After all,
if you do not resist the apparently inevitable,
you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
Tim Cook showed up to bless the product launch at the Apple Store in Palo Alto like some corporate pontiff, anointing the faithful who’d lined up to hand over a grand for a phone that’s basically last year’s phone with a slightly better camera. This is Palo Alto, baby: Disruption Town, where revolution is a marketing term and resistance is something you do with exercise bands.
That Terry Eagleton quote hanging there like a severed finger pointing at everyone? Yeah. Because nobody’s resisting jack shit. They’re queuing up, credit cards out, ready to genuflect at the altar of incremental upgrades. The iPhone Xs. Not even a new letter, just plural now, like we needed options on inevitability.
Look at this: the storefront glowing like a suburban temple, the crowd pressing in, desperate for their fix of newness that feels exactly like oldness but costs more. Cook’s there working the line like a politician, hand shaking his way through people who think they’re buying innovation but are really just buying into something. Brand loyalty masquerading as identity. Consumption pretending to be choice.
And Palo Alto is the perfect setting for this theater: a town so high on its own supply of disruption speak it can’t see it’s become the thing it claimed to be destroying. Everything’s been optimized, streamlined, made frictionless, including the part where you think for yourself. The inevitable wasn’t inevitable until everyone stopped asking if maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need another fucking phone this year.
But hey, it’s sleek. It’s minimalist. It’s curated. And that’s what passes for rebellion now.