Pathfinders: Bad apples (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s a popular saying, origin uncertain, that ‘America innovates, China imitates and Europe regulates’. That’s not true anymore in the case of China, which is leading from the front these days in AI and green tech. But Europe continues to live up to its reputation, last month by fining Apple and Meta €500m and €200m respectively for certain dubious business practices deemed to be in breach of the 2022 Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU’s attempt at levelling the online playing field. The European Commission declared that Apple was guilty of anti-competitive behaviour with its App Store, specifically by ‘restricting app developers in their ability to inform customers of alternative offers or marketplaces that could be found outside its own and steer them towards purchases.’ Meanwhile Meta had erred by introducing a ‘consent or pay’ model which invites users to take out a monthly subscription or else let Meta hoover up all their Facebook and Instagram user data for sale to third parties (BBC news, 7 July).

The Meta model is a typical example of how firms exploit audience capture. They’ve got their customers hooked, so now’s the time to take the piss out of them with extra charges. It’s a bit like what the big streaming services have been doing lately by introducing adverts into paid subscriptions, and then inviting subscribers to pay extra to go ad-free, all in the name of ‘choice’. But is Meta really offering a choice? One might suspect that the real deal is ‘pay up and we’ll plunder your data anyway.’

Apple have always been known for being control freakish and attempting to lock their customer base into their own exclusive ecosystem, including a special patent-protected charging cable that no one else is allowed to make and which doesn’t work with any third-party device.

People say that capitalism drives brilliant technical innovation, but when you look at the way this happens, ‘brilliant’ is not the word that comes to mind. It is chaotic, spontaneous, unplanned and secretive, with profligate waste and duplication. Under the pressure of competition, each developer adopts a walled-garden approach, for the sole purpose of protecting future profits. Most will eventually fail, and the few successes which do emerge are of course incompatible with each other. Producers have every incentive to maintain this incompatibility, make their products impossible to repair, lock in customers, and oppose any move towards component standardisation. In the ensuing market battle, the ultimate victor may not be the best technical product but the one with the biggest marketing muscle. When you decide to ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’, you can end up with a cactus instead of an orchid.

Take electric cars, for instance. What’s deterring buyers, apart from up-front cost, is range anxiety related to lack of charging infrastructure, and long charge times. The real problem is the vast range of models, sizes and batteries being produced. Logically, producers could have cooperated in the first place to produce just one standard battery for all cars, together with standardised quick-replacement mechanisms, so you could swap them out at any garage in mere minutes. But capitalism doesn’t do logic. That’s not to say that EV battery standardisation won’t ever happen, but the battle for profits comes first, and never mind the waste.

Recent EU regulations have been an attempt to override the jarring contradiction between what producers do for profit and what people actually want. So for example, there are regulations to ban designed obsolescence, ban greenwashing, and enforce a ‘right to repair’. These are all worthy enough measures from an environmental perspective, but they are likely to damage the bloc’s overall competitiveness with the less scrupulous USA and China. The Wall Street Journal tartly responded with a 2024 article entitled ‘Europe Regulates Its Way to Last Place‘.

So it was that in 2022, in an effort to reduce much electronic waste due to the multiplicity of different charging cables, the EU put a stop to Apple’s proprietary Lightning port and forced the firm to change its Euro-market products to use the industry-standard USB-C charging port. Now Apple are hopping mad about the new DMA fine over its restrictive App Store, and have lodged an appeal. Perhaps they will argue that if the ruling were applied to offline traders, Tesco would be legally bound to advertise Sainsbury’s products, Asda to advertise Aldi, and so on.

Apple boss Tim Cook reportedly got on the whine-line to US President Donald Trump to complain about all this, presumably in the hope that Agent Orange would put the squeeze on the EU mandarins via more tariff threats. Trump might be less than enthusiastic though. He is thought to be greatly dischuffed at Cook’s polite but steadfast refusal to cave in to his demand that Apple ‘reshore’ all its production facilities to the US. From Cook’s perspective, this would be an utterly bonkers move which would cut a gigantic hole in Apple’s profits, given that US workers cost a lot more than Chinese or Indian ones. Moreover, it would require several years of intense planning, making it scarcely worth consideration given that Trump’s effective time in office could expire as soon as November 2026 with the US mid-term elections. So, appeal or not, Apple may decide to suck it up and pay the fine. €500m is a drop in the bucket to Apple, and a lot cheaper than eviscerating a $3tn empire just to give Trump a few good headlines.

If capitalism really worked in humanity’s benefit, there wouldn’t be any need to keep making laws to curb its natural tendencies. All capitalist producers are bad apples in this sense. Meanwhile attempts at regulation can often mean states or trading blocs are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of global competitiveness. The world has long since socialised production. What it now needs to do is socialise ownership and control of that production too. If it doesn’t, the spiralling chaos will continue, with disastrous prospects for humanity and the planet.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: Cashless but Not Profitless (2016)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Apple’s latest ambition is to rid the world of cash’ reads the headline in the Times (20 October), reporting Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, saying ‘we would like to be a catalyst for taking cash out of the system.’ The prospect of a ‘cashless society’ has been held out before. Apple’s plan is that people should use its smartphones to pay for things instead of cash or a cheque or even a debit or credit card.

A cashless society is not the same as a moneyless society, for a reason hinted at in a turn of phrase used by Christopher Burniske, described as ‘an analyst of digital currency’:

‘Apple’s is building a payment structure where you can use all kinds of digital means to transfer value.’

Actually, transferring value is not a bad way of describing one of the functions of money, that of being a means of exchanging values.

When something is bought (and therefore sold) what is happening is that the ownership of something that has ‘value’ is being transferred from one person to another. Money is the means through which this is done. In this transaction money represents a value that is transferred from the buyer to the seller in exchange for something in principle of equal value. The buyer will normally have acquired the money by themselves having exchanged something for it.

Things that are bought and sold (Marx called them ‘commodities’) have value because they have been produced by work, their value being the amount of necessary labour embodied in them through the work of the series of workers involved in their production from start to finish. At one time money had intrinsic value itself as a product of labour, that involved in mining, transporting and refining the gold or silver and then of minting these into coins. So exchange really was an exchange of real things of equal value. This time is long past. For over a hundred years now, ‘money’ has been paper (and with the new £5 note plastic) and metal tokens for value. These still represent value even though they have no, or not much, value themselves.

Now that the electronic technology exists there is no reason why cash could not be replaced by digital money. In fact it already is to an increasing extent. It is doubtful, though, that it will ever completely replace cash. In theory it could, but a cashless society would be not be a moneyless society.  It would be a society in which cash had merely been replaced by a digital currency. It would still be a buying and selling society where goods and services were produced for sale on a market with a view to profit. It would still be a society based on the ownership of the means of wealth production by a tiny minority with the non-owning majority being forced to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary. It would still be capitalism.

But what a waste of human ingenuity and IT that could be more usefully employed to help organise the production and distribution of wealth to meet human needs in the non-market, money-free society that socialism will be. Apple’s real aim of course is not so much to help a cashless society emerge as to make a profit from selling the devices it makes and the apps to use them.