Tim Cook

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Apple downplays the value of human achievement

In January 1984, Blade Runner and Alien director Ridley Scott shot an Apple computer Super Bowl commercial mocking Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four — and it changed the television advertising landscape forever. It featured a woman in a white tank top and bright red shorts destroying a monochrome screen with a sledgehammer. This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook promoted a new ad titled “Crush” that gave the exact opposite message and led to a furious backlash on social media. The ad begins with lights coming on in a factory setting with cultural items and artifacts stacked on top of each other, all gathered on a giant industrial press. Then the press begins to lower as a Sonny and Cher song plays.

Saturday

Ben Sixsmith

My day at Sun Valley

‘What would you like for dinner sir?’ ‘What do you recommend?’ ‘The grilled cicadas are very fine, sir. Or the fried cockroaches.’ ‘Sounds delicious.’ Smiling, I look around the table of the Sun Valley restaurant where billionaires from Jeff Bezos to Tim Cook have convened to talk shop in a safe environment. It is a kind of tech-based relative of Bilderberg — the annual conference at which presidents, prime ministers and assorted other elite figures quietly come together. No journalists allowed, I was told. ‘I’m not a journalist!’ ‘What are you then?’ ‘I’m a thought leader.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A public intellectual.’ ‘Eh?’ ‘I have a column in the New York Times.’ It wasn’t true but it got me in.

sun valley

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Four main takeaways from the House’s Big Tech antitrust sideshow

Here’s a terrifying thought: Mark Zuckerberg is the only person in Silicon Valley that the political and intellectual right can trust when it comes to ‘Big Tech’. Wednesday’s ‘Antitrust’ House hearing resembled a group of Neanderthals trying to reason with Data from Star Trek. The worst of both sides was on show as Democrats and Republicans jockeyed for the news cameras, rather than getting real answers on antitrust practices or how Silicon Valley bows to the authoritarian regime in China. I watched the grueling insurance seminar so you don’t have to: here are the four big lessons.1.

big tech