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All Power to the Pack Rats!

Ikea and Apple’s War on “Hoarders”

I. APPLE VS. THE “HOARDERS”

THE APPLE IDEOLOGY is sleek and clean. It proposes a futuristic lifestyle without attachments or clutter, where mankind is free to chase down every desire, creative and otherwise, free of the “fuzz” of possessions. Like a nomad on the steppe, movement, horizon, and conquest are the only concern.

The room of the modern man is stark, but in its simplicity it exudes wealth and sophistication. There is just a bed or futon and an iPad. None of the old-time accoutrements which signified intelligence, artistic interest, or a curiosity about the world are evident. There are no magazines, books, or records anywhere. Just perhaps some high-priced “products,” a.k.a. toiletries, in the bathroom. Everything he or she needs is on the Cloud.

Things, stuff, and doodads are just hang-ups, after all, which serve to drag us into our past and harness us to prior ideas of who we were and what we are supposed to be.

The Apple world is apart from the old world. It is one where we can be anything, free of the wretched past. Just a being of light and electricity who wafts effortlessly from whim to caprice to passing fancy. Like their room, his or her body is also clean, shaved; streamlined for action. If one has possessions, one is seen to be rather fuddy-duddy and certainly not a sexually vital contemporary being.

The Apple proposition is a sixties futurist-Zen minimalist throwback, lifted from Scandinavian designers like Panton and Saarinen, whose Nordic functionalism was influenced by modernist movements like De Stijl and the Bauhaus.

While modernism proposed ways of dealing with the cataclysmic upheaval brought on by industrialism, Apple’s proposition is the Western capitalist commercial: freedom, ease, sex, and cool control of one’s environment. Apple actively encourages the population to lose their possessions. Music? Store it on the Cloud. Books? Store them on the Cloud. Film, magazines, newspapers, TV are all safely stored in the ether and not underfoot or stuffed in a closet. It’s a modernist monastery where the religion is Apple itself.

Meanwhile, those who have hung onto possessions are castigated, jeered at, and painted as fools. The hit TV show Hoarders (A&E) identifies people with things as socially malignant, grotesque, primitive, dirty, bizarre. In a word: poor. Apple has turned the world upside down in making possessions a symbol of poverty and having nothing a signifier of wealth and power.

This is actually a bourgeois sensibility, an aesthetic of Calvinists and other early Protestants/capitalists. While wealth adornment was a no-no, extraordinary wealth accumulation was a sign of godliness and beatitude. These bean counters were pioneers of the modern aesthetic: owning things = vulgar; having obscene piles of money/capital beyond what one could ever use = divine.

The antistuff crowd invokes Eastern Buddhism and communism-lite in their put-down of possessions and the people who “hoard” them. It’s supposed to be a sign of superstition, a hang-up, a social disease, greedy, sick. People who have things are derided as “fetishists.” Why would one have a record collection when all information is available online to be had by the technologically plugged in (which is, at this point, a requirement for everyone)?

Why would one have a bookshelf when Google has taken all the book content in the world to be dispersed through its beneficent magnanimity? Books are heavy, dirty, dusty, and disintegrate into your lungs. Why should there be encyclopedias when there is the wiki-world? And so on. Why should there be record stores, bookstores, video stores, shopping areas, kiosks, cinemas, theaters, opera houses, libraries, schools, parks, government buildings, meeting halls, et al? Public spaces, markets, and interacting with other people are primeval, germy, and dangerous. After all, it can all be done online, you primates. The only thing one needs is a Whole Foods, some hip bars, and an airport so as to jet to Burma before it gets lame.

This is fine for the cyberelite; they can live as they wish. But why is their ideology impressed on all of us through this shame-based propaganda? Why is the “hoarder” so loathed by the Apple authorities?

Answer: because he or she is feared.

The “hoarder” has “things” after all, items like books and records which are clues to a past when these things were stores of knowledge, signifiers, totems of meaning. The cyberlords want it all destroyed. The library must be cleaned of nasty old books and filled with computers. The record collector must renounce his or her albums and replace them with an iPod. This is an obvious concern if the multibillion-dollar iTunes Inc. is to effectively rein in recalcitrant stragglers in a market it dominates so entirely, selling “songs”—which are, for them, just puffs of free digital smeg-phemera—for ninety-nine cents a pop. No resistance to the realm can be tolerated.

But it’s not only the money they make from iTunes or their various other virtual marketplaces—which have left all physical businesses shuttered (aside from fro-yo places, nail salons, and gin-joints)—that they care about. The computer lords want to control everything, and central to controlling all things is controlling perception. Perception of the way things are, the way things work, and what’s happened in history so that they can frame their version of events and control the narrative; mind-controlling the masses to make them into better, more compliant consumer/servants.

Just as governments spend enormous sums of money on textbooks, monuments, films, and museums which heroize their regime and frame their particular version of history, the computer overlords are concerned about the myths of the culture. Their ascendancy must seem inevitable, brilliant, brave, noble, just, and right.

The “stuff” that the “hoarder” retains, however, might tell a story which refutes or challenges their version of events in some way. The record collection or magazine or newspaper might reveal some clue to a social movement or trend or fashion or sensibility which defies their moronic stranglehold on consciousness. A burp of resistance. A clue to a way out. A signal that life doesn’t actually depend on high-speed Internet access. And the physicality of the item infers that things meant something once, that everything wasn’t always a meaningless, equivocal post on Tumblr.

Of course, the “hoarders” who are profiled on the show are extreme examples of people who hold on to things, but the message is nonetheless clear. Just as Willie Horton was exploited for racist ends and invoked to create fear and distrust of an entire group, the “hoarders” who are ridiculed, shamed, and “saved” on the television are meant to tar all owners of stuff with their brush.

The shaming of targeted “hoarders” is intended specifically to cajole, bully, and embarrass the population into giving up everything they have—not just possessions but ideas, ethics, rights to ownership (both intellectual and otherwise), privacy, decency, justice, fair treatment, and human rights.

In the Apple Internet age we are expected to surrender absolutely everything; anything less is filthy and deranged “hoarding.” All content is free for the Internet lords who dispense it—or not—at their pleasure.

Apple Inc. is often seen to be selling an image or signifier of a lifestyle, but for them Apple is not just the means to life, but reality itself. Apple demands that everyone throw out all their other possessions for their ersatz midcentury plastic designs. These devices, which never stop “upgrading” and are therefore almost immediately obsolete, present a world where there is only Apple through which we get our information, our culture, our relationships, our sense of self, our love. Apple is the big apple—the world, the cosmos, sin, and godliness—and you’ve got to have it every day.

Apple’s proposal would be impossible without the coordination of its dear ally, the Swedish megacorporation Ikea. Ikea, the original “i”-demon, is their ideological compatriot, and both are similarly ubiquitous features of the modern world. No dorm room or young person’s house is free of middlebrow minimalist Ikea things on which to place their iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc. “iKea” manufactures items which paradoxically comply with the iWorld’s “antistuff” doctrine: instantaneous furniture and utensils, created by slaves, that disintegrate or explode when moved.

II. Ikea’s Conspiracy to Smash Romance

Ikea furniture is necessary for the success of Apple’s antistuff doctrine. Not only because Ikea furniture eschews the future (its nihilistic furniture is designed for bivouac living), but because of its nefarious effects on domestic life.

When one conspires with one’s partner to construct a piece of Ikea furniture, it is a harrowing task and speaks volumes of the faith one has in one’s relationship. No matter that faith, it will most likely destroy the love affair or at least irreparably damage it, sewing the seeds for its imminent destruction. The instructions, supposed to be universal and written in pictograms, are embedded with tiny details, extremely easy to miss, that are absolutely vital to the success of the project. Wrong assembly results in nightmarish frustration, squabbling, and despair. The instructional manual always warns of impending death as well, casting a fearful morbid pall over the (ideally) mundane job of shelf building.

Why does Ikea make their manuals into time bombs of discord? Because Ikea wants couples to break up. Each breakup results in more bachelors and bachelorettes, which results in more Ikea products sold. Abandoned love affairs result not only in abandoned dreams but abandoned furniture, abandoned apartments, abandoned housewares, abandoned throw pillows and end tables left in the rain on the road or given away as Craigslist clutter.

Breakups are attractive to the Apple-iKea alliance for the isolation they ensure. An isolated population is more easily manipulated, misled, shorn of its possessions, its self-respect, and its sense. Romantic dissolution is the ultimate example of the imperialist’s tried-and-true “divide and conquer” strategy. These corporations want the desolation of love: a population alone, miserable, confused, and in a state of self-loathing sexual desperation.

Both Apple and Ikea are closely linked to the pornography industry, aesthetically, philosophically, and economically. While home computers’ popularity and ubiquity stemmed from their use as cryptoporn proliferators, both Ikea and Apple’s designs stem from the ideology which spawned modern-day “adult” programming: Nordic functionalism. Indeed, the ideas of Nordic functionalism—a design idea which eliminated the buttresses, gilding, and facades of old architecture in preference for clean lines and modernity—resulted in the modern pornographic paradigm. Though functionalism began as a version of Le Corbusier and Bauhaus architecture, it ended as a total weltanschauung.

Along with the frills and indulgences of old-time design, this doctrine of socialistic simplicity swept away the clutter of the old world’s baroque and courtly sex play and distilled it into the highly efficient erotica that is now standard fare. From its late-sixties beginnings (when Denmark led the world in decriminalizing smut), Norse pornography has been, like a science expo, brightly lit and clinical. An exposition of dispassionate technique and disregard for feelings, touch, communication, and affection. Form furiously follows function. Porn action, instead of being a lascivious sleaze-fest (replete with contrived story arcs) as it was in the “blue” era of “smoker” flicks, began to resemble lab work with moans and groans inserted like test data; pellets fed to rats.

What was the purpose of bringing sex into the light? Scandinavian design was an art of transparency. No obfuscation or sentimentality. Proscience and antireligious. Absorbing this philosophy, Danish and Swedish pornographers spearheaded the well-lit, unsentimental nudes which appeared later in hardcore “triple-X” features, ridding the world of the sentiment, treacle, and pretense of the Pompeo Posar/Bunny Yeager “cheesecake” era. The “girl next door” was duly evicted and her place rented by brusque sex workers in an assembly-line brothel. Ikea shelves are storage’s unsentimental analogue. Frank, dispassionate shelves concerned with getting the job done, eyes glued to the bottom line. Beds are futons, a type of mattress originally used in Japan by prostitutes. Finnish cloth by Marimekko eschews plaids or complex patterns for simple, uncomplicated Rorschach blobs so one’s living room becomes a psychiatrist couch of lurid—yet frank and clinical—revelations. Swedish and Danish furniture looks like the gear from a low-budget film production: director’s chairs, boom lights, and simple pallets.

Facebook—and other devices for social control, neighbor spying, and mass surveillance—get their great power and ubiquity from the promise and lure of sex. Easy sex for free from multiple partners is the inferred reward. If people are coupled, in domestic bliss, this is less easily manipulated. Ikea wants to keep the population in a state of romantic flux. This is the reason for the hawking of sexual freedom, caprice, and whimsy as a bedrock of liberal civilization, as opposed to old control models which relied on sexual repression.

Ikea is ultimately a junior partner of the ascendant Apple megapower, which wants to erase history, strip people of all their belongings, and rehabilitate total poverty and cosmic displacement as modern, sleek, and fun. All this for complete control and ownership of the entire globe. Ikea has accepted the lieutenant’s role in this unholy alliance. Like Apple, Ikea sneers at planning, permanence, and real possessions, beyond their ephemeral bric-a-brac. They suggest that the dorm room or living room or bedroom is just a momentary resting stop before we all become ultraefficient digital matter, buzzing at, around, and within each other in an eternal orgiastic cyber-cum-athon. But always orbiting the Apple deity: life-giver, death-merchant, illusionist; that from which all else originates.

How long before we’re convinced that hands, arms, legs, and appendages are just bothersome? The cyberlords have already convinced us that maps, paper, pens, and even push buttons are somehow incredibly inconvenient and clumsy, leaving us scraping and pawing like drooling bug life on their flat and sleek digital dildos. Google’s search engines, maps, etc., have likewise taught us to refrain from using our apparently out-of-date and hopelessly inefficient brains. What’s next? Giving up all thought, consciousness, history, and agency? It’s all just in the way.

“Hoarders” are the only thing standing between these incomprehensibly rich, all-controlling, degenerate, digital despots and the absolute destruction of any deviant or alternative consciousness—and indeed any nonofficial history or interpretation of the world. We must therefore say: ALL POWER TO THE PACK RATS!!

Help a “hoarder” consolidate and safe-keep their things today. Lend them money to rent a storage locker. Volunteer to help them keep their things at your place. Their stuff is the final shred of resistance to the destruction of all non-Apple-approved human endeavors.