User-friendliness and fascism
economist.com
economist.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus
The Bauhaus was broadly socialist, persecuted by the Nazis, but believed that industrial mass production would allow architects, artists, and designers to bring art/design cheaply to the masses. You can see that line of thinking about product and design from Jony Ive back to Dieter Rams and on back to the Bauhaus.
A great deal of modern architecture (e.g. the International School came out of Bauhaus émigrés to the U.S. – Gropius and van der Rohe) is derived from the Bauhaus. Modern architecture has been criticized not only initially by fascists, but subsequently by a broader cross section of society, because the architects were making concrete, glass, and steel structures than had little or no human touch (cf. the landscape of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange). Tom Wolfe wrote a short critique of modern architecture in 1981 called From Bauhaus to Our House.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
The socialist aesthetic, privileging the designer, can be just as controlling in its way as the fascist aesthetic. But this article gets Apple's aesthetic lineage and politics wrong seemingly out of sheer ignorance.
That said, FLW's politics were not strictly socialist, but were a complex combination of liberatarian, pacifism, populism, Wisconsin progressive, support for the Wobblies, and anti-semitism. Some argue that he was also close to Kropotkin (an anarchist). This earned him the suspicion of J. Edgar Hoover and a file in the FBI.
There is an interesting kernel here, but it's less about Apple's focus on clean aesthetics than about the seamless interoperability and user-friendliness of the entire Apple product line; clean aesthetics are just one part of that.
But modern architecture and designs' famous slogans are "form follows function" and "less is more." Following that, Steve Jobs has said:
People think it's this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
So the opening dichotomy set up by the Economist writer is slightly misleading, as if he's revealing something about Apple and design that wasn't already implicit in their aesthetic lineage and public statements.
The point you're highlighting, which I think is relevant, the authors sums up:
In many areas—health reform, financial reform, urban-planning reform, and more—efforts to make life more user-friendly for citizens are targeted by both libertarians and by vested commercial interests as vaguely fascistic efforts to centralise control or limit freedom.
Again, the effort to rationalize complex systems doesn't really have a political valence in the way he's set it up—it's not libertarian or corporatist or fascist.
For example, libertarians often argue for the elimination of byzantine statutory systems and requirements. They argue for tax simplification, the repeal of complex or unused laws that remain on the books or that are open for arbitrary application, and in general argue against prior restraint or over-broad criminalization of behavior. To wit, Ayn Rand:
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
The rationalizing effort also extends to fascist regimes that rethought urban architecture (e.g. Speer), and 'made the trains run on time,' and inserted the state into the middle of capital-labor relations in order to achieve social harmony. It extends to socialist countries that simplify consumer choice by restricting market entry and simplify provision of welfare by providing uniform national systems with guarantees and remove volatility from the economy by socializing investment. It extends to the arguments of classical liberals who sought to rationalize the whole system of society to sweep away arbitrary powers and customary rights, and reorganize spaces and cities (whether Hausmann redesigning Paris or Henry Ford rationalizing production or Fredrick Winslow Taylor rationalizing management).
The effort to rationalize and simplify crosses almost all Enlightenment era or modern political ideologies. The only difference is the focus of the rationalization effort.
Wikipedia summarizes the core of the argument:
The idea is that small distributional coalitions tend to form over time in countries. Groups like cotton-farmers, steel-producers, and labor unions will have the incentives to form lobby groups and influence policies in their favor. These policies will tend to be protectionist and anti-technology, and will therefore hurt economic growth; but since the benefits of these policies are selective incentives concentrated amongst the few coalitions members, while the costs are diffused throughout the whole population, the "Logic" dictates that there will be little public resistance to them. Hence as time goes on, and these distributional coalitions accumulate in greater and greater numbers, the nation burdened by them will fall into economic decline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancur_Olson
So, the idea is a kind of 'death by a thousand cuts' where each little loophole or exemption is not so large that the public will rally against it, but the cumulative effect of interest groups ends up creating a byzantine system of laws which become unintelligible and hold back growth.
Politicians, while running under the banner of broad ideologies, know that their practical support comes from smaller groups capable of mobilization (whether it's financial contributions or unions getting out the vote). So, interest groups win out over the general public interest.
I somewhat disagree, there have definitely been points in history when corporations have exerted control over a populace, although most generally it's workers, not it's customers, through the use of private security like Pinkertons, and through company towns.
However, Apple really doesn't fit that bill. I agree that this is a very awkward metaphor.
"A private copying levy (also known as blank media tax or levy) is a government-mandated scheme in which a special tax or levy (additional to any general sales tax) is charged on purchases of recordable media."
I'd say
I've been a UX professional for fifteen years, focusing on the field of usability.
To me, "user friendly" evokes images of Microsoft Bob, software "wizards" that leave no room for user control, and chirpy in-dash car systems that overload the user with icons and friendly messages, instead of just getting the usability right in the first place.
I prefer the term "user subservient."
A good system should be subservient to the user, easy to understand, but ultimately leaving the user in control.
Apple and Microsoft go too far towards "user friendly," and the Linux approach veers too far towards user control without usability.
On a more abstract level, it just feels weird and maybe subversive to characterize the restriction of choice as freedom. I mean, it does make a sort of sense, esp. after taking human psychology into account in that restricting choice to a manageable level might make it easier for people to make decisions. But it still feels weird. Maybe it just exposes "freedom" as a flawed concept, and a tense balance between orders of magnitude-larger forces is all there is. That's a weird Lovecraftian world to live in, though.
The current system is (sort-of) like Linux. Pretty ad-hoc and less easy to use / figure out for the un-initiated. Often basic things are left out, not because they don't exist or work, but over principle.
The Democrats want to upgrade the current HC system to a Mac and the Republicans are certain that we'll end up with Windows instead.
For some people a word to describe that philosophy is "fascist." For these people, fascism is not a form of government; rather it is a method, a toolset for achieving your ends.