Full Disclosure: I’m writing this post on a $1,400 laptop (2010 MacBook Air — just before the Thunderbolt upgrade, god dammit!), listening to a $10 premium AAC-encoded version of Kanye West’s opulent rap album, through $350 Sennheisser headphones, via a $300 headphone amplifier (cheap, I swear, in comparison to the decent models!), sitting in my expensive New York City apartment, wearing, oh yeah, a $50 American Apparel heather gray hoodie, $90 Brooks running shoes (not even for actual running! I bought a great pair of Nikes that treat me knees better), and $50 Levi’s 501 pantaloons (with a $599 iPhone 4 in one pocket).

I noticed something about today’s Apple announcement, and the waves of disappointment the company’s latest, shiny bauble made across my various timelines. (Unlike the Doctor, I guess I can have a few…) People are kind of disappointed with the iPhone 4S’s apparent non-upgrade-y-ness. It doesn’t have a new case design (ie, for normal people, how the outside of the phone looks). It doesn’t do any hyperbolic ‘cures cancer’ stuff. It doesn’t have real 4G speed, nor interchangeable camera lenses. It doesn’t come in any new colors. And, as the semi-canny among us will note, an iPhone 4S won’t look different than an iPhone 4, an eighteen-month-old model that now only costs $99 (with contract), and which is basically worthless as far as cultural capital goes.

The mass disappointment among tech geeks and non-tech-geeks alike is absolutely insane, and I will tell you exactly why: This disappointment is insane ¹ because I, B Michael Payne, has had enough of this shit. Really no more, no less. I think the whole tech miasma stinks to high heaven with evil. Let me tell you why?

As seen above, I have a lot of expensive shit. I also don’t have very much money, which until about two decades ago, would have been impossible. But now (the ‘now’ of the last couple decades), credit cards and home equity loans — basically the insane extension of credit to every single person — has made a fat pile of cash that’s only purpose is to be spent on stuff. It’s fair to say that I’ve mostly missed the credit boom. I had wracked up a few thousand dollars of credit card debt after college, which I painfully paid back a few years after I stopped charging things. I still have, lets say, lots of student debt, which isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. No mortgage, luckily, I suppose. I have been infected with — or to really take ownership of it, let’s say I fell in love with the idea of, or, to put it more plainly, was stupid enough to think I could afford to partake in — the consumer class desire to spend, spend, spend. Because everything around us is an ad for something else, even if it’s just the frame of a lifestyle that comes as vacuous and empty as every hipster trendpiece, waiting to be filled in with the material possessions you choose to furnish it.

That’s why there are Mad Men-branded Banana Republic suits, finally, now. Mad Men created a consumer desire for trendy suits, and it stupidly didn’t have a product in the wings ready to fill that desire. Now it does.

But I don’t care about Mad Men and suits (yet, I’ll get back to this point). The sheer insanity of the disappointment of the Apple event, and the idea of Apple events, and the larger culture around them — Apple-centric tech blogs — is entirely insane and terrible. The problem with it all is that it’s mere spectation on insanely powerful and effective consumption. Apple is literally the biggest company on the earth, with a market cap that sometimes surpasses what’s left in the American government’s piggybank! I mean, come on. Come on! Come on! Let me rhetorically shake you! Apple is basically as large as fucking Exxon fucking Mobil! And people love Apple. I mean, that’s basically why Apple is so large, and I don’t begrudge them their success at all.

The insane thing to me is that Apple’s made an event out of announcing the possibility of buying new things. If you think about it, sure, every Christmas implies a shopping season. But at least you get all the Christmas stuff, too. What Apple’s done is to convince the world that it’s totally awesome and fun and fucking great to hear about new things they’re going to sell us. Which, again, yes: I really like using my iPhone 4, which I bought at full price after I lost my previous iPhone 4. (Please don’t ask me about my checking account’s health right now.) The thing is, and also I’m all for innovation in technology, but are iPhones and Android phones really where we should be the very most fucking fired up for innovations in science and engineering? Really? Consumer goods? You realize that, like, that presages the fall of western civilization, right? Fuck outer space, let’s build a new iPhone!

And people, who were a few moments ago so lathered up for it, are now so fucking mad like babies about how the new iPhone isn’t awesome enough. Not to get all Louis C.K. here (“build your own, then, if you think you can do better!”), but the original iPhone was probably all the phone most anyone would ever need in his or her lifetime. I mean, they had Einstein, Marie Curie, FDR, Joan Didion, and Emily Dickinson before the iPhone 3GS was even available for pre-order.

Who is to blame? In this case, I say Apple’s not on the string for all of it. For banks giving out outrageous home loans and lines of credit based on nothing but increasing their own bottom lines, yes fuck them. People are always going to want status, and the way it’s set up, status is money. For Apple, yeah they’re kind of like the banks pushing shit loans on people, but they’re also just trying their best to make cool things people will buy. They manufacture the possibility of the desire, but we mint desire inside our own hearts. I blame us. And especially the tech blogs. (I guess by “tech blogs” I mean, mostly, Apple blogs like Brooks Review and all the other empty-calorie, John Gruber-aping punditry sites that don’t add anything to anything.) This brief post on uber-nerd Dr. Drang’s blog gets right to the problem of it:

It seems like every Mac-related site I visit or subscribe to is spending more time telling my how much money Apple is making and less time telling me how I can make better use of my Macs and iPhone. A little cheerleading is fine, but I don’t need to see daily stories about how Apple is dominating this sector or that. The smartphone marketshare battle with Android, for instance, has absolutely no effect on how I use my iPhone or how I live my life.

I think this is a real problem with tech writing. There’s a lot of it, it trickles down from the wired to the tired, and it’s only getting bigger. Right now, tech writing and pocdasting is a weird, incestuous mix of rumors, investment speculation, and the occasional review that only says, in essence, “wait for the next model”. The constant churn of tech blogs’ gloating posts about how great Apple is at making us more efficient or whatever is just a confidence game. But it’s not really a confidence game like a confidence game is usually played. It’s like their middle-man-swindlers just making money for Apple. Sure, I’m sure there’s a nice sideline business in selling ads on such sites, but they’re basically just wringing people into a lather for a manufacturer who’s notoriously opaque and has a notoriously slim line of product offerings! I mean, for Apple there’s actually way less to write about than for other companies. But that’s like all you hear on fucking Marco Arment’s blog. It actually makes sense for developers to tout Apple, since an increase in the number of Apple users means an increase in their customer base. So good for them. I can see why Apple developers are so happy to get people into a lather about everything Apple.

So what’s my problem? I feel like I haven’t really gotten to the point yet, so I apologize. My problem is that the network of sites that promote Apple, and Apple itself to some extent, are constantly agitating the black box inside our hearts that spits out taste and wants, hoping that we’ll keep clicking back to read their inanity and then buy the new thing so we can read more about it and get sick of it just in time to buy the new one — after they’ve built up a big desire and expectation in us to get it.

I am someone who struggles with desire. I want everything I see, and I tend, as you can now see, to lash out at the people dangling the thing in front of me rather than at myself. That’s a me-problem. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong of me to find the dangling sheer repugnance in itself.

This is my problem with #menswear blogs, too. We’re going through a really really bad time right now. I think shits going to be bad for a long time, but there’s a boom in luxury goods buying as well. Not coincidentally, there’s a boom in menswear and style blogging, too. Except that the leading menswear blogs — A Continuous Lean, Park and Bond, Put This On — are also selling the things they’re touting. But they also manufacture the desire for these things, and the way they do it is sort of self-replicating. Just like anyone who reads Daring Fireball for a few weeks and loves his iPhone starts blogging about whatever the fuck, people who read the usual style blogs inevitably start posting fresh blog looks chock full of camouflage cargo pants and foppish pocket squares, and the next thing you know, there’s another menswear blogger, standing tall improbably in the midst of yet another recession.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t write about the things they love!

What I’m saying is that wherever there’s a culture of writing and commentary around consumer goods, there are going to be a very few people making lots of money off it, and tons and tons of people making no money but expressing their interests and joys for free. And that it’s essentially unfair for people to be duped out of their time and what little discretionary spending they have in order to join an order of folk who don’t honestly care about them, and who exist only as leeches who, again, skim off money from people in need and send it to the very largest money-making companies in the world.

And it’s not even about the money, as I’ve tried to say, but about the desire they make. That’s what’s insane to me about this (and basically every) Apple product announcement. I just know so many people who are barely holding on — myself included, if I’m being honest — who just fucking want all this stuff. People with good jobs and people with no jobs. And it’s the pundit class more than anyone who seems to be the mediators of this desire, which serves no social good and no higher function that desire for its own sake.

I might be a hypocrite, and an asshole, but I can tell you plainly and honestly that I am done with the consumer hype cycle and the internet desire machine. I’ll stick to my part of the internet, which gets in fights about the authenticity of mp3 blogs and NYC bands. Tech bloggers can stick to theirs, shoulder to ankle with companies as big as Exxon Mobil and America itself. I’ll work with desire for its own sake ², and they can manufacture it for pieces of glass and 8 megapixel cameras.

What I’m saying, ultimately, I guess, is that the sort of desire and feelings that Apple inspires is something close to true love. I sort of see Apple and all consumer electronics as variations on a Fleshlight, with a Fleshlight’s amount of metaphysical spiritual worth to them. And seeing people get so wrapped up in it just bums me out. Not jizzing all over Apple products is a part of my response to all the #classwar and OccupyWallStreet types of things going on, and should be read, I suppose, as such. But, you know, I think there are lots of things out there worth desiring about which Apple — and even bloggers! — can’t tell you anything.