There was a minor flap recently when Andy Rubin compared Apple to North
Korea.
Many turtle-necked Apple hipsters
had their feathers mildly ruffled, and bloggers gleefully reaped a tiny flurry
of page impressions. Quite right too, because Rubin was clearly wrong. Apple is
nothing like North Korea, because Apple is the China of the tech world.
Lend me your ears for a minute, while I make a broad-strokes argument for this
statement.
Not so long ago, the consensus in the West was that political liberty and
capitalism went hand-in-hand. Wherever one arose, the other would inevitably
follow, and in their wake would come prosperity. When China started
liberalising its markets, it seemed self-evident that the rise of capitalism in
China would bring democracy in its wake. The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989
were supposed to be a sign of things to come, a precursor to wider revolution.
The West's argument was persuasive - it was borne out by a century during which
the world was a roiling cauldron of political and economic experimentation, and
nearly every command economy had failed. Today, the international landscape has
changed entirely. The West has had a catastrophic financial meltdown, and
things are only getting worse. There is a sense that the US-led Western order
is in decline, and the Chinese-led east is rising. China has been the fastest
growing major economy in the world for a decade, and the Communist Party is
more firmly in control than ever. Today, there's no apparent prospect of
political reform. Chinese intellectuals and diplomats are beginning to mount an
increasingly assertive and persuasive argument for a system of government that
brings prosperity without liberty, and dictatorships the world over are
listening very, very carefully.
In the software world, we've also spent decades arguing that freedom and
prosperity go hand in hand. This is the "Open
Source"
justification for free software: a pragmatic position that we should have
liberty not for its own sake, but because it produces better outcomes. This is
also the argument behind open hardware platforms, behind open Internet
standards, behind interoperability. Some bloody battles had to be fought with
monopolists, but in the main the last 20 years have been a stunning success for
openness. There has always been a
minority who have made a more
fundamental case for liberty, but it's important to recognize that they have
lost the debate. The engine that drives the most important Open Source projects
is entirely based on a superficial utilitarianism - the Googles and IBMs of the
world don't contribute to Open Source because they love liberty, but because
the financial return they get from doing so is greater than their investment.
The fundamental distinction between openness and free-ness hasn't been
important so far, though, because ideology and utilitarian arguments were
aligned. Now, things are changing. No-one can deny that Apple's mobile device
strategy has been a complete slam-dunk. The iPhone is the most profitable
handset out
there
by far, and the iPad is shaping up to be huge. Apple's long-term plan is
breathtakingly ambitious - it's making a play for complete dominance in the
mobile market, with an integrated offering that controls everything from
content to applications to the devices themselves. It's therefore making a play
for total control of the way most people will experience computation in the
near future. Not even the most die-hard free-software hippie can deny that
Apple's success has been won on merit - their devices are simply, unmistakably
better than the competition. Open platforms have been out-classed in almost
every measurable dimension. So, we may be entering the next stage of the
computer revolution with devices where every native application has to be
approved by a single authority, where even programming languages and
development tools are centrally controlled. Apple's competitors and imitators
are watching and taking notes, because far from being punished by the market
for this, they have profited beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.
Apple and China have put pragmatists who also value freedom in a quandary. In
the past, practice and ideology aligned neatly: political liberty and economic
progress went hand in hand, and so did open platforms and commercial success.
There are now powerful counter-examples to this line of thinking, and it seems
clear that making a pragmatic argument for liberty has been a strategic
mis-step both in politics and in technology. Advocates of freedom will have to
turn back to more fundamental arguments: human rights, ethics and morality. We
should recognize that at this point in time, we're losing the war of ideas. I
must admit, in my darker moments I'm pessimistic about our ability to make the
case persuasively to a disengaged public.
PS
To keep this post manageable, I've not talked about factors that muddy the
waters for the technical side of the argument. For instance, I don't think
Microsoft is a counter-example, and neither is Apple's support for open web
standards. I'll save those for a future post. I'd also like to point out that
I'm absolutely not anti-Apple - I own a lot of Apple gear that I use every day.
My position regarding China's place in the world is a caricature of Stefan
Halper's superb book "The Beijing
Consensus: How China's authoritarian model will dominate the twenty-first
century".
You can listen to him speaking about this book at the Cato Institute over
here.
