The announcement of the launch of the Apple iPad3 was greeted with predictable positive promotion in the media and the usual level of hysteria among the shopping public which we have come to expect.  When Steve Jobs died last year, it was as if a messiah had left the earth yet, when his c.v. is examined, it contains no cure for AIDS, no effective treatment for cancer and no answer to world poverty.   He designed cool looking computers, snazzy cell phones and juke-boxes of a size that can be carried anywhere.  We live in a world of small messiahs these days.

The fascinating thing about Apple is, of course, the company's ability to pull off the same con-trick time after time.  We all know that capitalism requires the constant creation and recreation of markets.  Apple have this down to fine art: they release an under-equipped product; indeed, by the time the product is released there are usually rumours circulating about the upgrade to come; and then a year or so later (if that long) they release the new version (at about the same time as the rumours of an even newer version start to spread).   There is not even any real competition here beyond mere chronology.  Apple competes, in effect, against itself, and everyone's a winner.  That sounds very close to a commercial equivalent of the secret of perpetual motion.

What is perhaps so surprising is that everyone - me included - falls for this.   You would imagine that, sooner or later, the buying public or the media would realize that we are all being systematically ripped off; but here is the single coolest thing about Apple - they have so taken hold of the imagination that we believe their ripping us off is actually doing us a favour; thus, the media hype continues unabated and the queues outside shops seem never to become any shorter.

The old Marxist social theorists of the fifties and sixties would no doubt have seen this as part of the "culture industry" whereby the ruthless exploiters con the hapless public into buying things they do not really need in order to keep their minds off more important issues.  As such, it is a bit like the old Roman bread and circuses trick, though with the focus simply on the circuses.

I suspect such an approach is both naïve and rather patronizing.  We public are not hapless dupes in the Apple barrel.  We actually enjoy being scammed. We are complicit in the con, so to speak.  Perhaps buying the upgrade allows me to feel superior to those who cannot afford it.  Perhaps it simply helps me to belong.  Either way, few can be unaware of the con-trick that is being played; yet many seem happy to play along and to pretend that Steve Jobs and his company are actually liberating us - though only, of course, liberating us from problems which they have first created for us.

Blaise Pascal would have seen through all the hype to the heart of the matter: Apple's marketing strategy speaks clearly to and capitalizes on the restlessness of the human heart in the face of fallen human condition.   We would rather fall for anything that distracts us from our ultimate mortality - even being ripped off to the tune of large buckets of cash every few months - than face the reality of our own mortal limitations.   Buying the latest upgrade makes us feel good about ourselves, makes us feel life is getting better, cooler, hipper, that we are still connected to the young and have what it takes.

Life can be fun, yet even our coolest gadgets will not be able to protect us from the final reckoning.  John Donne phrased it in beautiful, if somewhat frightening terms, when he declared:

I run to death, and Death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.