the development human freedom conceived in individualized terms through consumption and the reality of the oppressive system of production required to deliver such promise. The role of technical standards standards is examined both as a means of enabling the ―user friendliness‖ ―user friendliness‖ required for mass consumption and the development and monopolisation of mass production . It is argued that the ―user friendliness‖ of the technology contributes to a technical deskilling of the user which leads to the technology acquiring the character of a ―black box‖ and thereby becoming reified. This places further limits on the social individual‘s freedom and sense of fulfilment.

Introduction

On January 24 1984, during the third quarter of the American Football Super Bowl XVIII game between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Washington Redskins, an advertisement was broadcast that became one of the best k nown television ads in the history of advertising. Entitled ―1984‖, the advertisement, directed by Ridley Scott, announced the forthcoming launch of the first Apple Macintosh using a dramatic metaphor based o n Orwell‘s eponymous dystopian novel. It starts with an army of androgynous shaven headed people dressed in identical grey tunics marching down a tunnel towards a hall where a giant screen sc reen is showing a close up

picture of a bald and bespectacled ―Big Brother‖ droning on about having created ―a garden of pure ideology where each worker will bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths ‖ and stating, in imperious tones: ―We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause … We shall prevail‖. A blond woman athlete, a hammer thrower, in red shorts and a white vest displaying a barely discernable Apple logo, runs into the hall pursued by a police squad in full riot gear and hurls hurls her hammer at the screen, screen, destroying it. A voice then reads aloud aloud the

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legend that appears on the screen: ‗On January 24 Apple Computer will introduce

Macintosh. And you will see why 1984 won‘t be like ―1984‖‘. The metaphor used by the advert has several dimensions, all of which had been crucial in informing Apple‘s development of the Macintosh computer and in their  subsequent marketing strategy. Arguably they were also essential to the eventual success of the Macintosh computer. One facet of the metaphor is the reference to the suppression of individuality by the power of uniform collective identities. The ―collective will‖ is enforced through violent

repression by a ―Big Brother‖, an implicit incarnation of the State, claiming to act on behalf of the collective, collective, the ―we‖ who who ―will prevail‖. However, whilst Orwell‘s 1984 was a satire on the totalitarian collectivist collecti vist state, Apple wanted the metaphor to be extended to include an attack on IBM, despite the denials of the advertisement ‘s producers. At the annual shareholders‘ meeting which took place on the same day as the ad was broadcast, Steve Stev e Jobs, Chief Executive and co-founder of Apple, stated: It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the  only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming  IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and and controlled future. They are increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force that can  ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on  its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the  entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George  Orwell right?  http://news.worldofapple.com/archives/2006/03/30/apple-at-30-1976-to-1986/ 

In the advertisement, the fight for individual freedom is symbolised by the role of the t he woman athlete athlete who destroys the image of Big Brother. Apple implicitly aligns itself with this fight and portrays the Macintosh as the means by which individuals will achieve it in the world of computing. The metaphor, in its subliminal identification of IBM with the repressiv e State of Big Brother, also addresses the business world and, as I shall demonstrate, d emonstrate, the world of 2

legend that appears on the screen: ‗On January 24 Apple Computer will introduce

Macintosh. And you will see why 1984 won‘t be like ―1984‖‘. The metaphor used by the advert has several dimensions, all of which had been crucial in informing Apple‘s development of the Macintosh computer and in their  subsequent marketing strategy. Arguably they were also essential to the eventual success of the Macintosh computer. One facet of the metaphor is the reference to the suppression of individuality by the power of uniform collective identities. The ―collective will‖ is enforced through violent

repression by a ―Big Brother‖, an implicit incarnation of the State, claiming to act on behalf of the collective, collective, the ―we‖ who who ―will prevail‖. However, whilst Orwell‘s 1984 was a satire on the totalitarian collectivist collecti vist state, Apple wanted the metaphor to be extended to include an attack on IBM, despite the denials of the advertisement ‘s producers. At the annual shareholders‘ meeting which took place on the same day as the ad was broadcast, Steve Stev e Jobs, Chief Executive and co-founder of Apple, stated: It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the  only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming  IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and and controlled future. They are increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force that can  ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on  its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the  entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George  Orwell right?  http://news.worldofapple.com/archives/2006/03/30/apple-at-30-1976-to-1986/ 

In the advertisement, the fight for individual freedom is symbolised by the role of the t he woman athlete athlete who destroys the image of Big Brother. Apple implicitly aligns itself with this fight and portrays the Macintosh as the means by which individuals will achieve it in the world of computing. The metaphor, in its subliminal identification of IBM with the repressiv e State of Big Brother, also addresses the business world and, as I shall demonstrate, d emonstrate, the world of 2

work. It carries an attack on the role of the big corporation corporation and on monopoly, monopoly, through its implicit reference to IBM. The approach of of the 1984 Superbowl Superbowl advertisement and the development development of personal computing to which Apple‘s Macintosh contributed significantly raise some fundamental questions regarding the relationship between technological change ch ange and human freedom. freedom. To what extent is the the promise that new technological technological artefacts will contribute towards the development of human freedom achievable under the capitalist system of production? Given that most human human beings beings are both both producers producers and consumers, is the freedom that is being promised to be achieved both in the realm of of production and/or and/or in the realm of consumption? To what extent is the freedom being promised accessible to all or is the t he freedom of some achieved at the expense of the freedom of others? The promise that the Macintosh would contribute to human freedom was, as I shall argue, also predicated on its ―user friendliness‖, that is, on the reduction of the t he technical skill required to use a personal computer which was one of the major new features it offered, This also raises the t he additional question of the role of technical skill in the relationship between between the production and and the use of technology. Is the development of ―user friendliness‖ of technology a contribution to the freedom of the user or is it rather a process of de-skilling which disempowers the user? The theoretical theoretical framework framework used is largely that provided provided by Marxist philosophy. The theoretical framework used used is largely largely that provided by Marxist Marxist philosophy.

Marx, in

common with most of the mainstream Western W estern philosophy, philosophy, envisages the main precondition for the development of human freedom to be the freedom from necessity and from t he drudgery of the labour required to fulfil the ―primitive needs‖ of life so

that human beings can dedicate themselves largely to ―the development of (their) human powers as an end in itself‖ (Marx 1981: 958). In this sense the main contribution that technology can make to human freedom is to enable human beings to free themselves from necessity. However, Marx also considers considers labour labour as fundamental to the essence of human beings i and the control of the labour process as essential to a sense sense of human fulfilment. fulfilment. In this context the technology has to act as a tool under the control of the worker if it is to contribute c ontribute to the sense of fulilment through labour. It is the contradiction that exists under capitalism between labour 3

under the control of capital as a source of profit and the promise of technology as an harbinger of freedom that is explored in this analysis of the development of personal computing. The Development of the Macintosh

The Macintosh constituted a major conceptual break with the previous generations of microcomputers in relation both to the market it was aimed at and in the way its technology was configured to satisfy the needs of the user in its perceived target market. This break was already being signalled by the 1984 Super Bowl advertisement which addressed its target audience self-consciously t hrough the use of an emotionally arresting metaphor and avoided all mention of the physica l attributes of the artefact it was designed to promote. The nature of the break was that, until the Macintosh was developed, microcomputers were mainly sold to computer hobbyists. The fundamental nature of the hobbyist is that the technological aspects of the artefact constitute a main focus for their interest ii. A hobbyist enjoys tinkering with the technology as much as, or even more than, using the artefact as a tool for some other purpose. A hobbyist has to have considerable technical knowledge in order to be able to use the artefact. Before the advent of the Macintosh, a considerable amount of technical k nowledge was required in order to use a microcomputer. The Macintosh was specifically designed to be used as an individual tool. The essence of a tool iii is that it should be relatively easy to use. Learning to use a tool should require as little diversion of labour time from the primary purpose of that

labour. Or, in today‘s terminology, a tool should be ‗user -friendly‘. The individual tool aspect of the Macintosh‘s design was well expressed by one of the founder members of Apple in a recorded interview . He argued that the key

moment for the designers was when they realised that ―everyone who wanted a computer already had one‖. By this they meant that the hobbyist market was saturated. In order to extend the market, they had to design a tool. Using another metaphor to inform their thinking to conceptualise the function of the microcomputer that they were trying to design, and to differentiate it from that of a mainframe computer; they thought of the relationship between a Volkswagen and a passenger 4

train. The Volkswagen does not go as fast or as far as a passenger train, but with a Volkswagen you can go anywhere you want when you want to. In this way they arrived at the conceptualisation of the artefact that they were trying to design as an instrument of individual freedom. This was eventually expressed metaphorically in the Super Bowl advertisement. The Macintosh marketing campaign that followed the original 1984 advertisement

primarily targeted ―knowledge workers‖, a concept first introduced by management guru Peter Drucker in 1959. This group was described in an internal Apple memorandum as “professionally trained individuals who are paid to process information 

and ideas into plans, reports, analyses, memos and budgets. They  generally sit at desks. They generally do the same generic problem-  solving work irrespective of age, industry, company size, or geographic  location. Some have limited computer experience-perhaps an  introductory programming class in college-but most are computer naive. Their use of a personal computer will not be of the intense eight-hour-  per-day-on-the-keyboard variety. Rather they bounce from one activity to  another; from meeting to phone call; from memo to budgets; from mail to  meeting. Like the telephone, their personal computer must be extremely   powerful yet extremely easy to use.”  ( quoted in MacKenna 1991: 191-2)

The target group of potential customers for the Macintosh confirms the

designers‘ conception of the artefact as an individual work tool. The target group includes self-employed workers, workers in small organizations and workers in large organizations. What is common to all these workers is that they all have a considerable amount of autonomy in their work. T his would be true even of those that work in large organizations. The Macintosh was intended as an aid to this autonomy, a productivity tool in a labour process which was to a large extent self-directed by the worker him or herself. As I will

demonstrate, this freedom to decide the allocation of one‘s labour time extended beyond the freedom from tight management control for workers in large business organisations and included freedom from dependence on the 5

labour of other workers in achieving the purpose of the labour of the

―knowledge worker‖. The Macintosh never quite achieved its aim of becoming the main tool of all

―knowledge workers‖. In the context of the large corporation, it failed to displace the IBM PC iv and clones for reasons that will be explored later on. However, it did attain an almost complete monopoly over a subset of this group, the creative worker. For architects, designers, musicians, artists of all kinds, film makers, the Macintosh became the computer of choice. This highlights other self-conscious features of the Macintosh‘s design which were particularly attractive to creative workers. One such feature is the concealment of virtually all technical aspects of its construction inside a single box. There were few wires to be connected by the user in order for the computer to function except the power cable which had to be plugged to the mains socket , the keyboard and the mouse. This last device, now ubiquitous, was first introduced into general use as an accessory necessary to operate the Macintosh‘s graphical user interface . Whilst most other microcomputers had separate monitors and separate floppy disk drives which had to be connected externally to the main box, the Macintosh had these built into the box. Unlike other microcomputers there were no expansion capabilities, no visible means of adding hardware to perform additional functions which would require the user to obtain technical knowledge in order to install and operate them. All it could do was already built in or could be added by software that could be loaded through the built in floppy disk drive. The external case of the Macintosh could not be opened by the user and required a special tool which was provided only to qualified experts. In addition, the smooth box in which all the technology was hidden had been designed to be an attractive object in itself, a demand of Apple‘s cofounder Steve Jobs, which has been a constant principle of Apple design to this day. That virtually no technical knowledge was required and the artefact was good-looking was particularly attractive to the creative worker, the antithesis of the technical nerd.

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The Macintosh‘s user friendliness was mainly achieved through its pioneering use of the graphical user interface v. This used for the first time in a product intended for mass consumption the metaphors of icons and menus as simple visual aides-memoir that could be pointed to and clicked using a mouse to direct a pointer on the screen in order to initiate particular applications or processes such as printing or saving a file. This meant that it was no longer necessary to remember commands to be typed in order to cause the computer to perform a desired action. This had until then been the main method of using computers with operating systems such as Microsoft DOS . The aim of the Macintosh design was therefore to turn the artefact into a tool for individual labour which would be experienced as liberating.

It promised

the individual ―knowledge worker ‖ freedom from management and central control in the context of the work environment of a large corporation and freedom from dependence on the labour of others in the case of the selfemployed ―knowledge worker ‖. The metaphor of the Macintosh as an agent of liberation from the drudgery of submission to the standardization and collective uniformity imposed by ―big

brother‖ presented in the 1984 advertisement can therefore be seen to have several dimensions designed to appeal to the most deeply felt human aspirations. Perhaps the most important is related to the human need to express creativity through labour using a tool which is as far as possible under

the worker‘s individual controlvi. It promised to free workers in large corporations from the central control which they would experience when using central mainframe systems and the loss of control they would feel when their computer user needs could only be met through the mediation of data processing department of the corporation where the user-defined problem would be converted into a programme to be run on the mainframe computer. This was necessary because the user would normally lack the technical and programming knowledge required to interact directly with the computer. The user friendliness of the Macintosh, provided by the graphical user interface and the point and click simplicity of the mouse, together with the availability of packaged software, would obviate the need for programming and typing skills . 7

The fact that the central mainframe computer in the large company would most likely have been provided by another large corporation, IBM, which then enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the computer market, and was a competitor of Apple, added another dimension to the metaphor. This was the David v. Goliath dimension, with Apple playing the role of David and IBM that of

Goliath. The large corporation is thus portrayed as an incarnation of ―big brother‖, imposing control and uniformity on its workers. IBM was then wellknown for its strict code of dress, dark suit and tie, and of conduct for its employees, in total contrast to the creative freedom existing inside Apple in its early days containing, as it did, many members of the flower-power hippy generation of California vii. The promise to free the labour process of the individual creative worker from dependence on the labour of others with necessary complementary skills can best be understood through the example of the role played by the desktop publishing software package. Before the development of the first desktop publishing (DTP) software package and of the laser printer which f ollowed closely the introduction of Macintosh, the graphic designer was dependent on the typesetter for the production of text which, in most cases, was fitted into the overall design provided by the designer by a paste-up artist who cut and pasted the text and graphics into the design template. The skills of both the typesetter and the paste up artist were incorporated into the computer through the DTP software package, freeing the design process from dependence on both these. Whilst the work of the typesetter required a high level of skill which would not normally have been possessed by the designer, paste-up was a relatively low skill but time consuming work introduced in the division of labour of graphic design in order to save the designer‘s time exclusively for higher  skill level tasks. DTP packages, first introduced in 1985viii, were instrumental in making the Macintosh appeal to graphic designers in the publishing industry, freed designers from the need to rely on the work of the typesetter and of the paste up artist, a reliance perceived as limiting the control that the designer had over his or her labour process.

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This capacity of the computer to facilitate the reorganization of labour processes through the incorporation into it of many human skills via software, a form of automation, was the main reason for the computer becoming a key technology of the second half of the 20 th. Century. This was first achieved through the mainframe computer which was costly and only affordable by large corporations. It was also operated centrally and its operation required a high level of technical skills which were not easily accessible to most endusers within the corporation for whom the data processing department became the interface between themselves and the machine. Even for workers with technical skills, the control of the machine by the corporation which limited how and when they could use it for their own purposes was often perceived as form of tyranny. Many of the computer hobbyists who became pioneers of the personal computer revolution had themselves felt frustrated when working for large electronics companies ix and were strongly motivated to perceive the development of personal computing as a form of liberation for themselves from such tyranny, a feeling which was reproduced in the 1984 advertisement. They met and exchanged their ideas in the Homebrew Computer Club created in 1975 to share computing knowledge. Early members of the club were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who went on to create Apple. Jobs and Wozniak were also a frequent visitor s to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), another influential centre in the development of the early ethos of the personal computer movement. The process of turning the computer into an individual tool which could be portrayed as an instrument of creativity and freedom at work was achieved in two main stages. The first involved the development of the microcomputer, an artefact which provided a focus for the work of the hobbyist whose interest lay primarily in tinkering with, modifying and extending its capabilities, rather th an its use as tool for some other purpose. For the microcomputer, the gap between manufacturing and user skills, between production and consumption, was small. Several of the early microcomputers were available in kit form for self-assembly by the hobbyist. What the microcomputer did was to put the computer within economic reach of the hobbyist. The second stage, arguably initiated with the introduction of the Macintosh, turned the microcomputer into 9

a tool and led to the absolute separation of manufacturing from user sk ill, of production from consumption. The way in which the Macintosh was designed and marketed illustrates several key aspects of the process whereby consumption of technological artefacts is individualised under capitalism. It implicitly highlights key facets of

a human being‘s relationship to both production and consumption and to the nature of power. The artefact is presented as a means to achieve freedom for the individual. The idea of freedom is normally associated with the ability to

remove constraints on the individual‘s abi lity to fulfil his or her purpose or desire. Normally this freedom is associated with the world of leisure. What is unusual about the way that the Macintosh was conceived and

presented was that the ―freedom‖ promised was related to the world of work and therefore of production, rather than to the more common world of leisure. The Macintosh was being presented to the ―knowledge worker‖ as

―productivity tool‖ enabling him or her to achieve the desired outcome without having to answer to or rely on others, thus gaining a greater control over his or her labour process. As I have already argued, this greater freedom can be understood both in relation to a centralised management control in the context of a large organisation or, in relation to the dependence on the skills of others, as in the example mentioned earlier of individual creative workers such as the graphic designers. The attack on IBM implicit in the 1984 advertisement was both an attack on the large corporation which stifled individual creativity and an attack on mainframe computing, the technology which enabled the large corporation to maintain centralised management control over the labour process of its workers.

The Macintosh promised freedom for the worker in

both respects. It was therefore a tool rather than a machine x. However, as I shall show, the central contradiction at the heart of Apple‘s message is that in order to deliver what it promised to the consumers of the Macintosh, Apple itself needed to grow into a huge multinational corporation controlling the labour of the producers of its artefacts in way that IBM in 1984 would never have thought possible. This is also the central cont radiction of capitalism itself: to promise individual freedom through consumption via the 10

market, whilst in reality its system of production requires workers to be controlled and enslaved. Standards, Skill and Choice

In capitalism the idea of individual freedom is also promoted through its association with consumer choice. The suggestion is that a lack of choice constrains freedom and forces individuals to accept what is provided for them whether they like it or not. Maximizing choice therefore becomes a means of maximizing freedom. Competition between producers in the marketplace is thus a means of both providing choice for consumers and determining which products best fit the needs and desires of consumers. Success or failure of producers thus becomes associated with their ability to meet human needs and desires. Providing choice enables individuals to express t heir individual identities, wants and desires through consumption. Freedom thus becomes

synonymous with the individual‘s ability to exercise choice in the marketplace and the market becomes ―the free market‖. However, what this argument fails to take into account is the individual‘s role as producer. It is this role which under capitalism provides most individuals with the means to consume in the form of wages. Inequalities are generated in the realm of production and the freedom of choice in consumption is thus primarily determined by the

individual‘s role in the production system. In this section I explore the fallacies in this ideology of capitalism through an examination of the process whereby production, consumption and markets for personal computers developed. The first microcomputer is generally accepted to have been the Altair 8800, introduced in 19775 as a kit for electronics hobbyists and launched through a cover story in the January 1975 issue of the hobbyist magazine Popular  Electronics . It was described as the “world’s first minicomputer kit to rival  commercial models ‖. (Ranade and Nash (eds) 1994:10). In an ad published in

September 1975 in the first issue of Byte which became the leading hobbyist and professional magazine of the incipient microcomputer industry, it was

described as ―The Affordable Computer‖, implying that it could be afforded by 11

individuals. (ibid: 54) The basic Altair, with a memory capacity of 256 bytes, could be bought in kit form for US$395 dollars or fully assembled for US$498. Previous to that the smallest computers available were minicomputers which sold for tens of thousands of dollars. The Altair was made possible by the radical innovation of the microprocessor by Intel in 1971. The creation of the central processor unit of a computer on a single chip that could be bought off the shelf enabled a computer to be designed and built around a particular microprocessor. All such computers would then share a common machine programming language. The Altair 8800 used the recently introduced Intel 8080 microprocessor. Following the introduction of the Altair the microcomputer industry mushroomed. A huge variety of microcomputers became available. Apple was created in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with the introduction of the Wozniak-designed Apple I and by 1983 had become the fastest growing company in the history of the U.S. But Apple was only one of the many start up companies that entered the market. In the US, companies such as Commodore, Atari, Tandy/RadioShack, Adam Osborne were only some of the better known ones. The UK also had for a while a thriving microcomputer industry with many companies, including Acorn Computers (BBC micro), Sinclair (Z X80 and 81,

the world‘s smallest and cheapest ever computers, and the ZX Spectrum), ACT (Sirius, Apricot) and, later, Amstrad (PCW, PC 1512, PC1640). As I have already noted, the early consumers of these microcomputers were to some greater or lesser extent hobbyists. A considerable amount of technical knowledge was required to use these computers, even when they were being bought for leisure activities such as playing games. As well as often requiring the self-assembly of microcomputer by the user, in the early days little or no applications software was commercially available and users had to write t heir own programmes. The Altair, for instance, had no keyboard and programming it involved toggling a set of switches to represent the binary instructions that would be recognised by the Intel 8080 microprocessor. Over time various innovations were introduced which reduced the amount of technical skill required to use the computer, and the development of packaged software 12

meant that programming was no longer required for the most commonly used applications. The development in 1979 of Visicalc as the first spreadsheet package for use on the Apple II was an important stage in this process. Its culmination was, as described, the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. The great variety of microcomputers available on the market in the early period of its development approximated to the capitalist ideal of maximizing consumer choice. However, competition between producers was largely on the basis of the different technical characteristics of their various products. Any cursory perusal of the hundreds of adverts for microcomputers that appeared in the growing hobbyist press would make this obvious. The adverts all highlight profuse details of the technical characteristics of the product which could only be understood by readers with considerable technical knowledge. A 1977 example published in the October 1977 issue of Byte was the advertisement for the Radio Shack TRS-80 which already attempted to appeal to non-hobbyists by describing it as being ―for people who want to use a computer now- without delay, work and the problems of building one.‖

However, a few lines further on the ad states ―The Z80-based system comes with 4K read/write memory and Radio Shack Level I BASIC stored in readonly memory. Memory expandable to 62K bytes. Includes CPU, memory,

keyboard, display, power supply, cassette, data recorder…‖xi . Even the first computer which explicitly attempted to appeal to the nonhobbyist stressed its technical characteristics. This was the Apple II, a computer that is widely recognised in the industry as having played a key role in the diffusion of personal computing. The 1977 advertisement that introduced it to the market was published in Byte magazinexii. It is one of the first to make explicit reference to personal computing as opposed to a microcomputer. It is headed ―Introducing Apple II‖ over a photograph of a man sitting at a kitchen table working on an Apple II with a woman, presumably his wife, in the background working at the kitchen sink, a

picture of perfect domesticity. The title over the accompanying text is ―You‘ve 13

 just run out of excuses for not owning a personal computer‖. This was a deliberate step in Apple‘s continuing journey to extend the market for  microcomputers beyond that of the hobbyist. However, the advert includes a full list of the technical characteristics of the Apple II including such details as

―Video display: memory mapped, 5 modes - all software selectable; I/O 1500 bps interface, 8 slot motherboard, Apple game I/O connector, ASCII keyboard port, composite video output ‖. The price was US$1298 and it was advertised as having 4K RAM expandable to 48K using 16K RAMs. However, it attempts to appeal to the non- expert through such phrases as ―but you don‘t have to now a RAM from a ROM to use and enjoy Apple II. For example, it‘s the first personal computer with a fast version of BASIC permanently stored in ROM. That means you can begin writing your own programs the first evening, even if you have had no previous computer experience‖.

The ad represents Apple‘s first uncertain steps in the process of separating the production of the artefact from its consumption which culminated in 1984 with the introduction of the Macintosh. This bewildering variety of apparently similarly priced products on the market all claiming to be able to do the same things, however, hindered the expansion of the personal computer market. The considerable amount of information and knowledge, mainly of a technical nature, that was required in order to make an informed choice between the goods on offer meant that number of people who possessed the knowledge and the time to exercise that choice was limited. The fact that the various microcomputers were built with different architectures and used different microprocessors also meant that the software that worked on one computer would not work on another. Once a choice of microcomputer was made, the user would be stuck with it and would be unable to use programmes that had been written for other computers. The expansion of the market required the development of ―user friendliness‖. This means, as I have argued, reducing the time and the technical knowledge required to learn to use a computer. This was the insight that Apple developed and which was central to the design of the Macintosh.

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However, ―user friendliness‖ could not be achieved in the context of a market in which dozens of incompatible products competed on the basis of different technical characteristics. The development of a standard architecture which hid the variety of technical details from the user and enabled various users to exchange data and information which had been processed by different computers was required. Whilst technical standards are often achieved by common industry agreement and subsequently implemented by standards organisations whose decisions have the force of law, on this occasion the development of a common standard was achieved by the architecture devised by one particular producer becoming dominant and thus achieving a near monopoly over the market. That producer was not Apple, but IBM. In the first few years of the development of the microcomputer, the new market was disregarded by IBM which traditionally saw as its mission the production and sale of mainframe computing for large organisations. It had always ignored the individual consumer and had even been slow in entering the market for mini-computers. However, by the end of the 1970s, the growth of the hobbyist and home computing market was such that IBM felt it could no longer ignore it and set up a special project to develop its own personal computer. Unusually for IBM, a company that had always been highly vertically integrated, it chose to use standard components bought in from external suppliers. The microprocessor it chose was from Intel, the Intel 8088. It also chose to use an operating systemxiii, MS-DOS, developed by Bill Gates at the company he had created with Paul Allen in 1976, Microsoft. In the agreement it reached with IBM, Microsoft retained the right to licence its operating system to third parties. IBM, again unusually for the company, also decided to adopt an open architecture approach to its personal computer. This meant that any other company was free to build computers with the architecture that IBM developed. As a result any software that was developed for the IBM personal computer would work in any other computer built with the same architecture and using MS-DOS as its operating system. The first IBM PC was launched in 1981. Sales were initially sluggish, but began to take off the following year. The release of the first spreadsheet for 15

the PC, Lotus 1-2-3, in January 1983 gave a great boost to sales. Because IBM was well known and had a near monopoly over mainframe computing in large business and government organisations, the IBM PC became virtually the only personal computer that individuals and departments in such organisations were allowed to buy, particularly as the competition was from start up companies with unproven track records. The IBM PC and its immediate successors, the XT, released in 1983 and the 1984 AT quickly came to dominate the business PC market. The open architecture of the IBM PC, the availability of off-the-shelf components and the ability to licence the MS-DOS operating system allowed other companies to build personal computers, the so-called clones that were able to run all the software that had been written for the IBM PC. Compaq was the first company to build a clone but many others followed. Compaq overtook IBM in PC sales in 1994. Meanwhile IBM PC and clones sales quickly outperformed those of other noncompatible computers. By 1986 they accounted for more than 50% of sales of all personal computer by volume rising to well over 90% by the late 1990s, with the remainder of the market belonging to Apple Macintosh computers. The achievement of a de facto industry standard for personal computers around the architectures of the IBM PC and successors xiv, together with the introduction in 1990 by Microsoft of Windows 3.0, its first successful operating system with a graphical user interface inspired by the Macintosh, was an essential factor in widening the market for PCs. The replacement of the command line interface of MS-DOS with the icon and menu-based interface in Windows 3.0 in 1990, finally did for the PC user what the Macintosh had already achieved for its users. It turned the PC from a technical artefact requiring a degree of technical knowledge for its use into almost a f ullyfledged user-friendly tool xv. The PC architecture obtained an overwhelming dominance ov er the personal computer market. Contrary to Apple‘s ambition

when the original Macintosh was launched, most ―knowledge workers‖ came to be PC rather than Macintosh users. However, the Macintosh retained a near monopoly over that small sub-group of ―knowledge workers‖ who might

be referred to as ―creative workers‖. Designers, architects, and other artists all over the world use almost exclusively the Macintosh as a tool. 16

The fact that the PC became a de facto standard available for any manufacturer to use rather than the intellectual property of any one company fostered competition based largely on price and reliability rather than on technical features. This benefitted consumers and reduced prices and the profit margins of PC manufacturersxvi. Over time, as the personal computer

became a necessary tool of the ―information society‖, particularly with the growth of the Internet from the early 1990s, the world market for PCs grew exponentially. In 2009 some 305.8 million units were sold worldwide xvii. This favoured greatly economies of scale in production and the market became effectively an oligopoly, with the top 5 companies sharing more than 50% of the market between them. The growth of the market was maintained by the very high rate of obsolescence of PCs fuelled by the extraordinary rate of innovation in the semiconductor industry. The computing power of semiconductor chips, including microprocessors, doubled every 18 months to two yearsxviii. An industry analyst estimated that in 2004 over two thirds of the PCs installed in offices and approximately half of all home PCs had been bought in the previous two years xix (http://www.rtoonline.com/Content/Article/Oct04/PCReplacementRates100404.asp 19 May 2010). In 2008 Gartner estimated that worldwide just over 180 million

PCs—about 16 percent of the existing installed base —would be replaced during the year and that some 35 million of these would be dumped into landfill sites with little or no regard for their toxic content. (EE Times Asia 02 Jul 2008 http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800532355_1034362_NT_0f60f95b.HTM 19 May 2010)

The establishment of the de facto PC standard effectively reduced the available consumer choice of personal computer hardware, but democratised the market by making the use of the personal computer as a tool more accessible to those without technical skills. In the course of producing greater user friendliness and reducing the technical skill, the production of personal computers became much more divorced from their consumption and use, the process Marx referred to when he said that ―in a successful product the role 17

played by past labour in mediating its useful properties has been

extinguished‖ (see footnote 2). Partly as a consequence of this process the market grew and competition between many producers combined with the economies of scale enabled by the development of mass markets ensured that their price declined, thereby making them more accessible to less well off consumers. However, near-monopoly conditions prevailed in the market for PC operating systems with Microsoft controlling over 95% of the market and in microprocessors where Intel has retained around 80% of the market. Allowing the market to set a de facto standard for the PC may have benefitted consumers, but this has been at the cost of handing a monopoly and a decisive role in the industry to different players in the personal computer supply chain. The ideal of perfect competition is far from having been achieved. A small proportion of the worldwide market for personal computers has been retained by Apple through its Mac family of computers. However, as this market is very large, Apple sells a very large number of computers, 10.4 million in 2009 xx. Apple has jealously defended, in the courts when necessary, its ownership of intellectual property of its computer architecture and of the Mac operating system which it writes itself. Apple products are developed in the utmost secrecy and component suppliers and sub-contractors are subject to strict non-disclosure agreements. Ironically for the company that claimed to be the champion of freedom for the individual against corporate control in its 1984 Macintosh launching advertisement, Apple now has a complete monopoly over its market, and a de facto proprietary standard to which software developers and add-on hardware manufacturers for the Mac have to adhere. There are therefore no problems of compatibility between Mac users but they have no choice of supplier of the computer or operating system. The monopoly that Apple have over their market allows it to charge premium prices for its products and they have profit margins that are far higher than those of PC manufacturers. As a result Apple is a very rich company with large cash assets. It is also a very large multinational company xxi.

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Production

In the infancy of the microcomputer industry manufacturing was craft based.

The inventors‘ garages figure prominently in the mythology of the industry, none more so than Steve Jobs‘s at 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos, California where the original Apple I was manufactured. The work, however, involved mainly the assembly and soldering of components bought off-the  –shelf from suppliers. The success of the Apple II initiated a process of industrial production which gradually over time transformed into a process of mass production. The contradiction between the ideals of contributing to the liberation of labour held by many of the pioneers of microcomputers in Silicon Valley and the reality of employing labour in the highly Taylorised assembly of their products as markets began to grow did not escape Steve Jobs in particular who tried to maintain as much as possible a humane regime of worker autonomy at Apple. His solution to the conundrum was to seek to automate production as far as possible, hoping, as did the early advocates of automation, that this was a means of freeing labour from the boredom of routinised jobs. The Macintosh was conceived in a separate division of Apple under the close supervision of Steve Jobs. Jobs reputedly paid as much attention to the question of how the Macintosh was to be manufactured as he did to its design and to its friendliness and aesthetic appeal to the user. A new factory for the manufacture of the Macintosh was built by Apple in Fremont, California. When it opened in 1983, the factory was so automated that one report alleged that visitors often outnumbered workers (Smith and Oliver 1992). An attempt was also made to automate the Apple plant in Carrollton, Texas where Apple IIs were assembled. The plan involved achieving a daily production of 1500 computers using only 6 workers, but it was never put into operation (Slawson n.d.). However, the reality of capitalism soon caught up with Jobs‘ idealism. His unorthodox management style had already been recognised as problem, even by Jobs himself, and in 1983 Jobs convinced John Sculley, until then

President of PepsiCo., to become Apple‘s Chief Executive Officer.

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Early in 1985 a major recession hit the personal computer industry. In its first attempt to deal with this, Apple first closed four of its plants for two weeks (the Fremont Macintosh plant, a Texas plant where the Apple II was being manufactured, a plant in Cork, Ireland manufacturing Apple IIs for the European market and a plant in Singapore). In order to minimise the financial effect on employees, they were asked to take their holidays in that period. (Tri City Herald, March 10 1985, quoting a report in the Los Angeles Times ). However, as the crisis continued, internal tensions developed in the management of Apple as how to deal with it, particularly between Jobs and

Sculley. The situation came to a head in June 1985 when Sculley‘s views prevailed and Apple underwent a major restructuring which dissolved the separate Macintosh division, and closed 3 of its six plants, with 1200 employees losing their jobs. A major issue of contention between Jobs and Sculley had been Jobs‘s opposition to plant closures and job losses. The production of the Apple IIc was transferred from the closed Texas plant to the highly automated but underutilised Macintosh Fremont plant in California. Manufacture of the latest version of the Apple II, the IIe, was transferred entirely to the Singapore plant which already manufactured it. The restructuring gave Sculley full management control over the company and led

to a diminution of Jobs‘ role. A leading industry commentator at the time remarked that Sculley ―was changing Apple from a religion into a business‖. (Woutat 1985) Following the reorganisation, Apple abandoned Jobs‘ focus on automation and sought to implement more of the Japanese management methods of Just in Time and to introduce Flexible Manufacturing Systems. (Yoder 1990; Chisman 1989) Steve Jobs was forced to leave Apple in September 1985. He went on to found the new computer company NeXT, having designed a computer with that name which was never really successful. At NeXT, Jobs helped design a manufacturing plant which was more highly automated than anything that had come before. A Fortune report on the plant remarked that the 40-strong manufacturing staff had more PhDs than the group that had designed the computer in the first place. The plant never achieved even 10% of its production capacity as sales of the NeXT computer were sluggish. 20

Steve Jobs eventually returned to Apple when Apple took over NeXT in 1996 and became its CEO the following year, a position he used to drive the design and production of highly successful consumer products such as the i Mac, the Macbook, the iPod and the iPhone. In the process Apple maintained a regime of secrecy and tight control over its intellectual property. Apple‘s manufacturing philosophy changed profoundly in many respects and followed the mainstream of US brands in outsourcing most of its manufacturing and product assembly operations to subcontractors, mainly in East Asia. Apple has attempted to keep secret who its suppliers and manufacturers are. In the run up to the launch of new products Apple extracts non-disclosure agreements from its suppliers which involve such level of secrecy that any sub-contractor employees who gain knowledge of some aspect of the forthcoming Apple product have to be subjected to intensive surveillance. (Pomfret and Soh 2010) A Mail on Sunday  investigation in 2006 (MailOnLine Sunday 2006) of its manufacturing subcontracting finally began to reveal the huge distance travelled by Apple since its idealistic beginnings in Silicon Valley, ostensibly dedicated to the fight for individual freedom and against monopoly capitalism. The Mail on Sunday investigation discovered that one of the major manufacturing subcontractors was the Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. which trades under the name Foxconn Industries, a company which the report alleges employs a million workers and maintains factories in mainland China. Apple product assembly is carried out at two factories. T he first factory is in Longhua, near Hong Kong, where the iPod is assembled. The second one is in Zhengzhou in central China. A subsequent investigation by the Wall St. Journal (Dean 2007) added further details to the picture. Hon Hai also assembles products for Hewlett Packard, Nintendo, Motorola, Sony,

Nokia, Dell. It is the only supplier of Apple‘s iPhones and a main assembler of  iPods. The Longhua factory employs and houses some 270,000 in a fortified city bigger than Newcastle. Workers live in dormitories on the site, 100 to a room. There is no charge for the accommodation, but outside visitors are not allowed. The workers wear uniforms colour coded by department. A Daily  Mirror reporter described the sessions of ―professional education‖ which 21

constitute the only break from work ro utine in the following terms: ―Like soldiers on parade, the young men and women are ordered to line up on the factory roof and drilled for up to three hours, often in searing heat. On

occasions they‘re required to stand still for hours without moving a muscle. These extraordinary exercises were devised to ensure that the workers toe

the line‖ (Webster 2006 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2006/06/14/welcome-to-ipod-city-115875-17226460/  ). In an interview with

the Hon Hai‘s founder, Terry Gou, the Wall St.Journal was told by Mr. Gou: ―I always tell employees: The group‘s benefit is more important than your  personal benefit.‖ (Dean 2007) All gates are policed by guards and all those entering and leaving are closely checked both to prevent product theft and the leakage of intellectual property. Vehicle occupants are checked with finger print recognition scanners. Security guards use metal detectors to search employees and if any metal i s found on them the police is called (Pomfret and Soh 2010). The Mail on Sunday report interviewed one worker who said she worked a 15-hour day f or £27 a month. Following the bad publicity in the world‘s media initiated by the Mail on  Sunday  exposé, Apple instituted an audit of its suppliers in order to establish

to what extent they were complying with its own supplier code of conduct. A report was issued in 2010 (Apple 2010) which came to the conclusion that the majority of suppliers were complying with the code which stipulates, among

other things, that employees‘ working week should be limited to 60 hours and that no worker under 16 should be employed. Apple‘s audit report nevertheless revealed that at least 55 of the 102 factories that were manufacturing its products were ignoring the limit on weekly working hours. Apple‘s own guidelines are, in any case, in excess of China‘s often flouted labour laws which limit the working week to 49 hours. Also 24 of the factories

were paying less than China‘s legal minimum wage of 800 yuan (£76) a month. (Moore 2010)

In 2009 and 2010 Apple was hit by further supplier

labour scandals. First, in August 2009, 49 workers at a Wintek factory in Suzhou manufacturing parts for the iPhone and the iPod were poisoned by n22

hexane, a chemical used illegally to clean mobile phone and player screens, resulting in one of them dying (ChinaTechNews 2010). In 2010 a spate of employee suicides at Foxconn Industries raised further alarm about conditions

at the company‘s factories and eventually triggered a wave of strikes at Foxconn and other Chinese plants assembling consumer products for Western companies. These are the conditions currently prevailing in the manufacture of the artefacts of the company which in the first few years of its life promised that its products would free workers from the uniformity and oppression imposed by large corporations. Conclusions

In this article I have tried to highlight the dual condition of human beings as both producers and consumers in the context of analysing the development of personal computing within a capitalist economy. The growth of such an economy requires the transfer of increasing number of human activities from the realm of subsistence and collective consumption to that of individual consumption via the market. The  justification for this is that the individualisation of consumption promotes the

individual‘s freedom of choice and frees him or her from externally imposed constraints. Technological artefacts appear as vehicles for enhancing such freedom.

Hence ―with a Volkswagen you can go anywhere you want to when you want to‖ whilst a train requires timetable and destination constraints imposed by the need to consider also the needs of others. Normally implicit in these considerations is the assumption that the expression of freedom lies primarily in the realm of leisure. Work time for human beings is largely perceived as the time during which the means to meet basic needs and to enjoy the freedom provided by leisure are obtained. This perception was already present at the birth of the age of mass consumption when Henry Ford introduced the US$5 dollar day for his car workers partly as a compensation for the fact that his factories turned them into repeating machines, but also so that they could enjoy the products of their labours, the model

T Fords, in their leisure time. ―High wages to create large markets‖, Ford said. (Grandin 2009) And he promised that his products would provide freedom in leisure. 23

The history of personal computing is a case study in how an innovation inspired by the desire of human beings to free their creative labour from the stifling control of monopoly capitalism gradually became a new instrument of corporate control and oppression of labour unable to escape the dynamics of the system itself, now dominated by new monopolies which they themselves created. The pioneers in the early days of Silicon Valley, the members of the Homebrew Computer Club and of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, including Steve Jobs himself, believed in a code according to which: Access to computers- and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works- should be unlimited and total. All information should be free. Mistrust Authority- Promote Decentralization. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, race, or position. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better xxii.They wanted everyone to have access the wonderful tool they thought the computer to be. The organisation that gave birth to the Homebrew Computer Club was called the People‘s Computer  Company. But their original vision was one of giving computing skills t o everyone in order to enable them to reconfigure the machine to their own purpose, rather than removing the need for technical skill from the use of computers. They wanted the production of personal computing to be part and parcel of its use and did not conceive technical skill to be a barrier to the democratisation of computing. The spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club was one of cooperation and of sharing of possessions and knowledge, not one of competition, secrecy and surveillance. They opposed the increasing division of labour that would lead to deskilling in labour process of production and a concept of freedom which was relegated entirely to the realm of leisure. That same spirit has subsequently periodically resurfaced in the world of computing through such movements as the early stages of the development of the world wide web and, later, the open source software movement.

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However, the logic of capitalism dictates otherwise. The growth of the market necessitates the increasing separation of consumption from production. In order to achieve this, technological artefacts have to become ―user friendly‖. In this process the user loses all understanding of how the technology works and the technology

becomes a ―black box‖. The realm of technology becomes a mysterious one for the user-citizen from which she feels alienated and one over which she feels unable to exercise any sort of control. Technology thus becomes reified and appears to acquire a mystical power over society which individuals feel unable to control. The growth of the market, as I have shown, also requires the development of standards. Standardisation facilitates the development of ―user friendliness‖ and reduces the need for technical skill in use. However, standardisation also facilitates the development of mass production. This leads to an increasing division of labour in production, the deskilling of workers and/or their replacement by machinery to increase productivity. However, mass production also reduces price. This democratises consumption insofar as the artefact becomes accessible to people of more modest means and with lower levels of technical knowledge. But standardisation and mass production, as I have shown in the case of personal computers, also inexorably lead to the oligopolisation and monopolisation of production. The Macintosh democratised the consumption of computing through its radical reduction in the level of technical skill required for its use. Its mass production also enabled it to be accessible to a larger number of people. In this sense the metaphor of the 1984 Superbowl advertisement might seem justified. However, the cost is the increasing subjugation and alienation of the individual in the realm of its production. Steve Jobs, as an early adherent of the hacker ethic and member of the flowerpower generation, was aware of this. His solution for the conundrum was the almost complete replacement of human beings by machines in production, full automation, an objective he pursued relentlessly in his early days at Apple and subsequently in NeXT. Freedom of the individual would be guaranteed by the removal of the necessity for his or her participation in production. In this respect his vision was shared by Karl Marx:

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―The realm of freedom really begins only when labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material

production proper… Freedom in this sphere (of production) can consist only in t his, that socialised man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collectiv e control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic

prerequisite.‖ (Marx 1981: 958, 959) However, the logic of capitalism did not permit Jobs to realise his vision. In order to prevent markets becoming saturated and growth to stop, artefacts have to become obsolescent in as short a time period as possible, a process which is facilitated by continuous innovation and which leads to the creation of landfill mountains of PCs . In the case of the information technology industries, this is guaranteed largely by the

rate of technological change in the semiconductor industry, by the pursuit of Moore‘s law. When market saturation threatens, the pressure intensifies to customise the artefact ever more finely to perceived individual consumer requirements in such a way that the consumer will feel the need to jettison the artefact he or she already possesses. Both these processes militate against full automation as they require flexible production processes and shorter production runs which limit the time which companies need to recoup their investment in machinery. In any case machinery is not as flexible as people, who are also the sole source of profit in the full value chain. The requirement to reduce price in order to extend the market and facilitate economies of scale also leads to a pressure to reduce wages. The extreme suppression of the freedom of Chinese workers who are paid a starvation wage

assembling Apple‘s products in China by Foxconn Industries is, at least partly, consequence of the market needs of Apple. These include the ruthless protection of their intellectual property rights, in direct contradiction to the hacker ethic so beloved of the young Jobs.

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In the OECD countries, since the 1970s, the value added by production has tilted in favour capital and against labour (Luber 2007). In order to continue to maintain their consumption levels workers have had to work longer hours. Between1970 and 2008 the average number of hours worked per year by a worker in the United States increased by 20% xxiii.

In those countries where workers succeeded in reducing the

length of their working week such as France, the gain has been under threat particularly since the 2008 credit crunch and through the subsequent measures taken by the government to deal with its effects. The pressures to increase the age of retirement which have grown in recent years create a further threat to leisure as the road to freedom. Thus, in the recent past, the ability of individuals to achieve freedom in their leisure time through consumption via the market has become increasingly limited. Their freedom at work, both in the West xxiv and in the sweat shops of China has also been increasingly curtailed. However, the spirit of the pioneers of Silicon Valley survives and keeps resurfacing in different guises, despite all the attempts to subject the whole of human life to the dictates of the market and of the accumulation of capital. It is the spirit that Marx expressed when he stated that freedom in production could only be achieved when

―socialised man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most wort hy and appropriate for their human nature.‖ Whether his faith that capitalism would develop technology that would enable ―real

freedom‖ to be achieved in the realm of leisure through the reduction in the length of the working day once the ―associated producers‖ brought it under their collective control is justified seems, at the very least, questionable. References:

Apple (2010) Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report , http://images.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/pdf/SR_2010_Progress_Report.pdf 30 May 2010

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China TechNews (2010) ‗N-hexane Poisoning Scare At Apple Supplier In China‘, China TechNews, 22 February, http://www.chinatechnews.com/2010/02/22/11610-n-hexane-poisoning-scareat-apple-supplier-in-china 31 May 2010

Chisman, J.A. (1989) ‗Apple Uses Simulation to Improve PCB/FMS Line Design and Operation‘ Industrial Engineering , 21,7 pp.40-41 Dean, J. (2007) ‗The Forbidden City of Terry Gou‘, Wall St. Journal 11 August Grandin, G. (2009) Fordlandia: The Rise  and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City , London:Icon Books

Head, S. (2003) The New Ruthless Economy- Work and Power in the New Digital  Age , NY: Oxford University Press

Luber, M. (2007) ―Labour Shares‖ , an ILO Policy Brief, Geneva: ILO

MailOnline (2006) ‗The stark reality of iPod‘s Chinese factories‘ 18 August http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-401234/The-stark-reality-iPods-Chinesefactories.html 28 May 2010

Markoff, J. (2005) What the Doormouse Said- How the Sixties Counterculture  Shaped the Personal Computer Industry  London: Penguin Books.

Marx, K. (1976, original 1867) Capital , Vol. 1, London: Penguin Books. Marx, K. (1981, original 1894) Capital , Vol. 3, London: Penguin Books. McKenna, R. (1991) Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies for the  Age of the Customer  , Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing

Moore, M. (2010) ‗Apple admits using child labour‘, Telegraph Online , 27 February http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7330986/Apple-admitsusing-child-labour.html 31 May 2010

Neate, R. (2008) ‗Steve Wozniak interview‘, Daily Telegraph , 6 October http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecom s/3145691/Steve-Wozniak-interview-iconic-co-founder-on-the-iPod-iPhoneand-future-for-Apple.html accessed 11 March 2010 Pomfret, J and Soh, K. (2010) ‗For Apple suppliers, loose lips can sink

contracts‘, Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61G3XA20100217 28 May 2010 Ranade, J. and Nash, A. (eds) (1994) The Best of BYTE , New York:McGraw Hill

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Smith, J. and Oliver, M . (1992) ‗Automation Isn't Always the Answer (Part 8)‘, Machine Design. . Vol. 64, Iss. 23, pg. 45

Swanson, D. (n.d.) ‗Acres of Diamonds: How a $400 Million Opportunity was Missed‘ http://www.acresofdiamonds.net/how_a_400_million_dollar_opportunity_was_misse d.php 28 May 2010

Webster , N. (2006) ‗Welcome to iPod City‘, Mirror Online  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2006/06/14/welcome-to-ipod-city115875-17226460/  29 May 2010

Woutat, D. (1985) ‗Apple Bites the Bullett, Will Lay Off 1,200 and Close 3 of Its 6 Plants‘, Los Angeles Times, June 15. http://articles.latimes.com/1985-0615/business/fi-12519_1 28 May 2010

Yoder, S.K. (1990) ‗Workplace (A Special Report): Higher Tech --- Putting It All Together: Computer-Integrated Factories Are Said to Be the Savior of Industry; But

Can Anyone Make the System Work?‘ Wall Street Journal (Eastern edition), Jun 4 See http://www.opencollector.org/history/homebrew/netdemocracy-60s.html for a discussion of the radical nature of the early personal computing movement. ii

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature‟s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of  labour that remind us of the mere animal. ii Karl Marx descri  bed this as the „object of labour‟, to be distinguished from the “instrument of labour”, i.e. the tool. The „object‟ of labour is the aspect of nature that the human being works on to achieve his or her   purpose, whilst the „instrument‟ of labour (or tool) is the implement used to achieve that purpose. iii

Marx defined a tool or “instrument of labour” as “ a thing, or a complex of things , which the wor ker interposes between himself and the object of his labour and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity an to that object". (Marx 1976, original 1857: 285) He further pointed out that a good tool should not require the user to be aware of the existence of the toolmaker: “it is by their imperfections that the means of production in any process bring to our attention their character of being the product of past labour. A knife which fails to cut, a piece of thread which keeps on snapping, forcibly reminds us of the Mr. A, the cutler or Mr. B, the spinner. In a successful product th e role played by past labour in mediating its useful properties has been ext inguished.” (ibid: 289) iv The term PC is generally used in an ambiguous fashion. Sometimes it is used as a generic term for all personal computers; other times it is meant to refer to a personal computer which complies with the standard originally set by the IBM PC. Here the term is used is employed exclusively in the second sense. The full expression “personal computer” is used when I wish to refer to any computer designed for  individual use whatever its architecture. At the time of writing this would cover almost exclusively PCs and Macintoshes as there are no longer other architectures available in the market.

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v

The concept of the graphical user interface was first developed by Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Centre. Steve Jobs visited this centre in 1979 and was inspired by the visit to develop a similar interface for the Macintosh. vi Marx referred to this fundamental characteristic of human nature in the following term s: “Labour is first of  all a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, his legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature, and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power... . Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also r ealizes his own purpose in those materials". (Marx 1976: 283-4) vii

Steve Wozniak, co- founder of Apple with Steve Jobs, said of Jobs: “ Steve was into everything hippy, he ran around shouting 'free love man' and eating seeds as he embraced the flower po wer set ” (Neate 2008) . viii In 1984 Hewlett Packard introduced the Laserjet, the first desktop laser printer. In the same year, soon after the introduction of the Macintosh, the first ever DTP publishing package, MacPublisher, which was designed for the Macintosh, was released. In 1985 Adobe introduced Postcript, the first page description language used for computer typesetting. It allowed laser printers to print easily in a variety of fonts for the first time. However, it was the release in 1985 of Aldus PageMaker for the Macintosh which was instrumental in developing t he Macintosh into the tool of cho ice of the graphic designer. http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/beginners/f/when_dtp.htm ix

Steve Wozniak had worked for Hewlett Packard before founding Apple with Steve Jobs. The first venture he undertook in partnership with St eve Jobs was a simple and cheap microcomputer designed to be operated with an ordinary tv as display. This had been an offshoot of their activities as members of the hobbyist Homebrew Computer Club. It was first offered to Hewlett Packard and rejected. Apple was founded as a direct result of  this rejection. http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/how-steve-wozniak-helped-foundapple-computers/article33435.html 12 March 2010 x Marx differentiates machinery from tools. Whilst tools are simple aids to labour typical of craft production, a machine is “ a mechanism ... that after being set in motion, performs with his tools the same operations as the worker did with similar tools” (Marx, 1976, p. 495). The idea of automation of labour is therefore an integral  part of Marx‟s concept of machinery, and he views machinery, defined in this way, as typical of industrial  production. The mainframe computer can be perceived in Marx‟s terms as a machine able both to automate and to control work. Marx did not envisage, however, the possibility that a tool could itself automate the labour of  another worker. This is, as I have shown, what happens when the Macintosh with a desktop publishing package is used by a graphic designer. xi  Byte 1977:10:p. 43 reproduced in Ranade and Nash 1994: 59 xii  Byte, 1977:6, p.14 reproduced in Ranade and Nash 1994: 56-57 xiii The operating system is critical piece of software for a computer as it controls the main functions of the hardware and mediates between the applications software such as a word processor or spreadsheet and the microprocessor. The applications software package has to be wr itten for the operating system. Control o f the operating system has arguably been key to Microsoft obtaining dominance of the key applications market with Microsoft Office. xiv There were several subsequent struggles for control of the evo lution of the PC standard. IBM failed to maintain its ability to set the standard when the industry refused to accept its introdu ction of the new micro channel architecture (MCA) with its IBM PS/2 released in 1987. IBM tried to charge royalties for use of its new architecture and this was an important factor in leading the industry to refuse to accept the new standard. xv

Lack of a universal standard similarly initially restricted the development of the market for video cassette recorders (VCRs) in the 1970s. In the early days, potential customers when trying to choose which VCR to buy had to wade through the raging debate on the relative technical merits of the t wo then competing standards, Betamax and VHS. The requirement for this technical knowledge was removed when VHS finally became the universal standard. xvi

The de facto PC standard, however, was based on the use of the Inte l family of microprocessors and on the Microsoft operating systems which were both proprietary. The monopoly which this gave to both Intel and Microsoft meant that they became the most profitable companies in the IT industry able to exert a considerable influence over the whole industry. xvii Figure provided by leading industry analyst fir m Gartner.

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