The recent unveiling of the iPad 3 confirms a view that I’ve held privately for a long time now: without Steve Jobs, Apple is having trouble innovating. And the reason lies in a curious but lasting truth about dictatorships and political economy.

To understand, we have to travel back in time – the 1950’s – when the world consisted of two spheres: the communist east, and the U.S.-led west. These two spheres had two distinctly different economic models. See if you can guess which one resembles Apple. Or, more to the point, see if you can guess which one resembles Apple during Steve Jobs tenure, and which resembles Apple after.

Back during the Cold War, Western economies engaged in what economists calls intensive development. That is, these investment directed their money towards improving their productivity through innovation by encouraging free flows of information, enabling free capital markets, and generally taking us from a world of black and white TVs and radios in 1945, to VCR’s, moon landings, and, eventually, the personal computer by 1989. This was the world of innovation.

By contrast, in the East, economies focused on extensive development. That means they took the technology they already had, and built more and more of it. That’s why traveling to any one of these economies – even day – means seeing row upon row of identical concrete apartment blocks, and mile after mile of steel mill. The reason they did this is straightforward: it’s a lot easier to make carbon copies of something that already exists than to innovate, especially if you are a society that squelches free speech.

What does this have to do with Apple? Apple Pre-Steve Jobs and Apple Post-Steve Jobs are, in my view, two different companies that resemble two different models of dictatorships. The former looks like what the West did under communism. The latter – today’s Apple – is beginning to resemble the communist East.

If both models are a dictatorship, why did Apple under Steve Jobs resemble a free market? Simple. Under Steve Jobs, Apple endured a clear rarity in the world of dictatorships: an enlightened dictatorship. There have been scattering throughout history: for example, Kemal Ataturk, the one-time dictator of Turkey, turned a losing-World War I state into a progressive democratic country. When a dictator has a vision and the means to execute it, the country he runs can create innovation simply through force of his or her own vision. And with the right kind of vision, Intensive development occurs. Ideas are brought in from the outside; others are created from within by a circle of advisors, or by the dictator himself. Steve Jobs, like Oliver Cromwell of England, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and a handful of others, was an enlightened despot. Innovation took place.

But like, I said, such dictators are rare.

In the absence of Steve Jobs, there is no vision, so the company begins to make carbon copies of what it knows how to do. In Apple’s case, this means letting the engineers take over the existing product line – and make copies, while updating the innards at the speed of technologic progress. Faster processors, higher resolution displays, and improved wireless networks are well and good, but that’s not what made Apple products revolutionary over the past decade.

Judging by Apple’s products since Steve Jobs’ death – the iPhone 4S (faster processor) and the iPad 3 (more pixels) – the company is turning into a textbook case of what happens when a country or a company is reliant on a single cult of personality rather than a democratic, open framework. And now we are seeing a textbook case of what happens what that personality passes away.

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Are economists as rational and intellectually progressive as they would like to imagine themselves to be?

Let me begin by saying that, in recent decades, economists have done a commendable job of systematically and thoroughly dismantling what bigots might term a "rational basis for racism." From labor economics to econometrics, economists across disciplines have made rigorous cases for advancing principles that are central to how we look at race today – whether it be studies showing how much bigotry costs firms (hint: a lot), or the countless econometrics papers that show that race can (and must be) separated from socioeconomics in explaining economic status. Economists deserve ample praise for demonstrating, in a way that only perhaps natural scientists can rival, that racial differences are not what our grandfathers would have us believe.

Yet I cannot help but be struck by how stereotypes, if not outright racism, continue to haunt the profession. Perhaps I am merely seeing symptoms of a field that is famously repetitive in its idealtypical set of stories and examples. Case in point: I would love to meet the Economics major hasn’t gone through the requisite "beer and pizza" budget constraint graph, or who learned expected utility on a curve that wasn’t either square-rooted or logged. Economists have their examples, and they stick with them.

But sticking with old habits is not just a good way to build field’s discipline; it is also a classic way to reinforce bad stereotypes. For every "apples and oranges" examples of comparative advantage, there are macroeconomists who will repeatedly refer to the fiscal discipline of Germans as something that is almost engrained in the German national ethos – and they do so in a way that, for a certain generation of Europeans, downright disconcerting. Indeed, the idea that Germans are "intrinsically" fiscally and economically disciplined carries of whiff of truly unpleasant stereotypes that is not aided by the economics roots in similarly-Anglo-Saxon Britain.

It’s also difficult not to be a bit unnerved by the field’s consistent use of race dummies in studies. It is true that in advanced studies, this form of controls has allowed us to isolate factor that cannot be confounded if we want to pursue good social science – factors like race and education and income. It’s also a fact that, given the general lack of data that practically every economics study faces, race is useful as a datapoint that is commonplace and relatively reliable in its accuracy. Yet despite all these factors, I cannot help but feel uneasy when, in a recent paper by Gruber (1997), I read, as I have a many times, a sentence that is downright disconcerting at many levels: "The unemployed have a much lower real wage and consumption level [...], are more likely to be female and black, and are less likely to be highly educated or married."

I know for a fact that Gruber, like all those macroeconomists talking about German prudence, means no offense and almost certainly harbors no explicit ill thoughts. The data points he raises are very important, his work is critical, and he should certainly not self-censor what the data shows. And yet, the recurring statement (one that couples race, poverty, low income, and low education) in these academic papers is one that, were it spoken outside the context of an academic paper, would raise many eyebrows. Quickly the line between “reporting the data” and affecting how the next generation of Americans looks a race is a thin one. When does “reporting the data”  become an excuse for the next French politician to brand Polish immigrants as “Polish plumbers?”

I don’t know the solution to issue of stereotypes and racial analyses in the social sciences. But I do believe that the profession could do worse than to bring the issue out of the footnotes and into faculty lounges and lecture halls.

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Not often in politics do we have the privilege of viewing two competing political philosophies, side-by-side, in a span of days. And yet, there it was, in just last week.

On Thursday, President Obama – for what seems like the first time in his presidency – ended a much-heralded speech on jobs with a rejoinder aimed squarely at the conservative, Reaganite wing of the American political spectrum:

No single individual built America on their own.  We built it together.  We have been, and always will be, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all; a nation with responsibilities to ourselves and with responsibilities to one another.

There it was, a word you more often associate with Republican rhetoric than Democratic speechmaking: Responsibility. The novel idea that we, as Americans, are responsible to each other – that our achievements are constructed through the web of people who pave our roads, teach our children, police our streets, design our cars, invent our companies, bag our groceries, and everything in between.

That we can only succeed in this journey together.

The Republican presidential debate yesterday was the perfect counterpoint to President Obama’s remarks. As TPM describes, Ron Paul, during the debate, offered a very different take on responsibility. Asked the hypothetical of an uninsured man dying due to lack of insurance, Paul responds:

“What he should is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself […] that’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk [ample applause]”

In those simple words, Ron Paul captured the spirit of a very kind of responsibility: a responsibility towards oneself, and one’s actions; a brand of responsibility that is, in practice, a tautological excuse for those standing around a dying man to not call the doctor; to not to dial 911; to not perform CPR.

I cannot stand for the idea that responsibility for oneself for it’s own sake is a renouncement of our responsibility towards each other. The recurring philosophies that I hear from the Republican party – That the rich are responsible for their own success, so how can we tax them? That the poor are responsible for their own failure; how can we feed them? That the sick are responsible for not being insured, so why should we save them? – espouse this philosophy.

Republican cite economists. And free-market economists – as a grad student at the University of Chicago, I’ve met my fair share – are quoted as saying it’s all about incentives. If we help people, they won’t help themselves. It all happens at the margin. Look, here’s an equation to prove it.

But this reality is not exhaustive. It is nothing but a facsimile of the simplified economics taught to freshman in their first year in college. It is Econ101ism. And we cannot afford it.

Every time a sick man dies because he did not consider the expected value of his insurance, every time an ADD child becomes a janitor because society knew it was in everyone’s interest to not pay for his medicine, every time a grand country founded on liberty sinks into debt because it’s richest know they are entitled not to pay it – this country’s social fabric frays at the edges.

It’s a shame, because it’s made of such solid threads – spun and woven together by great generations.

Let me end with a thought experiment. Consider, for a brief moment, the web of people who enable you to be who you are. Start with your Facebook friends – dozens, hundreds. Add in your teachers: from elementary school, junior high, high school, colleges and beyond. If you drive, consider the people who built those streets, hung those traffic lights, and police those roads at 2 AM. If you benefit from electricity, consider the people who repair those electricity pools when the storm clouds depart. The truckers who drive thousands of miles to deliver the food you ate this morning.

Now imagine each of these people repeating this experiment.

Our ultimate incentive in this country – in every country – is to keep this web from disintegrating. It is the responsibility we have to each other. Without it, we are ships without lighthouses and without shores; ships with no crew, nor supplies, nor a port to call home. 

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Part I – The Scene

Like me, you probably like it when your favorite app gets an update. Because it’s sort of great! Updates promise faster programs and more features. More often than not, they ask for not a penny in return.

You really can’t say no to that. It’s like a gift. A gift from corporate America!

Imagine my surprise, then, if you will, when I open up the iOS store not too long ago, to discover that my beloved Kindle iPhone app had been updated. Out of curiosity (and perhaps because it was right there), I started reading the log to find what goodies were in store for my favorite e-reading software. Perhaps a Summarize feature, to hold my hand through the second half of War and Peace? (P.S: if someone had told me there were two halves to that book, I would never have bothered). Or maybe a new font? I love fonts. Maybe they’ll call it New Bezos. That’d be really great.

And lo and behold, there she was, at the top of the list.
Removed the “Kindle Store” link from within the app

Well, that was when, dear reader, I realized that, like countless Americans, I had become an innocent victim of the crapdate.

 

Part II – Wherein Konrad Describes the Crapdate and its Adverse Effects

“A crapdate? What’s that Konrad?”

Well, first off, good question. So, it turns out a crapdate is exactly like an update – if the update occurred in oppositeland. Instead of adding features, it removes features. Occasionally ones you use on a regular basis. Instead of speeding up your software, it slows it down. Instead of making everything better, it accidentally introduces bugs that make things, well, crappy. More specifically, a crapdate is what happens when a company takes the software on your computer and makes it worse – or sometimes, unusable – without bothering to ask your permission.

At least it’s still free, amIright?

Rubbish. Nobody wants crapdates. Just leave us alone.

 

But they won’t leave us alone. And I’m here to tell you that crapdates are everywhere. They’re auto-updating your iPhone as we speak. Ditto for Windows. That $100 Touchpad you bought last week? The update is downloading as your read is. Hell, even your Chumby is probably magically updating as we speak.

You didn’t ask for any of these updates. But they’re here. And any one of them could be a crapdate.

 

Part III – In Which We Uncover the Genealogy of the Crapdate

It wasn’t always this way. Crapdates weren’t always the norm. We didn’t always face the perpetual risk of feature-depriving, performance-killing software fixed shoved down our throat over the invisible wireless Internet in our sleep. We used to have a choice.

Storytime. And this story begins, like many a true tragedy, with the legal profession.

It is a tale that arguably began in the late 90′s, during the Microsoft antitrust days. After getting by with a slap on the wrist from the feds, Microsoft took the Worst European Vacation ever when it was ordered to Brussels by the EU, where regulators decided to do their Americans brethren one better by actually punishing Microsoft. They deemed the inclusion of certain non-essential services – like, you know, a browser – to be not-so-good for Le Competition. Windows Media Player was also a no-go. In fact a lot had to si-go. Thankfully, the new version of Windows that came out of this process of Whack-a-Mole, Windows N, was thoroughly castrated of all these features.

And you know what? European consumers snapped it up in droves, European capitalism prospered, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Still there? Well that was a joke. Nobody bought Windows N, because it cost the same amount as the Real Windows, and a continent attuned to the scent of fine cheeses could smell a crapdate from kilometers away.

Remember: the first rule of crapdates is that nobody wants a crapdate.

 

Part IV – Revenge of the B-School Graduates

But it was too late. Lawyers – not to mention regulators, business consultants, and zealous software designers the world over – had gotten a taste of what it was like to be able to limit software capabilities for fun and profit, and they weren’t about to let What the People Want get in the way of playing God with the software installed on our computers.
This, as they say, was going to be big.

There was just one problem, as the Windows N debacle made clear. People were perfectly happy ignoring your goods and your services once they realized what you were up to.

You have to remember that, back in those days, updating the software on your computer was a much larger ordeal than it is today. For starters, more often than not, and update involved driving to the store to pick up the newest version. Literally. With your hands. Updates delivered online – Microsoft Encarta (the endearing precursor to Wikipedia) being one of the early pioneers – required prudent use of limited modem bandwidth, meaning there was only so much trouble an update could cause. For the most part, software engineers – and this really was a golden age when many of these decisions were still being made by engineers whose M.O. was, and continues to be, how can we make it better?-  focused updates on increasing the content in programs, while largely leaving their architecture intact.

In other words, this was the era of Napster, pre the DRM-filled, crapdated Napster of 2003. The era of copy-and-paste pre the crapdated, copy-and-paste free “Jesus phones” of 2007. It was technology before business and corporate America got to it.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you’re one of the poor chumps out there who happens to use a computer), the combination of the real world and rapid technological change was making short work of the Old Ways. Today, there are at least three seismic changes in the technology world that are paving the wave for the continued rise of feature-killing, profit-padding crapdate.

 

Part V – : Three Ways that Technology Gave Birth to the Crapdates

Let’s start with broadband. In contrast to those early updates, faster Internet connections relative to the size of software (which ballooned during the CD-ROM era, before moderating back down when programmers realized that nobody wanted to see full motion video of Mark Hamill in their computer games) meant that updates were no longer restricted to adding content; the entire program could be replaced, swapped, or crapified without prohibitive downloads times.

The gates were now open.

This change was compounded by a second, related evolution: the always on Internet. Of course, this came hand in hand with broadband, but today there are other avenues as well. When Amazon deleted copies of 1984 from its Kindle devices several years ago, claiming copyright claims, many complained that the entire shenanigan occurred entirely under their noses and entirely unbeknownst to them. More so than merely broadband, the growing omnipresence of wireless Internet through cell towers and Wi-Fi means that Internet is not just on at every hour, but everywhere. Thus, the decision of whether to “be online” (and thus readily available/vulnerable for some quick-fix updating) is gradually transitioning into the question of whether not you want to take active steps to be offline – a decision we’re increasingly making only several time a year, during takeoff and landing.

Finally, there is a third transformation underway, vitally necessary for enabling the crapdate. This one, in contrast to the altogether no-brainer technological changes I’ve described, is more evidently a product of technological fashion than Whig progress. And that is the culture of the auto-update, and its close relative, the one-button install. It’s true that for many uses and many cases, Apple’s progress in turning the cumbersome sequence of License Agreement-Next-Next-Install into a simple button press was a simplifying and seminal improvement in computing. That said, the culture of turning changes into the programs we use every day into a invisible, instantaneous, and never-ending hum of background updates carries ramifications that go beyond those 15 minutes of time we save each year. In fact, more so anything else, the invisi-updates ceded control of our software once and for all to app programmers, accountants, and Steve Jobs of the world.

Never was the statement “it’s their world, we’re just living in it” as fitting. Here we are, wringing our hands in worry about privacy, even as we declare enormous segments of our hard drives fair game for whatever corporations large and small decide should go in version 2.4.91. It’s remarkable, really.

 

Part VI – In Which we Learn What this is Really All About

But, hey, you know what? I’m not a security consultant. I’m not here to warn you about the million ways in which Julian Assange or Time Warner is going to post your honeymoon photos to Foursquare, or wherever.

No, I’m just here to tell you about something.

My scrollbar is gone.

My scrollbar is gone because, in the latest Chrome update that auto-installed on my computer (Google, it should be noted, is particularly distinguished in how fervently it strives to erase the line between that hunk of plastic you bought at Best Buy and the Overmind), some programmer somewhere forgot to turn on the feature that enables the scrollbar for websites you’ve turned into apps.

(This is a real thing – you can read all about it).

And this, my friend, is a bona fide crapdate, out in the wild. Straight from Mountain View.

What’s that, you say? This is a tech article, and I’ve almost forgotten to mention the Big A? A$$le? Steven “Moneybags” Jobs, and his orchard in Cupertino?

Oh, it’s coming.

 

Part VII – In Which iTunes Gets iTsAssHandedtoIt

Somebody needs to say it: Apple Inc. has by and far perfected the art of the crapdate. Hell, the lynchpin of their digital empire, iTunes, is the Mona Lisa of the crapdate. These days, you can tell how long someone’s been out of college by whether you hear them say something like “I remember when iTunes used to play music.”

Really, iTunes these days is the digital equivalent of something really, really awful that med school students drive in from all over the state to peer at while Dr. Jakozy pokes at it with tweezers. I’ve been using computers for two decades, and I don’t even know how to copy a song to my iPod. When I watch one of those IBM supercomputers beating some nine year old Russian kid at Sudoku, I’m secretly wondering this computer can run iTunes without randomly freezing for a week.

Seriously. iTunes is a piece of shit.

 

Part VIII – In Which the Author Goes Big Game Hunting

So, we’re back full circle, because now you probably recognize where we started. Apple changes the rules. Kindle app removes features. Everyone else follows suit.

And we know what happens in the tech industry when Apple does something.

In other words, this is only the start. Thanks to the changes in computing that I described, many of the most dismal lessons of the dismal science – stripping away features and reintroducing them as paid subscriptions to boost the bottom line; leveraging digital monopolies to punish competitors and manipulate consumers; using always-on broadband to gather perfect information about users in order to deliver the perfect ad – will become a mainstay of our computing experience. With the culture of auto-updates and instant installs, innocuous-looking programs are one crapdate away from becoming Trojan horses for later updates that will, effectively, allow them to do anything they want. And even nice programs will simply cease functioning the day before your research paper.

Because someone forgot to turn on the scrollbar.

Whatever, dude. We’ll fix it tomorrow.

Many out there will surely say that the benefits of magically updating software outweighs the risks. And you know what? Despite everything, they may be right. The benefits are incredible. Especially for the vulnerable demographic of old, blind people who really cannot update their software, because they have grandchildren to call.

In other words, NOT YOU.

For the rest of us, don’t crapdate that Kindle app away. Update software when there is a reason to. These days, your computer is only as personal as you make it. And when the time comes, don’t be afraid to let the world now when that harmless-looking update is really…

A crapdate.

Hey, it could happen to you.

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Having finished my first quarter at U of C’s Harris School of Public Policy, I’ve finally had a chance to come up for oxygen and refresh my personal blog. I used this space to keep track of thoughts, musings, and ruminations as a grad student in London two years ago, and I thought the occasion as good as any to start sharing my thoughts once again. Please stay tuned!

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