The Operating System

Pod, Pad, Phone. All of them “i”, all of them Apple. All of them products of the same entrepreneurial line with which Steve Jobs’ heightened sense of product development made the brand an unchallenged leader in “consumer coveting.”

It’s a “gadget war” that, in the shape of a miniature summary, reveals to the world everything that sets the brand apart. Apple products were type-cast for years — apparently they were meant for “the elite” (a notoriously pejorative term, as the juxtaposition with its antonym shows) and, astonishingly, they had the defect of being well-designed.

A core issue in the industry has been addressed for some time now: There aren’t and there will never be any “personal computers”. There is nothing personal about these machines, and there can’t be. Such is the multi-continentality of the various markets the product is destined for; see, for example, the Babylonian redundancy in the number of languages they come pre-formatted with, waiting for our choice of Korean, Portuguese (European or Brazilian variant) or Senegalese… This is a way for the user/consumer to achieve a level of comfortable control — real or apparent — that would allow him to think the machine doesn’t bite, and for this reason he can risk exploring it. In an Apple, there’s a higher chance of success, and this is neither due to the sharp design nor to the voluptuous sound. It is due to the operating system, Mac OS X, the omnipresent part of the “software” that homogenizes the relationship between the apps and the access to the content they generate, speaking in a language that encourages experimenting and subject knowledge. Behind all this is the axiom that generates a maintained value for the papers negotiated on Wall Street by the California-based company: The only universal language is creativity.

Meanwhile, another serious assumption is growing: Creation and cultural consumption is meant for the “elite” and, in a realized prophecy of a “lack of market,” the agents would be subsidy-dependent (another dead term in a country where resources are draining away). It is known that the Portuguese investment in creativity is so costly that there is no possibility for it to be included in a serious budget discussion. As for the cultural agents, I don’t think they are better or worse than any other agents of the nation, as for example the “teachers”, “the farmers”, and even “the politicians”. For almost 40 years, the so-called cultural agents have had the responsibility of creating “a” culture, faced with a lack of resources just like the one the teachers and farmers are facing. And they are to be scrutinized according to the same standards as the politicians.

Creativity is a vital part of any production system, and there’s no art necessary to prove it. Wasn’t the Industrial Revolution a ripple effect of the inventive genius of men like James Watt?

There is a lack of ingenuity needed to create that “operating system” that would save us from the imminent “crash” of the “obsolete machine” of ideological conflict. California has long been trying to do so — take Steve Jobs’ speech at the centenary Stanford University (stanford.edu) in 2005: It is the most researched video on YouTube related to his name, second only to the iPhone 4.