Tim Cook Is An Embarrassing Coward

If there was ever a company with "fuck you money," it's Apple Computer.

With a $3.8 trillion market cap and $65 billion in cash on hand, there's simply no excuse for CEO Tim Cook's sniveling cowardice during the Trump era, whether we're talking about his fawning presentation of shiny baubles to our mad idiot king, or his attendance of the premiere of overt right wing party propaganda just hours after Alex Pretti was murdered in the street by a masked Trump gestapo.

Apple has bottomless resources when it comes to lobbying government. There's simply no reason for this level of feckless subservience by Cook. This amount of gushing enthusiasm for the fascist project is an active choice, unnecessary for the continued survival of the company, and perfectly representative of the broad, systemic failure across every level of modern American executive "leadership."

I bring it up because Tim was recently the subject of this sad interview with Esquire to celebrate Apple's 50th Anniversary that stuck in my craw.

After a lengthy prologue celebrating a company that used to be innovative and interesting, the Esquire interview starts with this doozy of a question, which offers fairly typical "view from nowhere" framing of modern American politics:

Esquire: Customers can have long memories, and there are Apple customers across the spectrum. Some might see Apple doing something honoring Pride Month and say, “I’m off Apple.” Others might see you at the inauguration and say, “What the—?” I think I have a good understanding of you as a person and your values, and I can say, I’m going to trust that Tim knows what he’s doing, that Apple knows what it’s doing. What is your calculus when it comes to keeping people’s trust in the company, and in you as its leader, whichever way winds are blowing?

Please note how "believing that gay people are good and should be allowed to live" is contrasted with overt support for corrupt fascism as symmetrical ends of what's determined by the interviewer to be acceptable political discourse. Apple is, it's implied, required to treat these opposites equally if it's to "maintain trust."

This is typical "both sides" framing of a corporate media terrified of being honest about anything lest it cost them ad revenues, access, or the favor of (usually) right wing ownership. Corporate media can't be honest about fascism because it would cost them money (they expect you to be too stupid to recognize this).

Cook responds with just an absolutely precious pile of meaninglessness, where he tries to redefine "consistent values":

Tim Cook: I think you have to have values that are consistent and that you don’t change those with the wind or with the changes in other people. But I think you should interact and engage with everyone. I’ve interacted with both political parties in the U.S. and the people in the middle. I’ve interacted with governments all around the world, some that I have very different views on. But I think until you engage, you never know—you never understand—where somebody else is coming from. And you have no influence at all.

Both the question and the answer treat fascism like it's just an ordinary political party and a normal, accepted part of acceptable political discourse. But fascism is more akin to a cancer. You can't genuinely partner with, engage, or have a dialogue with it because it's purely destructive.

Trying to "engage" with fascism is like trying to have an intimate emotional relationship with a running chainsaw. The very act of framing fascism as a reasonable partner for dialogue is an act of propaganda that validates and normalizes fascism. Again, you're expected to be too dim to notice this.

This is super common across corporate media, which is financially incentivized to pretend that the real problem in the current American moment isn't grotesque corruption and fascism at the hands of soulless autocratic assholes and bigots, it's just some sort of ambiguous, sourceless, partisan animus nobody has control over.

The cure for this ambiguous partisan animus is, you're told, more engagement and more talking and more outreach (and conveniently more ad impressions). It's especially important to be dutifully respectful of the furthest reaches of the right wing ideology, lest you be falsely accused of censorship.

You'll see Cook frame it this way again here:

These things can’t move around as the world is moving. They have to stay. They’re our rails—but that doesn’t mean that you don’t communicate and engage with people that have different views. That’s where I always come from, anyway. So you’ll see me everywhere, and you’ll wonder, Oh, he’s meeting with somebody that has a different view than him. I think that’s good. I think it’s good. I think a problem in the world right now is that it’s so polarized and different views aren’t shared or discussed. They just become hardened. And I don’t think that’s good.

Corporate power – and by extension corporate media – can't really be honest about the real source of most modern "polarization" (corruption, greed, racism, intolerance, ignorance, and right wing zealotry). That would cost you access, ad engagement, and sales. So instead you get this sort of inane, formless, shapeless cack, comically terrified of the pesky truth.

In the interview, Cook prattles off milquetoast verbal support for all the stuff Trump is currently taking a hatchet to, including accessibility, sustainability, the environment, privacy, education, dignity and respect. It culminates in a brief exchange that lets Cook off the hook for any ethical inconsistencies:

ESQ: So, lest there be any confusion: Your values are the same as the day you got here?

Cook: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. They’re the same.

After that you're treated to a bloated epilogue about Cook's blue collar upbringing and some hollow platitudes about American ingenuity. But the interviewer never really challenges Cook's overt support for autocratic zealots who are actively (and unsubtly) destroying literally everything Tim Cook claims to believe in.

The interviewer of course was likely chosen specifically with the understanding he wouldn't do that. But Cook's profound fecklessness–and the media's inability to be honest with its readership about U.S. corporate leadership failures–is still a fitting celebration of the 50th anniversary of the cult of Apple all the same.

When I was a kid my mom was a school social worker who brought home Apple IIe and Apple IIc computers during the summer. Apple ignited my love of computers. I have an operational vintage Apple IIgs sitting just over my right shoulder as I write this. Which is to say I'm not unsympathetic to the cult's origins, or the interviewer's obvious, gushing adoration of the company's prodigious history.

But that Apple is long dead. In its place is a hugely profitable, popular monolith that offers semi-interesting iterations of once-elegant hardware, helmed by yet another formless, shapeless bobblehead, too beholden to the mindless pursuit of impossible scale to demonstrate any sort of coherent ethical backbone.

As Trump's power wanes (and I do believe it will wane), you'll see executives like Cook retire. They'll be steadily replaced by younger, resurgently-diverse CEOs who believe all the same things Cook did, but will swaddle themselves in ample rhetoric about "turning the corner" and "rebuilding a new tomorrow."

They're going to desperately want you to forget the cowardice of this era.

I desperately hope you won't.