Dumbshits – A Novel

A satirical novel about the world's most numinous company and the mad visionaries who built it

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From the novel:

“So, we were speaking of the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad?” said Erin. She had taken a seat on the couch across from me. We faced each other across a table bestrewn with copies of Wired and Fast Company. The Nineteen Eighty-Four ad, I thought, yes, get back to Steve, Steve can salvage this thing. “Sure. Overhead,” I began, “a thunderclap. It’s night, the not-so-distant future, a grimy metropolis peopled by the hopeless and the desperate: in a word, IBM users. Suddenly—rain in sheets. Rumbling far-off thunder. The tawdry neon glow of the city’s squalid commerce runs and blears on wet asphalt, clouds of foul steam, imbued with the streetlamps’ sordid orange light, drift skyward from underground boilers. The decrepit husks of abandoned buildings loom black against the humid clouddark sky. Matted, louse-ridden vermin scurry below, hunting trash. That’s where it all started,” I explained. “That was the vision Steve brought with him that day: ‘a thunderclap: the terrifying power of the vengeful heavens in a world betrayed by Hewlett-Packard’—Steve’s words. He said he wanted an ad that hit the viewer like a thunderclap. ‘I want something that stops people in their tracks, I want an ad that knocks you on your ass,’ he told us. ‘I want an ad that makes people go raving out into the street, that makes them take up their pitchforks and molotov cocktails and march on IBM headquarters. I want an ad that makes viewers gouge their eyes out. What I want,’ he said, starting to shout, ‘Is the Oedipus ad. This ad should smite the viewers the way Oedipus was smoted fearfully by the news that he had killed his mother and plowed his sister,’ Steve said,” I said. “I don’t think that’s—“ “Erin, please, don’t interrupt me,” I said. “Do you want to hear about the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad or not?” She nodded. “’This ad should be like Oedipus the King meets Blade Runner,’ Steve said, I continued. ‘Apple is congruent with the permanent revolution and this television ad is congruent with being televised and therefore in this case the revolution will be televised,’ Steve said. ‘Gil Scott-Heron is full of shit,’ Steve hollered,” I went on. “‘He don’t know shit about television or revolutions.’ ‘This ad will be a revolution in human affairs and culture writ large and it will, in fact, be televised.’ These were all the things Steve put on the table in that initial meeting of the marketing team for what was to become the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad,” I said, bending down to scratch the inside of my calf. Erin from William Morris Endeavor had taken a little notepad out and was scribbling in it now. Odd that she’s using that obsolete thing when she could be using an iPad, I thought. “It’s important to note that Steve had been watching Blade Runner over and over again in the year leading up to the commercial,” I noted, “He was totally obsessed. On top of his duties at Apple and his prajñā practice—“ “His what?” interjected Erin, peering up at me, her pen at the ready. “His prajñā practice. You know, prajñā? P-R-A-J-Ñ-Ā.” I watched her write this down. “Well, in addition to all these things he set aside at least half an hour a day to watch and rewatch scenes from Blade Runner, especially the unicorn scene, which held a special fascination for him for some reason. Incidentally,” I noted, shooting Erin a sly look, “Steve didn’t know that unicorns weren’t real until Rensburg pointed this out to him. He thought a unicorn was just a rare type of horse. Not many people know that fact.” Erin nodded cautiously. “Anyway,” I went on, “Around that time Steve would often call Rensburg and me into his glass office and strong-arm us into rewatching select scenes with him, pointing out all the little things he had noticed and the cinematographic tricks he appreciated. He also loved the scene with the esper machine, especially the ‘enhance’ motif, and would rave about building such a device at Apple. But after the first few weeks of this we’d had enough and refused to join him any more. Rensburg especially had had it up to here,” I said, bringing my hand up to my neck,” And told Steve that he would not be take part in any more Blade Runner viewing and that he’d ‘rather stick his hand through a coffee grinder than watch that damn movie one more time,’ Rensburg’s words,” I explained. “At first, if you want to know the truth, Rensburg and I were puzzled by Steve’s Blade Runner obsession and then, frankly, we began to look down on him for it. For me as a liberal humanist and phenomenologist and for Rensburg as an engineer and logical positivist, Blade Runner was just not a very good film. And Rensburg, especially, made no secret of his dislike for it. I remember that Rensburg once told Steve that ‘Blade Runner is as remote from fine cinema as Sesame Street,’” I said, “And that Steve should ‘quit wasting his time and watch a grown-up movie like Nostalghia.’” I chuckled, expecting Erin to join me, but she did not and kept her head down, scribbling. “But anyway,” I went on, “Steve ignored this, like he always ignored gainsayers, and carried on with his viewings. As we now know, something important was taking place inside him. This became clear later when it came time to make the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad. Clearly, Steve saw something portentous in this weird, prolix, conceptually overheated film,” I expounded, my thoughts gaining momentum. “And so, when it came time to make an ad for the new Macintosh—an ad that Steve had insisted air during the Super Bowl, I might add,” I added, as Erin nodded along and scribbled, “Of course, all of the other divisions at Apple had their ads, too, but none of them had the temerity to suggest that their ads should be aired during the Super Bowl. This was unheard of. Only Steve would think of such a thing. A single thirty-second Super Bowl ad would triple Apple’s marketing expenditure for the whole year. But Steve paid this no mind. It was worth it, because he had convinced himself that what was at stake was not only the commercial success of the Macintosh and Steve’s position at Apple but—“ here I slowed down to give this profound concept proper emphasis—“the very survival of the free human race.” I flashed a glance at Erin to see if she was impressed. “These apocalyptic terms were really what defined the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad, which, as was clear to everyone at the time, was also Steve’s great disquisition on free will and determinism—namely, will humans consent to be enslaved by IBM or will they throw off their oppressors and buy a Macintosh. And of course it was inevitable that these apocalyptic terms would lead to the introduction of the Nineteen Eighty-Four theme, this idea being by no means unique. You know, Lee Clow gets a hell of a lot of credit for this in my opinion completely obvious idea,” I pointed out. “It was soon going to be 1984 after all. People act like Clow was some kind of genius for coming up with the Nineteen Eighty-Four idea. But in reality we were approached by hundreds of advertising agencies that year and almost all of them were pitching Nineteen Eighty-Four-related treatments. Nineteen Eighty-Four this, Nineteen Eighty-Four that. Clow might have gone into the history books, sure, but he’s not the only one who’s gotten there on the back of someone else’s idea,” I said bitterly. Erin looked up at me. “In any case,” I hurried on, trying not to get flustered, “Clow was the one who came along at the right time, and Steve agreed to his Nineteen Eighty-Four pitch at once, since it conformed perfectly to his apocalyptic terms for the commercial. Although Steve had never read Nineteen Eighty-Four and had never even heard of George Orwell, so he had to take Clow’s word for it. Nevertheless Steve agreed to tie his fate to the Nineteen Eighty-Four theme on one condition,” I said, still watching Erin scribble on her little notepad. She had very nice hands and they looked graceful holding a pen. “On the condition that Ridley Scott direct the commercial. The board lost their minds when they heard this. ‘You’ve already spent ten times the advertising budget we gave you,’ they objected. ‘You’ve spent five hundred thousand dollars and all you have is the sentence “Don’t let 1984 be like Nineteen Eighty-Four,”’ they said, ‘and now you want another two million dollars to hire Ridley Scott. Fuck no, get real, find someone cheaper,’ said the board, said Steve,” I said. “To his credit, Steve bore this rejection with zenian equanimity and pressed on, immersed in his designs. In fact, as the development of the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad went on Steve became more and more invested in its outcome, since, as I have explained, it had gone from being on the surface simply a disguised appeal to viewers to buy a certain brand of computer, no different from any other advertisement, to, in Steve’s mind, a discourse on liberty and oppression. Or as Steve would have said, a work like Tom Paine’s Common Sense. Steve often compared the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad in its gestation period to Common Sense, notwithstanding the fact that he had never read it. ‘This ad will be the Common Sense to a new generation,’ he would harangue the marketing team,” I said. “‘This ad will spark a revolution and by god this revolution will be televised,’ he reiterated. ‘We will throw off our oppressors, International Business Machines Corp. By god their name alone oppresses me.’ But that wasn’t all. From there it developed into an even more profound investigation into the dialectics of Steve’s soul itself, since the question it posed—namely, is Apple a corporation or is it an anti-corporation?—went to the very core of Steve’s unshakable self-conception: his conviction that by making and selling computers he would alter the moral fabric of the universe.” Erin nodded at this. I was getting somewhere, I thought. “And so you see, Steve’s investigation into his own soul quickly became the driving force behind the Nineteen Eighty-Four commercial. But this investigation was always something of a mystery for the rest of us, because when Steve raised the question of whether Apple was a corporation or not—for a time he was always bringing this question up at various Apple meetings, no matter how off topic it was, and buttonholing employees in the corridors of Apple HQ to get their opinions on the subject—we thought he was joking. It was obvious that Apple was a corporation. ‘Apple is a corporation, full stop,’ we said to ourselves,” I said, “‘Apple exists to sell computers and mousepads and overpriced cables and to make its shareholders money,’ we said to ourselves, ‘and therefore it is clearly a corporation.’ But Steve refused to hear this kind of thinking. Anyone who thought that way was a bozo, according to him. ‘If that’s what you think you’re a bozo,’ he declared,” I reported. “’A bozo through and through. Who’s your supervisor,’ he would ask. ‘You’re fired, get your bozo ass out of my company,’ he would say. To the end of his days Steve could never countenance this idea and was liable to lash out at the mere hint of it. Even on his deathbed, he insisted that Apple was not a corporation but a ‘revolutionary ideology and liberationist force,’ his words, ‘on par with Copernicanism or the splitting of the atom,’” I said. Erin was scribbling furiously in her notebook. “What are you scribbling there?” I asked. “Oh, nothing. I have a poor memory,” she said. “I have to do this or I’ll forget things. Go on.” I felt suddenly that something was wrong here. Erin was scribbling too much. Why, as my agent, did she need to have all this down on paper? Weren’t my displays of verbal brilliantosity enough? Then again, perhaps, astounded by Steve’s rhetorical brilliance, she wanted to impress her superiors with some of these Steve lines, to whip out a flashy epigram on occasion and present it as her own. What kind of way is that to think about your agent, I rebuked myself. Let her scribble, let her get everything down, if that’s the way she wants to convey to the higher-ups at William Morris Endeavor the richness and scope of my material and the stunning originality of my Steve biopic. I’d like to see Aaron Sorkin’s so-called version of the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad episode, I thought. I bet it’s a flaming wagon of cowdung, Battlefield Earth-level stuff. I bet it treats the ad like just a pretty good commercial. I bet that’s the level of Sorkin’s understanding of the significance of the episode in the Apple saga. ‘The Nineteen Eighty-Four ad was a pretty good commercial’—I could hear Sorkin’s narrator saying these words. ‘It definitely made an impression.’ The dialogue—abysmal. Aaron Sorkin’s biopic is gonna be a total piece of shit, I thought. Not knowing the first damn thing about the subject matter himself he’s going to have to rely on an appalling number of secondary sources. Aaron Sorkin’s biopic will essentially just be a filmed reading of a wikipedia page, I thought to myself with growing satisfaction, beginning to feel more confident about how this thing would turn out. “Everything okay…?” Erin broke in on these thoughts. She had stopped writing and was looking up at me with curiosity. “Yes, yes, of course,” I smiled. “I was just thinking about the ad. So what I was getting at is that Steve began to conceive of the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad as much more than a commercial. In fact he began railing with greater and greater intensity against the very idea of commercials, even as he poured more and more of his immense spiritual energy into a commercial. ‘I don’t want to me hear any of you squareheads calling this thing a commercial,’ Steve warned us. ‘Next one of you who refers to the Nineteen Eighy-Four piece as a commercial is gonna get one of my New Balances up your ass,’ Steve would shout at us. ‘Calling the Nineteen Eighty-Four piece a commercial is like calling the Macintosh a typewriter,’ Steve shouted,” I continued. “Thus we were forced to follow Steve’s directive and refer to the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad as a ‘revolutionary vignette.’ Around Apple that was the official nomenclature for the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad. Even after Ridley Scott arrived in Cupertino and, as he put it, ‘could scarcely credit the bollocks that had built up around this stupid advert,’ his words, mind you,” I added, “thanks to the strange apocalyptic ideology that Steve had steeped the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad in before his arrival.” “What was Scott’s attitude toward the ad?” Erin asked, still scribbling. “Ridley Scott arrived in Cupertino in the fall of 1983 and walked into Apple Inc and the first thing he did was turn on his heel and walk right back out. I’d never seen anyone actually do that before,” I reported. “He turned literally on his heel and tried to wave down his fleeing cab, claiming to be ‘repulsed by the burgeoning madness,’ his words, ‘that had gotten hold of Steve and his team.’ Scott had a sharp tongue and, unlike anyone else at Apple, he was famous in his own right and thus not easily cowed by Steve’s affect. We had to retrieve him by force and triple his fee to get him to agree to even continue on with the project, and even then he couldn’t help wondering aloud constantly about the nature of what he had encountered at Apple. ‘What in the devil has gotten into you people,’ he would ask. ‘It’s just an advert. It’s a pretty nifty advert but at the end of the day it’s just an advert,’ he would say, usually when Steve was out of earshot, of course, having learned the hard way that if he ever wanted to finish and get back to working on Legend this was a fight he was better off not picking. It was Ridley Scott’s idea to give the woman a sledgehammer, though,” I added. “Steve wanted her to throw herself into the screen in order to shatter it, claiming that this was more symbolic and more consistent with Apple’s design philosophy, but the insurance company wouldn’t go for it, wouldn’t insure a stuntwoman to throw herself with that kind of force into the screen, so Ridley Scott suggested that she just throw a hammer. ‘Why not just throw a hammer?’ he asked. ‘For Chrissake, just have her throw a hammer. That will get the point across, won’t it?’ ‘No, it won’t get the point across, Bradley,’ Steve retorted. Whenever Steve was frustrated with Ridley Scott he called him Bradley for some reason,” I noted. “‘That’s the opposite of what we want here. That’s the pusillanimous version,’ he said acidly, ‘the pussy version. Throwing a hammer is a cowardly gesture, exactly the kind of thing I’d expect from a little pissant coward like you, Bradley,’ he told Scott,” I told Erin. “By this time Scott and Steve were really at each other’s throats, and every day brought a new struggle of some kind. This hammer fight was just one example. A small skirmish in the larger battle over the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad, which as I've mentioned was in a larger sense a battle over Steve’s soul. Ridley just wanted to just finish the damn thing so he could get back to the UK and to working on Legend and Steve wanted to linger over every little detail and draw the thing out as long as possible for all sorts of reasons, chief among them the sense that the longer we spent refining the ad the closer we were sure to come to ‘the crux of the problem,’ as Steve said. This problem was of course, as I’ve said, is Apple or is Apple not a corporation, or, put differently, is Apple or is Apple not a revolutionary ideology.” Erin nodded sagely, her lips pursed from concentration, and continued jotting down my observations. “This battle went on for many months, and I won’t bore you with every little detail of it—“ “Oh, please do, I beg you,” Erin put in. “—but I might add that it might never have ended,” I went on, ignoring Erin's interruption, “Steve and Ridley Scott might have gone on battling until they went to their graves with their hands locked around each other’s throats, had the board not stepped in and compelled, with the threat of the strongest conceivable penalties, Steve to air the ad during the 1984 Super Bowl,” I added. “Steve of course didn’t think the revolutionary vignette was ready. At every turn he equivocated, he insisted on pushing it back to the 1985 Super Bowl. This idea drove the board, and especially Mike Markkula, apeshit. He was already fed up with Steve’s antics and when Steve pressed for delay he lost it. ‘You insisted that we pay for a Super Bowl ad slot for your stupid crapintosh and now you want it to air it after the goddamn thing’s been on the market for a year,’ he shouted. ‘Or do you want to delay the release of the macintosh too? You fucking nitwit,’ he shouted, ‘just do your job and finish the fucking advertisement, it's a piece of shit that no one’s going to like anyway.’ Now, Steve could bear many injustices as a gnostic and entrepreneur,” I said, watching Erin from William Morris Endeavor adjust her position and bend gracefully over her notebook, “But Markkula’s harsh words clearly broke some essential restraint within him. At first he just stood there, his jaw taut, his eyes closed, breathing hard and fast through his nose, fists clenching and unclenching. Some reported hearing him say softly to himself the words ‘Om mani padme hum.’ Then all of a sudden he dove across Markkula’s desk and grabbed him by the lapels and headbutted him. No one knew where Steve had learned such a devastating martial-arts technique. Markkula’s nose was smashed instantly. Gone. Blood sprayed everywhere and the rest of the staff in the room leapt up out of their chairs as Markkula crumpled to the floor. Steve stood over him with a frightful leering blood-stained visage and loudly hawked a loogie and spat on Markkula’s toppled form,” I said. “What’s a visage?” Erin asked. “Some kind of weapon?” “Steve didn’t say a word,” I continued, paying no heed to Erin's question. “That was the one time any of us could recall when Steve did not launch into a tirade. He simply leered and spat and stalked out of Markkula’s office without a word. My theory,” I remarked, “Is that in this way Steve was daring the other executives and board members to challenge him on the issue of the ad,” I said. “Anyway, the others rushed to get Markkula medical attention, fearing on account of the welter of blood that was coming from Markkula’s ruined face and actually flooding the office that Steve had killed him. They thought Steve had driven his nose up into his brain. But this fear turned out to be excessive—just a broken nose was all it was. Initially the board wanted in no uncertain terms to send Steve to jail. He had crossed a line. ‘He’s going to be leaving here in handcuffs,’ they all said over and over again, shaking their heads. But thanks in part to the intercession of Rensburg, who threatened to quit if they carried out their threats, and thanks in part to me as well,” I added, “They softened their stance and assented to an exchange whereby Markkula dropped criminal charges and Steve agreed to air the ad during the 1984 Super Bowl. Initially the board wanted to cancel the ad entirely, but Steve’s threats to :them ‘if they so much as laid a finger on the revolutionary vignette,’ his words, were so fearsome that they yielded on this issue and let Steve proceed with his project. They knew that he would be out of prison in a few months and were terrified of what he might do if they angered him further. Steve’s relationship with the board changed that day,” I said. “After that things were different and it didn’t take long for their relationship to deteriorate completely. But that’s another story. Amazingly,” I added, “considering the drawn-out battle over the ad between Steve and Ridley Scott and Steve’s refusal to compromise on even the most trivial detail, the ad was actually finished in time for the Super Bowl. I remember it was between the Redskins and the Raiders. Couldn’t ask for a worse Super Bowl, but the ad had the desired effect…” I mused. After a moment I realized that Erin was looking at me perplexedly and that I had drifted off into reminiscences of the ad-viewing party that Rensburg had hosted that year. Rensburg had dressed up in the white tanktop and red short-shorts of the runner from the ad and, dashing through his own mansion, thrown a sledgehammer through a large mounted version of Steve’s Time Magazine cover. Truly, goldenrod days of yesteryore, Dickinson, I thought. “So anyway the ad was ready to go, it was all wrapped up and ready to be shipped off to CBS, except that Steve wanted to make one final change to it. Claiming that it wasn’t emphatic enough, he wanted to add a final frame with a giant hand, white-gloved in the fashion of old cartoons, gradually flipping up a bird while text scrolled across saying, ‘Fuck you, IBM.’ Steve tried to keep this last-minute addition secret, but, since he couldn’t figure out how to operate the Tektronix 4014, he had to enlist an intern to help him with it. Fortunately this intern risked Steve’s wrath and informed me the next day and I was able secretly to spirit the ad away to our partners at Chiat/Day so that no more changes could be made. I too was sick of the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad by this point and simply wanted the damn thing finished and furthermore I was confident that the FCC would reject Steve’s new addendum out of hand, thus jeopardizing the whole thing. Still, Steve kept at it, kept tinkering with the Tektronix 4014, determined to get his message inserted, unaware that the ad had been spirited away by yours truly and that the thing he was editing was actually a duplicate, until eventually he apparently gave up on this last anti-IBM gambit and consented to air the ad as it was. Do you remember when the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad aired?” I asked Erin. She looked up from her scribbling. “I was, let’s see, two years old,” she said, and returned to her scribbling. I nodded. Yes, indeed, two years old, I said to myself, rolling around on the floor, pooping in your diaper. But for those of us who saw it air in the midst of all those other message-tested corporate bromides the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad was unforgettable. A visitation from another dimension, a divine revelation, a beatitude, a phantasmagoric vision of human possibility, the televised equivalent of a bazooka blowing down the door to the living room of your brain, I thought to myself. Say what you will about the iPad or about Steve’s human-resources disasters, I thought, there was no doubt about it, the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad could only be called the greatest advertisement of all time. “Indeed…” I said softly, lost in reflection...