(c) Chris Alan Wilton
Curtis Brown
The Patent Office
Ithaca, N.Y.
Tim Cook
Apple Inc.
Cupertino, Calif.
Dear Mr. Cook,
Assuming the brain behind Flaneur, Vacation Robot and Pants Kickstand needs no introduction, I’ll just cut right to the chase. Facebook announced two weeks ago that it was buying WhatsApp for $19 billion. The week before that, Comcast struck a deal acquiring Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, and in January, Google — which has been snapping up robot firms for months now —bought Nest for $3.2 billion. Yet all this put together is chump change next to the $159 billion you guys have socked away under the mattress. Brows are furrowing, eyes narrowing, fingers tapping and mouths asking what the hell the plan is. “Apple is just standing still,” as Jay Yarow of Business Insider put it.
With Steve Jobs, we shrugged off eccentric stewardship. The billion-watt bulb screwed into that black turtleneck had a way of blinding would-be critics. But his successor — no offense! — is more like a human screensaver in a Brooks Brothers shirt. You’re running “perhaps the most overcapitalized company in corporate history,” says one of your biggest shareholders. Bloomberg analyst Leonid Bershidsky sees the hoarding as a sign that you may be “deeply unsure of the company’s prospects.” Even blogger Matthew Yglesias, who, when not sitting and eating, is generally standing and clapping for all things Apple, calls the cash stash “more of a distraction for management than a useful tool for flexibility.”
You need to go big, Tim. What would bring the magic back? Apple at its best is not a seller of gadgets but a shaper of culture. Apple put warmth, tactility and personality at the center of the digital revolution. But something’s gone off course, hasn’t it? If you’re like most people, you’re reading this on a little phone. And every once in a while, you look up from the phone and vaguely notice that your partner is saying something or a child (yours?) is looking up at you imploringly or your lunch companion is laughing desolately at her own joke or the person you were having sex with when you reached for your phone is now dressed and gone or someone is shouting at you because, it seems, you’re about to walk off the subway platform and into the maw of an oncoming train — and you sort of blink momentarily at these people and situations before refastening your eyes on the little glow-box, thinking, “If it’s that important, there’ll be something about it in my Twitter feed.” Except actually, you don’t even think that; all you think is, “Enough of that. Where was I?”
iContacts are a game changer. They’re Apple’s answer to Google Glass. It’s not just contacts versus glasses, though there’s that. (Surely we’ve reached not just peak beard but peak glasses!) No, the awesome thing about iContacts is that to get online, you have to look into someone else’s eyes. The nanoscreens saline-suspended in iContacts face outward.
From a cultural perspective, this will be revolutionary. Charles Baudelaire and Walt Whitman imagined urban consciousness as sensually enmeshed in a web of strangerly eye contact (“O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love,/ Offering response to my own — these repay me,” wrote the latter). But poets, as one of their ranks once observed, make nothing happen. It takes a CEO to make their dream a reality, Tim.
Google senses trouble, which is why it’s distributing an etiquette sheet advising members of “the Glass explorer community” how not to be evil with the ridiculous product they’ve bought. “Standing alone in the corner of a room staring at people while recording them through Glass is not going to win you any friends,” it admonishes. “If you find yourself staring off into the prism for long periods of time, you’re probably looking pretty weird to the people around you.” You don’t say!
iContacts puts an end to all this Terminator-style augmented-reality crap, in which you peer up above your eyebrow to read a Yelp review of the pasta you and your date are eating. Instead, you gaze directly into each other’s eyes and read that review, catch up on email, watch YouTube or whatever. True intimacy is restored. If the date is going well, you can send each other videos, watch them together and giggle, without breaking eye contact. If it’s going so-so, you can navigate toCrowdpilot for real-time, crowd-sourced dating advice and scroll through it right there on your suitor’s iris. And if it’s going very badly indeed, you can look into his eyes and sext someone else. The eyes have always been windows to the soul of another. Now they’re windows to something better: your own data.
Technology is the apple we ate to fall from spiritual grace; will yours be the Apple that makes us whole again?
And it’s not just intimacy we’re talking here but reciprocity. Want to check your Facebook news feed? Find someone you like, love or at least know (or maybe she’s just standing there fortuitously) and look into her eyes — which gives her a network connection too! Eye contact is no longer a casualty of online life but rather its implicit prerequisite. Solitary staring at a smartphone will finally be seen for what it is: masturbating in public. The truly well adjusted will connect with the wider world the old-fashioned way, through coupling.
I hasten to add that I don’t mean this in any kind of normative way. I am all for tripling, but in practice it’s difficult for all but the wall-eyed, like my friend Ryan. Meanwhile, gay people, straight people, gregarious asexuals, breeders and dry humpers alike are going to love this coming Mac renaissance of connectedness. While devoted couples lock eyes and murmur, “Refresh, refresh,” promiscuous people of all persuasions will relish the saucy second looks they get in bars, saunas, Europe or wherever such people go. It takes different strokes, folks, which brings me to another point: wearable trackpads. Enough said! Put ’em wherever feels right. Go buck wild. Leave the Google Glassy-eyed to tilt their heads and finger their temples, muttering to themselves and looking philosophical as they contemplate long lives of solipsistic solitude.
iContacts say to the world, “We’re sorry for what we’ve wrought, and we want to make it right.” It takes a big man to admit he’s wrong, Tim, but it takes an even bigger man to make trillions of dollars doing it. The iPhone was an amazing invention — it put the world in people’s pockets! Unfortunately, it also put their heads in their asses. For chrissakes, Cook, I saw a woman breastfeeding in a restaurant yesterday, and while the baby looked longingly into her eyes, she stared at her iPhone. When both are wearing iContacts, mother can Skype or text, and child can watch cartoons, with the growing bond between them unbroken.
For truly, do you have any idea how important sustained eye contact is to early emotional development? Neurobiologists will tell you that 98 percent of our neural wiring — not to mention billions of years of our evolution — is bound up with nuanced transmission and reception of facial cues. We’re walking off a cognitive cliff with these smartphones.
That said, I’ve never thought it entirely Apple’s fault. The era of decadent distraction did not begin in 2007. Before the smartphone, it was the cell phone and before that, the landline. Before phones and TV, it was books. Nobody remembers that now. “When a man takes a book into the corner,”wrote William Butler Yeats in 1906, “he surrenders so much life for his knowledge, so much, I mean, of that normal activity that gives him life and strength, he lays away his own handiwork and turns from his friend.”
And there’s your in, Tim. Remind the world that the problem of media distraction is as old as the printed word — and offer it the first solution in history. There are two competing narratives of technology: one lapsarian, the other salvational. Technology is the apple we ate to fall from spiritual grace; will yours be the Apple that makes us whole again? A generation of journo-dorks awaits your answer. “Seriously, what good is that cash if you don’t put it to work in a — dare I say — magical way?” asks Eric Jackson of Forbes magazine. What could be more magical, Eric, I mean Tim, than a world in which we all look each other in the eye again?
This is the magic, and it’s priced to go. If YouTube for $1.65 billion was a smooth bargain in Google’s rearview mirror, future generations will see your $18 billion acquisition of iContacts from me as highway robbery. The deep discount partly reflects the lack of a built prototype (screaming children, angry wife, busted Dremel), but mostly it reflects my firm philosophical belief in the urgency of now. Also, it’s negotiable. We entrepreneurs know that impatience is a virtue, and God knows I need the money.
Yours truly,
Curtis
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