The largest lockdown uprising in China took place at facilities run by Apple’s Foxconn supplier where workers had previously jumped to their deaths. After thousands fled the Apple gulag, making their way through the woods and rural areas to freedom, other employees battled with Communist authorities over abusive conditions and treatment in the iGulag.
Apple had nothing to say about the rights of those workers who thought differently enough to break free and fight back. If they were foolish enough to have iPhones, there’s little doubt the company would have eagerly helped authorities track them down to be imprisoned or killed.
“Think Different”, Apple’s slogan, actually means collaborating with a Communist dictatorship where thinking differently is a crime. And it also means suppressing free speech in America.
That’s why Apple is threatening free speech on Twitter just as it’s threatening it in Shanghai.
But that is what the company has always been behind the reality distortion field of its ads. “Think Different” has never meant anything other than, “Shut up and do what the visionaries tell you.”
In the 90s, to celebrate the return of its co-founder, Apple launched an ad campaign with the slogan, “Think Different.” The campaign with its images of Einstein, MLK, Lennon, Edison and Picasso was meant to suggest that Apple was a unique creative company for aspiring geniuses.
And soon Steve Jobs joined the pantheon of those geniuses. But behind the ad campaign meant to appeal to narcissistic hipsters with disposable incomes was a harder truth.
Jobs, the talented marketer who had positioned Apple as the company fighting totalitarianism with its 1984 ad, was aggressively offshoring the company’s labor to Communist China.
What China had to offer was mass production under a ruthlessly totalitarian system that would, when Jobs decided to revamp the iPhone a month before launch, wake up 8,000 workers at midnight for a 12 hour shift.
At an Obama dinner, Jobs bluntly confirmed, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
“What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?” Apple’s supply manager asked.
The dorms, where 12 workers live to a tiny room, everyone is monitored and so many have committed suicide that nets were put up to catch the bodies, were the real “Think Different”.
Steve Jobs loved China and the Communist dictatorship loved him back. His famous black turtleneck appeared to echo the Mao suit. There are golden busts of Jobs in China looking like a Communist dictator.When Jobs died, there was hysterical mourning in China. There was no mourning for the deaths of workers at the Foxconn plants where Apple products were made.
A year before Jobs died, fourteen men and women jumped from buildings at Apple’s Foxconn Chinese contractors. Their deaths occasioned much less interest than the outpouring of grief for the author of their misery.
In a notion that could have only come from a satirical story by Kafka and Philip K. Dick or a real life Communist dystopia, workers were forced to sign contracts promising not to kill themselves.
Afterward nets were hung up to catch the falling bodies.
Think Different.
After Jobs’ death, his widow took the money to build the Emerson Collective, pushing social justice in the fine tradition of atoning for evil with more evil, while CEO Tim Cook developed an even more incestuous relationship with Communist China that included signing a secret $275 billion pact to help Communist China develop “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and vowed to use even more Chinese technology in Apple’s products.
When the Hong Kong protests began, the streets filled with young men and women, most of whom not only owned Apple products, but believed the hype that it was a noble company that didn’t just make gadgets, but aspired to harness human creativity for a better world.
Instead, Apple quickly moved to suppress the protests by removing an app used by the protesters to avoid police. Apple sanctimoniously declared that the protests were endangering “law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong” and claimed that it was responding to “concerned customers” worried that the popular protests threatened “public safety”.
That statement could have been and may have been written by the Communist regime. It should have been enough to finally expose the myth that Apple is animated by a creative spirit, rather than power, greed, and a willing collaboration with Communist mass murderers.
But with protests breaking out against Zero COVID tyranny breaking out in China, people were once again surprised when Apple rushed to aid Communist China’s crackdown by preventing protesters from using AirDrop to communicate and coordinate their activities.
The company wasn’t just once again collaborating with a Communist dictatorship responsible for the murder of countless millions, but it was screwing its own users, the naive students who had paid premium prices for its slave labor products because they believed in Apple.
They believed, like so many Americans and Europeans, that Apple stood for something.
And Apple does. It stands for tyranny.
That’s why Apple is threatening Twitter’s place in its app store because under Elon Musk the platform has begun to offer the very thing Apple is helping China stamp out: freedom.
It’s a mistake to believe that Apple is just doing what it’s told. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the company as unfortunate as the one by the protesters risking their lives while believing that Apple wouldn’t kick the chair out from under its users and their movement.
Apple isn’t a great American company, it’s a great Chinese company. Its fundamental worldview is Maoist. Its simplicity of control isn’t just about manipulating interfaces, but people. Its ad campaigns, from ‘1984’ to ‘Think Different’, have always been regime propaganda. Jobs, unlike his genuinely talented co-founder, Steve Wozniak, held people in contempt. His vision of technology was essentially Communist: depriving people of control for their own good.
China had always understood Steve Jobs, with his Maoist turtleneck, his minimalist aesthetics, ruthlessness and conviction of his own genius, far better than we ever did. The real message of “Think Different” wasn’t that everyone ought to think differently, but that geniuses are a superior group who ought to have the unlimited power to rigorously implement their vision. That is what China offered Jobs. And what Apple offers the Communist elite is the power behind their vision.
Americans haven’t cared very much about Chinese workers hurriedly assembling smartwatches in freezing temperatures or children laboring in mines, but Apple’s tyranny doesn’t stay in China.
Apple’s vision for America isn’t any different than for China. In both countries, Apple helps a leftist elite implement its collectivist vision by offering customers a poisoned chalice of convenience in exchange for data harvesting and control. The company doesn’t empower its customers, it tricks them into giving up control so that they can be better controlled.
That is why it’s coming for Twitter and threatening it over its newfound free speech.
“We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology,” a Big Brother analogue intoned in Apple’s famous 1984 commercial, “secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts.”
Jobs was a fan of Orwell’s book. Unfortunately he viewed it as a manual.
Apple has used its illegal app store monopoly to create a walled garden of apps along a pure ideology, secure from contradictory thoughts. Now, much as China is purging political opposition, the company that helped define its new age, is doing the same thing here.
Jobs, who once claimed that PCs were totalitarian and Apple was “the only force that can ensure their future freedom” helped build an oppressive operating system tethered to an app store calculated to deprive users of their freedom. That integrated hardware and software monopoly is one of the great threats to freedom in America and China.
As we approach a 2024 election, more legislators are waking up and fighting back against Apple’s walled app store of ideology. And if the Communist collaborating company comes after Twitter, it may discover that the whirling sledgehammer from its 1984 ad is coming its way.
Wozniak was a student in a class I was a TA for, at Berkeley, under a pseudonym. He seems like a nice guy.
Pixar was located in my old neighborhood at first, for some years. I have several good stories about them. One was about how the radical left Progressives on the City Council drove them out of the city (Pixar was a billion dollar corporation at the time). One excuse was that a vacant lot next to Pixar that Pixar wanted to use was “Frogland”, an “environmental paradise”. Actually it was just a large dusty vacant lot next to the sewage treatment plant, that used to have a road through it which dated back to WW2 and the nearby shipyards. I used to take a shortcut through that vacant lot on my walks.
That sewage treatment plant fouled the air for decades, until one Friday I encountered an engineer consultant for the city on my walk, who told me the solution. I happened to have the email address to the city person in charge, and emailed him the solution, not expecting anything to happen. Voila! On Monday the problem was solved.
But last I heard, the radical left Progressives on the City Council were trying to wreck all the progress that had been made at the sewage treatment plant. Oh well, I am out of that city for good, it is someone else’s problem now.
pple has way too many worms just throw it away Boycott apple
Who else do we choose?
Goolag? Infinitely worse than Apple when it comes to censorship.
Windows? Bill Gates the globalist who wants to kill people with his vaccinations?
Apple are getting as bad as their competitors, they even have a tracking app for convid which is deeply misleading and turned on by default. Called Exposure Notifications it’s not until you go have a deeper look into it that it shows “your local authorities can monitor you’
If you really want to go independent for a laptop/desktop there’s Linux. Bill Gates is evil, but he has little connection to Microsoft today and if you don’t keep chasing upgrades and updates, Windows can be made fairly secure and under control.
It’s the smartphone/tablet OS that are a massive spyware operation. Google is quite evil, but if you don’t buy a Pixel, at least the hardware isn’t coming from Google. Which beats Apple. And Android has variants as well.
Good advice. I’m going to buy a Linux. I hate my Hewlett Packards anyway.
Not that Google spies can get anything out of me besides naked photos of my girlfriends. I have no life outside of that and I’m not a politician. It makes me laugh to think of Google geeks jerking it to my castoffs.
And this why I haven’t owned a an Apple product in 25 years. Not that Gate’s trash is that much better.
You do realize Apple products were made in the U.S. 25 years ago, don’t you? Hm? No? Didn’t think so. Apple is investing billions to move some of their operation outside of China and even doubled their U.S. supply base in the last year. That’s not a pro-Apple rationalization, it’s an indictment on your ignorance which seems to be prevalent in the average person these days. Hopefully you don’t have children that will get ruined by such stupidity.
Anyway, while Gates is part of the evil machine, he doesn’t make anything. Other than bulk software, Microsoft doesn’t manufacture anything either as the Xbox is made for them by another company. That company is in a free-trade zone and is a leader in social reform and social responsibility towards workers and the environment. Polar opposites to Apple’s practices.
So good luck out there, you need it.
Apple has made some moves outside China, but it’s still through Foxconn. So they can operate in Vietnam, but through a Chinese company. Apple did used to make products in America. Sadly, no longer.
Microsoft tried making Surfaces in Oregon, then shut down and moved to Vietnam. A lot of tech manufacturing is moving to Vietnam now. But often under Chinese aegis.
We bought some oak furniture recently, that was made in Vietnam too.
Yeah, Apple is helping the Chicom government persecute its citizens, you stupid asshole. It blocked an app that protesters used to avoid government detection. And Apple factories there have nets around them because the *employees* (slaves) keep jumping off the roof to commit suicide. You’re a piece of shit. Apple is a scumbag company and always has been.
Great article, Daniel. I suspected something was always slightly rotten with Apple, but I had no idea.
Why do these companies like Apple and Alphabet (e.g., Google, YouTube) go so left/totalitarian? That is a mystery to me. Do their enormously wealthy principals think their companies would exist, or even be allowed to exist, under any system other than capitalism? Not a chance. BTW, why does our banana republic even allow Apple to own the only means of distribution for apps to be used on their products? Seems like an obvious, anti-competitive, restraint of trade to me. But what do I know?
“Do their enormously wealthy principals think their companies would exist, or even be allowed to exist, under any system other than capitalism?”
Semi-capitalism. It is important to make clear that the USA has never been a fully capitalist country. No country has ever been fully capitalist but the USA has come closest. The closest it came to being fully capitalist was 1860 to 1890. It’s been downhill ever since.
America is now an advanced welfare state, with the remnants of capitalist elements in the process of disappearing; in the process of becoming a fascist dicatatorship with socialist slogans like China is now.
There’s a saying attributed to Lenin that “a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.”
they were always liberal and they joined the monoculture and dispensed with any libertarianism,
some of it is just about the people who tended to run and populate these companies, where they set up shop, the Bay Area, Austin, Seattle, etc…the head honchos generally aren’t hard core socialists, but a lot of those people don’t tend to think things through and just echo back the politics around them
hit them with a 90% tax rate to fund universal health care and they’d suddenly panic, not sure they’d learn anything though
It’s called a spiritual battle. Satan operates against God through humans and economy. God has only faulty humans…unless He needs a miracle. He doesn’t use many miracles because His Grace through Christ’s sacrifice through faith in Christ, is really all we need to get to the Kingdom. Meanwhile, humans like you, think humans are in control of evil. NO. HUmans. like Biden, Obama, Hellary, etc are puppets for satan. Until you secular, naive, robots wake up to Christ, you’ll be forever mystified, and blame God for human evil.
Josh Hawley Calls on Apple to End ‘Unconscionable’ Operations in China, Reshore Manufacturing to U.S.
Apple’s entanglement with China has been taken to new heights in recent years. In 2016, for example, Cook signed a $275 billion contract with the CCP to prevent a crackdown on the corporation’s business in China.
I wish Apple all the success in their endeavor with the CCP that was enjoyed by Taggart Transcontinental Railroad in “Atlas Shrugged” when its president Jim Taggart signed a two-hundred-year agreement for use of land in the semi-fictional People’s Republic of Mexico. Needless to say all of the land and its buildings, track, and rolling stock were seized rather quickly.
Apple serving time time to Pell, Core and Slice
This is Truly Shocking!This company(founded by Avowed Leftists)has created such a worldwide dependency for their products and all they Really are is SlaveOwners”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Apple is an amoral corporation, like many of them. But I have to say that Apple’s censorship is far less than most others, in fairness.
Apple just announced they are leaving China for iPhone manufacture. Most likely, they will finish the plant in Viet Nam.
In the end, tablets and iphones have allowed real information to seep through the communazi filters and will ultimately free a lot of humanity.
the Vietnam operation is Foxconn which means China
Daniel,
Please keep doing what you are doing. You are a light in this dark world.
Thanks for reminding me why I have never owned any apple product and never will. Great article.