Futurism first arose as a European art movement but it perhaps achieved its truest expression fused with an American utopianism which emerged concurrently from the pioneer spirit of the young country. The United States’ ascendancy to dominance on the world stage, along with the export of its capitalist ideologies embedded with the ideals of the Futurists, is one of the most prominent global political narratives of the twentieth century, and it has shaped the terms in which we are able to conceive of technology and the future.
Of all the instances of the technological imaginary in culture one of the most useful for analysing the shifting trends of perception might be advertising. According to the theorist Franco Berardi it was Futurism which gave “birth to the language of commercial advertising”1 and as a cultural performance the commercial advert presents the desires of technology manufacturers as to how they want their product to be seen – an idealised version, working perfectly, operated by the perfect user – constrained by the need to reside within public expectations and resonate with current public sentiment.
Here we will first trace in broad terms the ideals of Futurist and how they became embedded in the American technological psyche, before examining the advertising of one of the most successful technology companies in the world for evidence of these ideals.
Coming to America
The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism was published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on Feburary 20th 1909 on the front page of the Parisian newspaper La Figaro. Futurism, beginning in Italy, was primarily an art movement – Marinetti was a poet – but its political aspirations sought to modernise Italy, accomplishing its utopian visions with the aid of technology and the machine. This first movement of the avant-garde was marked by an emphasis on certain key qualities:
Power, aggression and male virility;
“No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. …We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”2
Youth, flux, constant rejuvenation and revolution;
“The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!”3
And the embrace of technology, which the Futurists saw as embodying these qualities.
“We will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”4
These ideas quickly spread across Europe and whether or not Futurism per se was at the forefront of consciousness during the next hundred years the ideals which it initially expressed at the dawn of the century most certainly were. “The idea of the future is central in the ideology and in the energy of the 20th century, and in many ways it is mixed with the idea of utopia. … The movement called Futurism announce[d] what is most essential in the 20th century because this century is pervaded by a religious belief in the future.”5 This “belief in the future” and “idea of utopia” is, as James Carey notes in his essay ‘The History of the Future’, with John J. Quirk, “a particular, though not peculiar, aspect of American popular culture. It is, in a trenchant phrase by Horace Kallen (1950: 78), ‘the doctrine and discipline of pioneering made art.’”6
America in 1909 was still trying to find its national identity; the last of the contiguous territories would only became fully fledged states in 1912. Carey observes that, “The very creation of the United States was an attempt to outrun history and to escape European experience, not merely to find a new place but to found a ‘New World’. The idea of a ‘new land,’ a virgin continent, had been part of the European Utopian tradition. The discovery of America during the age of exploration removed utopia from literature and installed it in life.”7
The expansion of the country had gone hand in hand with the extension of the telegraph, railway and motor car across the continent. Coupled with the desire to find a differentiation from a European identity rooted in long history, it is of little surprise that Futurism’s emphasis on speed, power, constant rejuvenation and the utopian potential of technology resonated with the American ideology of the pioneering spirit and ‘The American Dream’, so that in its journey across the Atlantic Futurism and its ideals became synonymous with modernity as a whole.8 As these ideal crystallised the ideologies of Futurism became deeply enmeshed with the American cultural identity which became always forward looking, always forward moving.
It is perhaps coincidental, though no less germane for it, that in 1915 the first exhibition of Futurist works took place at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, the city whose Santa Clara valley would become synonymous with the advancement of technology under the moniker ‘Silicon Valley’.9 In the 1960’s and ’70’s San Francisco would become the bastion of the idealistic counterculture movement that sought to create a utopian society in the American tradition and saw computer technology as a means to achieve its goals.10
Theodore Roszak, who wrote extensively on the counterculture, comments that “it is within this … population of rebels and drop-outs that we can find the inventors and entrepreneurs who helped lay the foundations of the California computer industry ”.11 That they would only do so thanks to funding and infrastructure laid down by the US government was an irony lost on the young idealists.
Thus, Silicon Valley emerged with an unlikely combination of the beliefs: the vision that a social utopia could be reached via technology; the capitalist economic ideology of increased efficiency through speed; the consumerist need for constant revolutionary, renewal and replacement; and the desires of the American military-industrial complex to seek any political and militaristic power advantage possible.
Somewhere in the desert between San Francisco and Las Vegas is Hunter S. Thompson’s “high-water mark” of the countercultural ideology, but the principles of the counterculture weren’t so much extinguished as assimilated.12 The American utopia was relocated, from the western horizon to the horizon of time: the future. The optimism of the counterculture though was replaced by a pessimistic vision of social change, which made a lip serve to optimism, but ultimately, “depend[ed] upon its blindness towards – and dependence on – the social and racial polarisation of the society from which it was born.”13 This echoed a wider social shift identified by Berardi:
“In the last three decades of the century the utopian imagination was slowly overturned, and has been replaced by the dystopian imagination. For many reasons the year 1977 can be seen as a turning point”14
If 1977 is the year when unbounded belief in a better future failed it is not the case that conceptions of the future embodying the idealisms of Futurism also failed. In the January of that year Apple Computer, self titled “epitome of the American Dream”, became an incorporated company, and in April Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced the world to the Apple II, the first computer sold as a complete machine, rather than a collection of parts.15,16
The idea of the complete social utopia might have been fading but technology could still promise a way out and some sort of a better future if only you bought the right products. The ideals of Futurism; youth, vitality, speed and power remained still very much embedded in the imagery and iconography of technology, but turned from the utopian project to the service of capitalism. They combined into what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron would call ‘The Californian Ideology’: an all-American Futurism which would be exported around the world, packaged along with the products of Silicon Valley.17
Apple
Apple’s first advertisements in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s were heavily focused on introducing the consumer to the novel new machine and as such were formatted largely as technical demonstrations. As computers became more commonplace, though, so the abstraction of the ads increased. In confirmation of Berardi’s sentiment of a loss of belief in the future during the late ’70’s these early commercials lack any sort of utopian vision. The closest we get is in of one of the most iconic commercials in history – the 1984 Super Bowl commercial for the Macintosh.18
A young, powerful athlete is seen running through gloomy corridors, chased by riot police, while, in scenes evocative of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a drably dressed populace march in slow lock-step towards a cinema. Once in the theatre the workers are shown a film extolling the virtues of being “one people, one will, one resolve” before the film is spectacularly interrupted as the athlete arrives and throws a sledge hammer through the screen, causing it to explode. The final voice-over tells us that “On Janurary 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 wont be like ‘1984’”
The sixty second segment cant reach so far as to make the promise that technology can bring about utopia, only the much watered down claim that it can avert dystopia. If the promise of utopia is missing, however, it is made up for with a focus on the no-less-futurist elements of youth, power and speed.
While home use of computers was growing in the 1980’s the major retail opportunity was with businesses, and as such ads depicted middle-aged men in managerial positions as the target market, yet in the ads the elder figures are portrayed as often not knowing how the technology works or are undermined by more youthful users.
In a 1986 Apple II commercial, the father’s computer is colonised by his son;19 1989’s Macintosh portable “Hit the road, Mac” ad, sees a young woman effortlessly uses Apple’s product, while two older men struggle with the machines of competitors;20 and the “John and Greg” ads from 1992, which features three men sitting side by side on a plane. While the three characters are only ever seen from directly above the unnamed man who is not using the advertised product is balding and visibly portlier than the two titular characters who sit either side of him.21
1985’s Macintosh XL commercials are centred around speed and productivity increases: “do all this yourself, over lunch”.22 While the commercials for 1991’s Macintosh Classic II, and 1992’s Quadra 950, open with first person P.O.V. shots; flying and from the bumper of a speeding car respectively. The voice-over for the Quadra ad states that, “you are about to witness a revolution in high performance technology”.23,24
The 1986 Macintosh Plus commercial sets its agenda immediately, opening with the word ‘Power’ emblazoned in Apple’s signature Graramond font on a black background. It goes on to compare “all the power on this Earth”, but concludes, “none is more potent than the power which resides within the minds of us all”. The implication being that Macintosh Plus would unleash this potency and give you the “power to be your best”. This phrase, which would become the company’s slogan for the next decade, hints at the way technological utopianism would morph to become acceptable in a culture which was becoming sceptical and unable to “believe in the future in the same way. [That it would] fulfil the promises of the present.”25
Berardi writes:
“In the last decade of the century that trusted in the future, a new Utopia takes form that can be labeled Cyberculture, or Netculture or Virtual Culture, if you prefer. This Utopia produces its own world in a much more efficient way than the previous century’s Utopias. The Net is the Utopia of an infinite virtual space where the uncountable trajectories of billions of intelligent agents meet and create their economic, cultural and psychic reality ”26
That the realities created are belonging to the agents creating them is key here. This new utopianism was not social but personal. It rose together with the exclusionary social optimism of the yuppies of the mid 80’s and early 90’s. Regan deregulated the markets at the same time as computerisation was revolutionising financial systems, and in certain parts of society – those in white collar technology industries – the future was looking bright. The knowledge that this would not be the case for everyone, though, lingered just below the surface; free-market competition was in the ascendancy and its zero-sum models were being applied to all areas of life.
The return to the acceptance of a form of utopian vision was hinted at in 1993’s ‘What is Newton’ ad which tells us, “Newton lets you communicate with a whole world and if there is anything the world could use its more communication”,27 and more explicitly with 1994’s “Power Macintosh is here, and the future is better than you expect”.28 It was not until Apple’s twentieth anniversary rebranding in 1997 at the height of the dotcom boom, however, that the individualistic idea of technology facilitating the re-formation of the self was made explicit: The company took up the “Think different” slogan, positioning itself as a facilitator of revolutionaries, and in various ads proclaimed:
“for twenty years Apple design engineers have been building bridges between what people dream about and the technology that can make those dreams reality”29
and,
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”30
The echoes of the Futurist Manifesto remain strong.
“We felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls.”31
The message of the Apple ads still invokes the Futurist values of utopia and revolution, but the ability to change the world has shifted from technology itself to being within people. Technology is only necessary to unlock that ability – it can change you and the way you think into somebody better. This is in many ways the same sentiment as “the power to be your best”, but Apple now began referring directly to power and speed less, instead positioning their products as aspirational lifestyle choices.
If direct reference to power and speed had begun to fall out of fashion in 1997, then four years later the trend became fully established. In 2001 the dotcom bubble burst, and the events of September 11th literally and figuratively shook the financial institutions upon which the Californian Ideology had been based. Beradi wrote:
“This last utopia ended in depression, after the sudden change of light that followed the 9/11 event, and it has finally produced a growing system of virtual life and actual death, of virtual knowledge and actual war. ”32
For a liberal world pushed into a live-streamed war, power and speed, with their implicit association with violence, became far less desirable. “Dotcom neolibralism”33 was derailed, however, the personal utopianism survived. The increasing sophistication of advertising enabled Apple to abandon almost all explicit mention of power or speed and the company began to produce ads as sleek as their products. Youth and vitalism were emphasised instead, such as in the first iPod commercial aired in October 2001.34
A man dances around his apartment with apparently boundless energy and confidence, a foreshadowing of the iconic, and similarly vitalistic, ‘silhouette’ ads which would run from 2003, featuring soundtracks which managed to be pop and underground simultaneously (several of the groups whose tracks featured on Apple ads were unknown, but then had immediate chart success).35,36 The 2006-2009 ‘Get a Mac’ campaign again raised the aspirational question ‘what person do you want to be?’ as two men proclaim “I’m a Mac”, and “I’m a PC”. Mac is young, casually dressed, with longer hair, while PC is older and dressed in business attire.37
This trend away from the overt representation of Futurist ideals would continue. Maybe, in part at least, due to greater feminist and post-colonial critique of technology, challenging the narratives of an industry which had been dominated by the view points of white males, together with the concept of the cybernetic integration of technology with our lives and bodies:
“Futurism exalted the machine as an external object, visible in the city landscape, but now the machine is inside us: we are no longer obsessed with the external machine; instead, the “info-machine” now intersects with the social nervous system, the “bio-machine” interacts with the genetic becoming of the human organism. Digital and bio-technologies have turned the external machine of iron and steel into the internalised and recombining machine of the bio-info era. The bio-info machine is no more separable from the body and the mind, because it is no more an external tool, but an internal transformer of the body and of the mind, a linguistic and cognitive enhancer. Now the nanomachine is mutating the human brain and the linguistic ability to produce and communicate. The Machine is us.”38
The softened rhetoric would begin to even lose the veiled references to youth and vitality. In 2007 Apple launch the iPhone, which would become its flagship product. Early ads are reminiscent of the product demonstration style commercials of the early ’80’s, when part of the purpose of the ad was to familiarise the consumer with the product and the way in which it worked, but the entire decade run of ads for the product family is almost exclusively focused on leisure activities, family, and making memories. These commercials are, at times, highly conceptual and seem to be intended less to sell the product than to associate it with a desired emotion.39
2010’s iPhone 3Gs ad ‘family man’,40 the iPhone 4 spot ‘meet her’,41 and 2013’s Emmy award winning ‘misunderstood’42,43 focus on idyllic family life, made all the more perfect with an iPhone. The ads hardly ever mention business, they are intimate, and often accompanied by soft piano music with none of the bombastic imagery which was prevalent in the ’80’s. Even when they are more rambunctious, such as 2016’s ‘sticker fight’ for the iPhone 7,44 it is a light-hearted energy, never serious in tone.
Although other elements of Futurism might have faded there remains the assertion that technology can bring about a utopia: not via speed, power and conquest but by intimacy and connection. The commercial for the 2011 second generation iPad states “technology alone is not enough”.45 And the 2012 third generation; “when a screen becomes this good it’s simply you and the things you care about.”46
Conclusion
This case study is extremely limited, but we may tentatively see certain patterns emerging. Although many of the Futurist ideals have been diluted they still remain in the foundations of our technological imagination. Kevin Robins observes that “the technological imaginary is driven by the fantasy of rational mastery of humans over nature and their own nature.”47 Or as Marinetti wrote: “Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars!”48
Despite changing socioeconomic landscapes these concepts have persisted for a century, mutating in their expression to fit the cultural mood. Gradual shifts in perceptions are apparent as certain kinds of imagery and language fall in and out of use, but the methods employed to imagine technology have remained, until relatively recently, bounded within the Futurist ideals.
At the time of writing Apple’s latest brand commercial, not specifically for any one product, features children, playing in a playground in slow motion, while in the voice-over children talk about creativity and inspiration, ending with the statement; “one small thing could change the world. Like one person can change the world.”49 Futurist visions of a social utopia via technology are slow to die.
1) Franco Bifo Berardi, After the Future, ed. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), https://libcom.org/files/AfterFuture.pdf. p 12,
2) Filippo Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, Italian Futurism (blog), 22 August 2008, https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/.
3) Marinetti.
4) Marinetti.
5) Berardi, After the Future. p 12-17.
6) James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, Rev. ed (New York: Routledge, 2009). p 136.
7) Carey. p 136.
8) John Oliver Hand, ‘Futurism in America: 1909-14’, Art Journal 41, no. 4 (1981): 337, https://doi.org/10.2307/776443.
9) Hand.
10) Theodor Roszak, ‘From Satori to Silicon Valley’, Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley, 2000, https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/satori/machines.html.
11) Roszak.
12) Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, 2nd Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). p 68.
13) Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ‘THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron | Imaginary Futures’, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, accessed 29 April 2018, http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-ideology-2/.
14) Barbrook and Cameron.
15) MultiFathom, The Apple IIe: The Most Personal Computer (1983) – YouTube, accessed 3 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sif9KHQkDk4.
16) Berardi, After the Future. p 12.
17) ‘Investor Relations – Frequently Asked Questions – Apple’, Apple.com, accessed 3 May 2018, http://investor.apple.com/faq.cfm?FaqSetID=6.
18) Mac History, 1984 Apple’s Macintosh Commercial (HD), accessed 4 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I.
19) dadsoldtapes, Apple II Commercial (1986), accessed 3 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lEmzAY5xIo.
20) Sivvr, Apple Macintosh Portable Ad Hit The Road, Mac Long Version 1989, accessed 3 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1bMBc270Hg.
21) ninakkay, Apple Powerbook Network John Greg Ad, accessed 3 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsqDtvTRsoM.
22) Peter Parker, Thirty Years of Mac Ads 1984 2014, accessed 1 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytuznpy95ZU (00:00:30).
23) shadowlock, Apple Macintosh Classic II Commercial – Out of Reach, accessed 4 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evQX5tBWyn8.
24) Jordan Kennedy, Apple Quadra Ad, accessed 4 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tw454TPZtU.
25) Berardi, After the Future. p 17.
26) Berardi. p 40–41.
27) Betamax King, Apple Newton PDA Commercial 1993, accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Yliy_WUBQ.
28) FLEMISHDOG, Power Macintosh Commercial (1994), accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BatEMgmtK6k.
29) VectronicsAppleWorld, 20th Anniversary Macintosh Commercial, accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkfXsMZZCLM.
30) kreftovich1, Apple – Think Different – Full Version, accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFEarBzelBs.
31) Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’.
32) Berardi, After the Future. p 12.
33) ‘Other Works | Imaginary Futures’, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, accessed 4 May 2018, http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/other-works/.
34) xaviertic, First IPod Commercial 2001, accessed 3 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE_bDNaYAr8.
35) Business Insider Insider Business, ‘The Best Apple Ad from Each Year since Its 1984 Super Bowl Hit’, Business Insider, accessed 2 May 2018, http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-history-through-advertising-40-years-anniversary-2017-2.
36) Sivvr, Apple COMPLETE IPod ‘Silhouette’ Ad Campaign Compilation 2004 2008, accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ifo4e8Oxbo.
37) Angus Lo, Complete 66 Mac vs PC Ads + Mac & PC WWDC Intro + Siri Intro, accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eEG5LVXdKo.
38) Berardi, After the Future. p 16.
39) Aside from the iPhone 3G, ‘hallway’ (2008) and 3Gs ‘break in’ (2009) commercials – which are anomalous for their starkly militaristic aesthetic and explicitly mentions speed and power.
40) Lawrence Kan, Apple IPhone 3GS Ad – Family Man, accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo7_ASwaCDw.
41) Lawrence Kan, Apple IPhone 4 Ad – Meet Her, accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrXc92TLbl0.
42) Sam Oliver Monday et al., ‘Apple’s Holiday-Themed “Misunderstood” IPhone Ad Wins Emmy for “Most Outstanding Commercial”’, AppleInsider, accessed 5 May 2018, https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/08/18/apples-holiday-themed-misunderstood-iphone-ad-wins-emmy-for-most-outstanding-commercial.
43) SilverSnow, Apple IPhone Christmas Commercial 2013, accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v76f6KPSJ2w.
44) Apple, IPhone 7 – Sticker Fight – Apple, accessed 5 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBfk1TIWptI.
45) Techno Mania, EVERY IPad COMMERCIAL Ever (2010 – 2017), accessed 4 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2awzUjHJJG8&t=5s (00:00:48).
46) Techno Mania (00:01:22).
47) Kevin Robins, ‘Cyberspace and the World We Live In’, in Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context, ed. Jon Dovey (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996). p 4.
48) Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’.
49) Apple, One Person Can Change the World — Apple, accessed 4 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkw8UBYn0pc.
A Dead Channel 