The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:
Call it “Apple exceptionalism” – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple’s sins are made manifest.
Take the claim that Apple is “privacy respecting,” which is attributed to Apple’s business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the “surveillance capitalism” hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.
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I gotta say, I only became aware of Cory in the last year or so (around when the first Reddit exodus to Lemmy happened), but I’m consistently impressed by how based he is.
I often like reading his older pieces. I forget how long he’s been at it for. Here’s one making fun of Apple almost 10 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/if-dishwashers-were-iphones
Don’t search back too far: he was terrible twenty years ago. I’ve never seen someone’s rhetorical chops improve as much as Doctorow’s has over the decades. He’s quite impressive nowadays.
I’ve read his “Little Brother”, it, eh, has those “hackers against the system” vibes of the kind of the “Hackers” movie and frankly isn’t very persuasive. Nice as a political statement, though.
