The thought doesn't count

A recent run of Apple commercials are devoted to highlighting its “Apple Intelligence” features — how the phone can make media for you to help you fake your way through life. You will be able to take credit for the insight and thoughtfulness that Apple has built into its devices and no one will think any less of you.

This one, for instance, depicts a father on a sofa on his birthday as he receives gifts from his kids: one, an unidentified box with a bow around it; the other, a hammer he already owned, newly (and somewhat clumsily) engraved by his daughter with his initials — a skill we are led to believe he taught her. Meanwhile, the father’s wife stands at a distance in the kitchen alone, making alternately panicked and snarky faces as she listens in on their conversation. She is the hero of the commercial.

Visibly annoyed that her daughters took time and thought to make and wrap gifts while she accepted at face value her husband’s demurral that “we said no gifts” — the promise that everybody could be comfortable with doing nothing for each other — the wife is compelled to bring her phone into action to salvage the situation. Typing into a prompt window the same activity her daughter had tried to memorialize with her gift, she gets the phone to make a video of the father teaching it to the kids and smugly presents this as something she made for him. Her family is immediately absorbed in the screen and its facilitation of their narcissism; we see that the video documenting an activity is more important than the activity itself and that the shared experience of watching something is more powerful than other kinds of collective experience.

But we are not expected to identify with them, the consumers of an AI product made to placate people like them with their cloying claims on other people’s time and attention. We are presumably supposed to identify with the wife, who half-heartedly smiles at her family as they watch themselves and then turns away from them to gloat for the camera, making eye contact with us, as if to say, See how stupid people are? Don’t let them make you feel guilty. Just use your technological advantage and a few seconds of your time to fool them into thinking you care while you saunter off to do whatever you want. You don’t owe anybody anything, and Apple Intelligence is here to provide integral support for that sort of freedom.

It’s very inspiring stuff. When Nathan Jurgenson forwarded the ad to me, he pointed out that rather than the old tagline “it’s the thought that counts” — itself a weirdly defensive, apologetic position to take in the face of a materialistic consumer society — the tagline for AI could be “The thought doesn’t count.” It doesn’t matter if you gave anything any thought if you can produce a persuasive simulation of it. It’s only the evidence of thought that counts, and you owe it yourself to fake that when it’s expedient, because then you will have more of your time for yourself. AI thinks so you can be thoughtless, in every sense of the word.

The normalization of AI depends on widespread acceptance that what makes a thought count is not who it comes from but what it contains — that the subjective component of thought is unimportant, if not illusory. No one really knows what goes on in someone else’s mind anyway, so why even bother believing in it? Other people’s intelligence is what’s “artificial” when you really think about it, right? Until we have a machine that reliably translates someone’s brainwaves into data we can use, we should just assume nothing relevant or utile is going on in there.

I’ll admit that when I first watched the Apple ad, I didn’t relate to it at all and found it hard to imagine how anyone could. I don’t say that to congratulate myself for my fine moral sensitivity but to confess my cluelessness, a myopia with respect to what large companies with massive marketing budgets have determined will make for effective salesmanship. I’m hardly one to be sentimental about conventional family, but even to me this ad seemed astonishingly brazen in its cynicism. I couldn’t believe Apple expected me to side with the wife rather than the family, with the inconsiderate isolated individual rather than the compassionate and mutually attentive family unit.

It reminded me of the old Facebook ad that made a hero of a kid at the family dinner table who won’t put away their phone. But in that ad, the refusal to be polite and attentive could be construed as youthful rebellion, a kind of temporary immaturity, and the table talk the teenager is checking out of is presented as excruciatingly boring. What is so striking about the Apple commercial is that not only are the children depicted as polite and thoughtful and it’s a parent who uses technology to reject the demands of etiquette, but what the wife is escaping is not some tedious and inane conversation but a quintessential moment of family togetherness, a key sentimental justification for domesticity in general. It’s as if the very idea of reciprocity, even among parents and children, is being dismissed and mocked as if it were something that we have all been hoping that technology would at last eliminate.

Since the U.S. election, I’ve been thinking about this ad a bit more and trying to resist my impulse to dismiss it as simply weird and off-putting. I realized it reminds me a lot of the barrage of “Kamala’s for they/them; Trump is for you” ads, for which I also couldn’t grasp the intended audience or why it would find the ads persuasive. But it is perhaps as simple as that tagline in its most abstract form. A Democrat-led government thinks you should be concerned with other people, whereas a Republican-led government gives you permission to think only about yourself. The Trump regime promises to normalize selfishness so you won’t have to feel guilty about it anymore (if you were weak enough to be susceptible to guilt in the first place). In fact, it won’t seem selfish but savvy, like the wife pulling one over on “them,” her dumb, sappy family.

This kind of appeal to selfishness is consistent with a general disdain for politics — “vote for me and you’ll never have to vote again” as a promise that we can be free of politics once and for all. Lots of people profess to hate politics for its divisiveness, as if it were some arbitrary externality that descended on communities from the mainstream or partisan or social media to make neighbors unnecessarily mad at each other. But beyond the primitive but enduring form of “us versus them” politics which allows people to take a rooting interest in it and enumerate potential scapegoats who will be compelled to suffer the world’s inevitable miseries first, many people seem to dislike politics because it fundamentally requires paying attention to other people and entertaining the idea that their concerns are credible. It entails the recognition of difference, even when you want to suppress it; it requires thinking about the reality and efficacy of power, and under what conditions its distribution could be shifted, all of which means surrendering fantasies of individual autarky.

But technology has a lot invested in selling those fantasies of autonomy, of being able to do everything yourself on your own terms, through a screen and without the nuisance of other people and their needs. The phone is offered as a license to be inconsiderate, and over the past few decades it has been widely accepted as such, no longer a rude thing to bring out or glance away at when someone is talking to you but an inevitability. When I check my phone in the middle of a conversation as someone else is talking, I no longer worry about whether it seems selfish or impolite — it probably is but it doesn’t even occur to me anymore. It feels normalized to see people as subordinate to screens in any given environment, that the screens’ notifications come first. Other people are peripheral characters relative to what occurs on my screen, which is for me in ways that the others never can be. The phone reminds me that they are NPCs in the game of my life. (Eventually, if tech companies have their way, this attitude will be written on everyone’s face, in the form of a pair of “smart” glasses, and the possibility of not looking at a screen will be barred in advance.)

The woman in the Apple ad shows us how good it is supposed to feel when you succeed in reducing the people who make claims on you to NPCs. She dismisses her family with a clever phone trick, she finished the side mission, and she leaves them behind in their prescribed behavioral loop, their preprogrammed performances of clichéd scenarios. It doesn’t matter that they have their own phones and could being pulling the same stunts on her, because she already doesn’t care enough about them to worry about how they really feel. The thought doesn’t count.

I know there are a number of overlapping reasons that Trump was re-elected despite his manifest personal and moral unfitness and the vacuity and incoherence of his positions, but over the past few days I’ve been mainly thinking about this normative selfishness, the inconsideration his campaign seemed designed to celebrate at every turn in various guises, the same way it is celebrated in the Apple AI ad. With Trump as figurehead (and with AI ascendent throughout everyday life), you don’t have to consider other people, let alone the needs of society’s most vulnerable; ultimately, you don’t have to consider “society” as really existing, as Margaret Thatcher famously claimed in this 1987 interview:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

This point of view dismisses the idea of public welfare along with the idea of a public; it refuses to imagine that individuals aren’t always fully responsible for their own living conditions and fully capable of individually negating the impact of any so-called social facts. Public-health campaigns are thus a pernicious myth that proposes that the health of a group depends on more than individuals watching out for themselves. (Next thing you know, they will claim that public safety is more than a matter of self-defense.)

So it makes sense that the Trump campaign was eager to embrace anti-vaccine charlatan Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose ideas have been entirely discredited and, if implemented, would lead to widespread suffering and death, especially for children. But the Trump campaign seized on him not for his ideas but for what he symbolizes, and to project a refusal of what vaccines represent: a government mandate on individual behavior in the name of public well-being. It seized on that other rabid squirrel too for the same reason: It was meant to illustrate a commitment to individual sovereignty in the face of the nanny state.

The ongoing pandemic perhaps may have hardened many Americans against any kind of personal sacrifice for the public good. Maybe they tried, but they found it too hard, decided it wasn’t worth it, couldn’t feel the benefits themselves, couldn’t see anything but the costs they seemed to be bearing while everyone else bent the rules. The thought didn’t count. Maybe the sort of media intent on protecting the idea of the public doesn’t exist anymore or is more easily drowned out. It perhaps seemed to people, in the absence of any better and consistent explanation, that nothing else but inflation results when people try to look out for each other at the scale of a society. And as the masks literally started to come off, they realized they weren’t alone, and that lots of people, a different sort of coalition, felt as they did: that it was asking too much to be concerned with the health of the most vulnerable at the expense of their own personal convenience, which was actually not a kind of petty selfishness but a pretty foundational value for our whole way of life. The devices with which we are most intimate repeatedly remind us that our own convenience is a primary experience. Whenever we look at them, regardless of what specific content they happen to show, they are telling us how we should vote.