One year ago today, Marx's theory of the "fetishism of commodities" was quite literally "stood on its head." Bill Gates somehow managed to make a computer operating system sexy. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of consumers stood in line before midnight in the summertime heat last year to purchase a product that's mainly intended to get them to work more efficiently. Henry Ford would kneel in awe if he could somehow know.
How Gates accomplished such a strange feat is still quite mysterious, but worth examining. Computers have somehow turned work into play for many people. They can "wear the wig" at work, playing Minefield when they should be recalculating their spreadsheets. It's said the game is so addictive to some that Gates himself removed it from his own workstation. Employers are now using "SurfWatch" style censorship software originally intended for children to prevent their employees from having too much fun with their machines.
Windows '95 was marketed as the toybox that it is. A fun, playful means of masking the drudgery of ordinary office work. And certainly anything that could so supplant such drudgery might actually become an object of true desire in every sense of the term. The Lacanian "lack" of our working lives is, after all, quite real. So many of the things - play, snacking, sex, music, love - that make for a fully human existence are not allowed from 7 to 7.
The Rolling Stone's song Start Me Up was a natural anthem for this operating system of our dreams for more reasons than just the allusion to the user-friendly "Start" button. Not only does the button itself work as a familiar double entendre in the context of the song, but the subliminal reading of the lyrics by those familiar with the song seals it. "You make grown man cry/you make a grown man cry . . ." Jagger sings as the song fades, and then just at the end, before the DJ realizes it, he mutters " . . . You make a dead man come." That's how Gates envisioned his new operating system: a commodity which would make consumers literally ache with desire. We were supposed to crave Windows '95, yearn for it, clench our fists and teeth and toes tight with anticipation of the final commodity. The commodity that would finally set us free.
Certainly he wasn't as successful as his dreams, but few Americans have ever dreamed with the force of Bill Gates. Gates's passion for marketing his business products as entertainment masterpieces have the subversive potential to truly cast contemporary working life into an unpredictable "ELSE" statement that feels liberatory and might truly be.
Copyright © 1996 by Robin Markowitz. All Rights Reserved.
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