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Tech

​The Apple Watch Is the Perfect Wrist Piece for Dystopia

A product that cynically acknowledges the income disparity in a time of dystopian drift, and embraces it.
Apple.

The future app tycoon stands gazing out through the bulletproof glass of his top-floor penthouse suite, awaiting his UberUltra and contemplating his forthcoming evening at the future opera. He decides to augment his appearance with a tasteful accessory. Now, he's going to want it to be "smart," because this is the future, and elegant, because he is rich. And it should probably be a bit inconspicuous, given the recent outbreak of occasionally violent uprisings; something that at least shares the DNA of the gadgetry of the commoners. He opts for the Apple Watch Edition.

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Okay, that might be a bit hyperbolic—though maybe not!—but the sentiment rings true enough. The Apple Watch is the perfect wrist piece for dystopia.

When the news first broke that Apple's latest must-have will come in a luxury version that retails for $10,000 to $17,000, the initial reaction was shock—Apple producing an especially opulent artifact of conspicuous consumption? How dare they—followed by near-instantaneous submission. In short, it charted the pattern (half-serious critical recoil, more centric smart takes, and finally, open-armed acceptance) of just about every major Apple hype cycle ever.

"Yes, there's a market for that $10,000 Apple Watch," Wired soon assured us, and Buzzfeed explained how it "learned to love the $10,000 Apple Watch."

In the latter, which Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims called the "best thing written about luxury technology ever," Joseph Bernstein exhorts consumers (and the tech press) to learn to stop worrying and love luxury technology.

Bernstein says that "the sheer bitterness of the response seemed to me incoherent, even naive… I don't mean to imply that a $10,000 Apple Watch represents some kind of good deal. It's exorbitant. However, the aggrieved public reaction to that cost made something obvious: Consumer technology in America has a muddled and weirdly immature relationship with luxury goods and conspicuous consumption." He thinks that the anger was fueled by Apple's creating yet another unnecessary want (after the pods then the phones then the pads), and that in that case, the ire was "understandable."

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I have another theory. Maybe, just maybe, the backlash was informed by the constantly percolating background awareness that our moment is marked by widening income inequality. From Occupy to Piketty to the now-bipartisan sloganeering in Congress, inequality has become an assertive cultural reality. And here was Apple, not just cramming another auxiliary product into the market, but aiming (at least a subset of) its latest wares squarely at a gilded elite.

After all, it's integral to the Silicon Valley mythos that companies there develop products that improve people's lives; goods that, according to an ethos aptly parodied bySilicon Valley, can "change the world." A $17,000 watch most certainly does not do that.

In the days leading up to the Watch's release, much was made of the insights gleaned into Apple's corporate culture through a New Yorker profile of its industrial designer, Jony Ive, one of the chief architects and proponents of the $10,000 Watch. Ive fought to market the luxury product, and, of course, won.

As a result, Fusion's Kevin Roose notes the resultant "very deep and meaningful tension that sits at the core of Apple's mission: 'build products for everyone' versus 'build products for everyone, plus some luxury products that only the ultra-rich can afford.' And the fact that Jony Ive won the argument says much more than that he's good at playing corporate politics. To me, it says that Apple is positioning itself for a world of widening income inequality."

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A world where the biggest untapped growth potential for a technology company is, in other words, in luxury goods. If that's the case, it makes perfect sense that the bitterness over the watch was "incoherent"—though it's anything but naive. It's a deeply intuitive reaction, as well as a resonant one, and in no way is it "immature." That Apple feels it needs to design opulent, artificially scarce products in order to succeed is a reflection of the fact that income is piling up in the top 10 percent of society's earners—and that's a trend that's worth getting angry about.

It's natural that Americans should have a weird and dissonant relationship with luxury products.

It's natural that Americans should have a weird and dissonant relationship with luxury products—their proliferation, and further movement into the tech sector, is a clear indicator that the rich apparently need more stuff to spend their money on, at the same time that 46 million Americans are on food stamps. Why shouldn't that make you squirm? Especially the consumers and industry watchers who've bought the Silicon Valley "think different, do no evil" lines all this time?

These tech companies have been promising consumers a world of plenty for decades now—again, it's part of the world-bettering SV mythology—and Apple is now introducing a product expressly designed to exclude less well-off consumers, even to carve a gulf between them. A dystopian watch for dystopian times—when I say dystopia, I mean the economic variety; vast divisions between the wealthy elites and the laboring poor. Think Metropolis, not 1984. And San Francisco, for example, where Apple is based, was just rated the second most unequal city in the nation.

The most expensive Apple Watch costs about 31 times more than the standard version (hey, it's less than the gulf between average worker and CEO pay); yet the sliding scale of everyman-to-luxury means that Apple may, perversely, get its cake and eat it, too.

A venture capitalist will, after all, be wearing a version of the same watch as a public school teacher. Apple is manufacturing a sense of consumer continuity, and paving over the income divide with a product that's shaped and works the same, but, as Bernstein notes, can be tweaked to contain the signifiers of wealth.

It is a product that cynically acknowledges the income disparity in a time of dystopian drift, and embraces it.