Whenever Apple launches a product, I watch the associated buzz with a sick fascination. To call the degree of attention lavished on Jobs’ keynotes unusual would be a gross understatement and, as opposed to the geek-frothing that accompanies something like video game launches, Apple announcements show up in the mainstream media with clockwork regularity. But because I am always intrigued by why things like this happen, I just wanted to take a moment to think about the fervour behind Apple announcements and, in classic Scrawled in Wax style, make some grand and totally unsubstantiated pronouncements. So:

1) Technology is culture. Naturally, I don’t mean that in a literal sense. But what I do mean is the perhaps obvious point that if an age has a marker of its concerns and its desires – truth and science for the 18th century, industry for 19th and early 20th – then technology, specifically that of ‘the screen’, is that focal point for our age.

2) If tech is a marker of culture, then Stevenotes are, for better or for worse, like the signposts of where we are going. If modern cultural desire can be located in and around consumer technology, then one way to explain why there is so much hype about these events is that we are sheep in search of a shepherd. When Jobs says this is where digital music is going, we all listen. When he first launched the iPhone, we said, ‘oh, this is where mobile communication is headed’. When he positioned the iPhone as a platform rather than a product, we got a sense of how the entire digital economy will shift into competing silos of tools and applications made for a specific ecosystem.

But more importantly than all these industry-specific trends, Apple keynotes seem to be taken as heralding the arrival of a long-predicted future. Take Mobile Me: while very cool it is not an original idea (it is essentially the same thing as Microsoft’s Live Mesh except that it, ya’ know, works). But with Apple, I think the key is that rather than having to go out and integrate a product or service into your own life, they provide a complete ecosystem that you have to – no, want to – integrate yourself into. As the representative of the future in the present, Apple become your ticket to tomorrow. But also, take Jobs comment about eBook readers (“The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore”) and you get a sense of the problem with supply and demand economics being the only determinant factors in what amount to cultural trends.

3) If Apple keynotes are cultural signposts, then we are entering a new phase of commodity fetishism in which the product is valorised as saviour. ‘Commodity fetishism’ is a term used to describe a situation when a product is believed to have an inherent value, rather than one ascribed to it by culture and or the labour it took to create it. But the term fetish is also useful because it relates to desire and the unconscious, and this is something that is conspicuously absent from discussions around Apple. It is perhaps trite, but there is a reason that Apple products are so consistently described as ‘sexy’; imbued with desirable contemporary characteristics (sleekness, minimalism, connectedness and, um, crazyfuturehotness), Apple products become objects of desire (i.e a fetish) that capture something about what I suppose you could call the ‘cultural libido’. And in a moment when tech is the signpost of culture, and Apple the signpost of tech, then the big question is: what does this concentration of desire reveal about the current era? It’s too large a question for me, but if you want to take a stab at it in the comments, I’d appreciate hearing some ideas.