Opinions Are Like Software Applications

For New York magazine, an attempt to explain how Apple’s institutional priorities can be understood by looking at its source code, and what that might mean for the big pending legal battle with the FBI over encryption in the iPhone:

One reliable peril of advanced technologies is that the details of implementation usually aren’t yet common knowledge among most people — often including judges and lawyers, regrettably — but the compulsion of speech, or software-as-speech, isn’t made any more acceptable simply because fewer people know how to interpret it. The FBI’s demands in this case rely on that confusion: Its application for the order to compel Apple to provide them with the custom software states that “writing software code is not an unreasonable burden for a company that writes software code as part of its regular business.” This phrasing contains a subtle gamble: that both the courts and the public will conceive of the software as a tangible artifact produced by an incomprehensible factory in the clouds, rather than fully considering its design and development a coordinated act driven by human motivations, politics, and principles.

Apple + U2 album release

I wrote a very opinionated post for Wired about Apple’s recent decision to force downloads of the new U2 album on all iTunes users.

There’s a very simple reason why this is unprecedented, and that is because it doesn’t make any sense. Never before has such a major technology company also operated as publicist for a creative artist. The whole endeavor yearns desperately to be a landmark new innovation for the music industry, perhaps something along the lines of Radiohead’s legitimately earth-moving In Rainbows, which was self-released with variable pricing in 2007 and remains the gold standard against which music industry innovation is measured. But this is not In Rainbows, and as such should instead be remembered primarily as a monumental blunder by the tech industry.

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Update: At 1:30pm today I’m going to be a guest on CHQR AM 770 in Calgary to discuss this fiasco; listen here.

Apple Employees on Steve Jobs Film

The much-hyped Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher comes out today, and over at Slashdot I have an interview with Daniel Kottke and Bill Fernandez, two of the earliest Apple employees, about the creative liberties taken by the filmmakers.

Vijith Assar: Let’s talk about that pivotal scene at the the West Coast Computer Faire.
Daniel Kottke: It’s really kind of the really big scene in the movie. They spent several days shooting it, but they did an unbelievable job recreating the West Coast Computer Faire. There’s fifty different booths selling stuff relating to computers. Huge room. They did an unbelievable job reproducing it based on photographs that had been taken. It really blew me away. But anyway, that speech that Ashton does: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am Steve Jobs, and I’m going to introduce you to the Apple II, blah blah blah.” That speech that he gives never happened, for sure. [laughs] It was just a booth at a computer show.
Bill Fernandez: There’s a whole other aspect that wasn’t even touched: the personal computing environment. The Commodore PET computer came out, and we were concerned that we might lose to them. And the Radio Shack TRS-80 came out. And from what I gathered, there’s nothing in the movie that sets the context; a lot of people were doing personal computing at the same time. more