Orwell 1984 + Apple 1984

[Ryan Goble]

Hopefully, everyone who teaches Orwell's 1984 uses the famous 1984 Mac commercial...
This came to mind as Wired Magazine did a cool feature called "The Revolution According to Steve Jobs"where different, interesting people weigh in on Jobs' legacy. The commercial is talked about by both Bruce Sterling (writer, speaker, designer, futurist) and ad man Alex Bogusky of Crispin Poeter + Bogusky with some great short texts for teaching the commercial and the book...

From Sterling...

"Jobs was far too irascible, judgmental, and competitive to be a futurist. Real futurists are long-view guys, cosmopolitan to the point of amorality. They let the little stuff slide, because history lets the little stuff slide. Steve Jobs let nothing slide. He read George Orwell, and then he commissioned a Super Bowl ad that yelled that Orwell’s 1984 would never happen because he, Steve Jobs, deemed otherwise. His design sense made him different—after dropping out of college, Jobs went to India and had a good look around at some real-deal spirituality. He renounced material goods and caught scabies and dysentery. Jobs never talked much about the lessons of that India jaunt, which inclines me to think it must have been crucial to him."

and Bogusky...

"The spot opened with a cinematic vision darker than anything we had been trained to expect from a commercial—sullen worker drones marching in lockstep. It was, well, Orwellian. But then there was a flash of color, a runner, gone almost too quickly for the mind to register. Then she reappeared, pursued and outnumbered but running with purpose—the empowered individual leading the rebellion. We didn’t know who she was or what the ad was about; we just knew that we wanted her to prevail. When she released that hammer, we were hooked.

Why did the ad work so well? Because it wasn’t about the features of a Macintosh. In fact, we never even saw a computer. Instead, it was about emotions, about how the Mac could change our relationship with computers. That was the only message that mattered, so that was all the ad was concerned with."

Full collection of Jobs reflections lives HERE.