Apple has come up with an ingenius advertising slogan for its new iPhone 4g: “This changes everything. Again.” This slogan is wickedly effective at accomplishing advertising’s primary goal, creating anxiety in the consumer that can only be calmed with a purchase of the relevant merchandise. It is so effective because it plays off of the destabilizing effect of the rapidly accelerating pace of technological change. Because technology is intimately woven into the threads of our everyday lives, it is no mere hyperbole to proclaim that “everything” has changed as a result of Apple’s latest breakthrough. Everything that occurs at the very least does so in some form of relationship to advanced technology, and much of what occurs involves this technology directly. Ipso facto, if you transform the technology this, indeed, changes everything.
Our ability to interact successfully in the world, meaning our ability to both keep ourselves clothed and fed with adequate shelter, and to attract sexual partners, now depends in no small degree on our ability to manipulate the current technology. But this ability is increasingly unstable, which is what makes Apple’s two line slogan such a knockout combination. Not only is Apple able to change everything, it has the power to do so “again.” It is the “again” that is truly threatening, releasing the toxic anxiety central to the 4g purchase. Perhaps we are all accustomed to a certain degree of change; see timeless clichés such as “the only constant is change.” But we are ill equipped for change on the everything scale, much less so everything changing repeatedly according to Apple’s rigid schedule. Apple’s slogan demonstrates that not only are they aware of how vulnerable we’ve become to their wizardry, but that they are willing to exploit it.
Apple has long since been lauded as the world’s “coolest company.” I’ve always noticed how those individuals recognized as the coolest appear more concerned with their status than with the people who grant it to them. Apple’s aforementioned label, then, is apt. The twisted part is how we always try to win the cool kid’s approval, in the hopes that we might soak up some of that cool aura, with all of its benefits. Just so, we have fetishized Apple, paying more for its products, waiting in line over night at the mall for the privilege to do so, in the hope that the world’s coolest company might, via its glowing logo, anoint us the world’s coolest consumers. Which makes us doubly pathetic. Not only are we at the mercy of Apple, for now and forever (remember “again”), we also worship Apple.
God is not dead, and the secular age is a sham. Once more we are prostrate in fear and awe. But where, for example, Christianity changed everything once, and has left us waiting two thousand years for the promised second act, we only had to wait four years between the iPhone and the iPhone 4g. Apple, of course, is just getting started with this Second Coming. Again!
