Apple and Conviviality

In my personal degafamization, I had no trouble leaving Facebook. I never really used Microsoft's office suites. I struggled a little, not so much with search as with the office suite, but I eventually gave up Google too. I've boycotted Amazon entirely, without a second thought, for a few years now. But I still haven't managed, not by a long shot, to replace Apple. And yet I want to!

Because while Apple sits on the "reasonable" side of tech history on certain points (privacy, security, how long it keeps its operating systems updated, real investment in repair and recycling), the company still causes me serious problems. Off the top of my head: marketing designed to push you toward buying, a device turnover rate (the iPhone especially) that's far too fast, planned obsolescence built into its operating systems, murky suppliers in Asia, its accommodations with authoritarian regimes... and I'm certainly forgetting a few, but I'm not aiming for exhaustiveness here.

Because the subject I want to tackle in this piece is Apple's relationship to what Ivan Illich defines as a convivial tool. According to Illich¹, "a convivial tool meets three requirements: it generates efficiency without degrading personal autonomy, it creates neither slaves nor masters, and it widens the range of each person's competence."

Quite clearly, Apple does not sell convivial devices or services.

Because when you buy an Apple device:

• You can't repair it
• You can't upgrade or improve it
• You often can only use it alongside other Apple products, or else accept a degraded experience. For instance, if you decide to part ways with your iPhone, you won't be able to use your Apple Watch anymore.
• You can't install just any software. To develop for Apple's ecosystem, the list of constraints is long, and not always justified.

The same phenomenon holds true for Apple's software and services:

• You can't open documents created with Apple's office suite on non-Apple devices. The formats used by Pages, Keynote and Numbers, Apple's suite, are proprietary and non-interoperable. If you ever decide to leave Apple, you'll have to reopen every single document one by one, export it to an open format, and hope the conversion doesn't cause too much damage.
• You can't simply export your notes or reminders into interoperable formats.
• You can't simply keep control over how your photo library is organised. If you leave the Apple ecosystem, your folders and albums are gone.

Apple no longer sells convivial digital devices and services. It rents us an ecosystem, a very expensive one, with an exit cost to match. It's sad, and paradoxical, when you remember how central Apple was to conceiving and even defining the personal computer, the ultimate tool of individual emancipation, a socio-technical miracle at a time when computers were originally built for the calculations of governments and large corporations.

Steve Jobs used to say the computer would become a bicycle for the mind, a sober, efficient, repairable and improvable tool. At Apple, the bicycle has turned into an SUV.

Footnotes

1. Ivan Illich develops the concept of conviviality in one of his landmark, eponymous works, Tools for Conviviality