John Stewart’s appearance on The Daily Show this week left me feeling a range of emotions: frustration, anger… and then confusion.
The opening monologue was about the threat of AI; specifically, how corporate interests are planning to use it to replace humans in the workforce. Because they’re all talking a big game about curing diseases and solving climate change, but what AI actually does is a simulacrum of most knowledge workers out there today.
And the interview with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan (embedded above), was about their struggle to regulate the biggest tech monopolies, who are clearly and demonstrably exerting their influence to maintain their power and strangle potential competitors.
It was during that interview that John Stewart, whose former show The Problem With John Stewart was an Apple TV+ offering, revealed that his corporate bosses had asked him not to cover the material in this very episode.
This is meaningful because, since the outset of Apple TV+, the company has been dodging complaints of interference in the programming. It started with a more general complaint, talking about “intrusive executives”. Then there was a story about Apple killing a show about Gawker, the publication that had outed Tim Cook as gay.
To be clear, Apple has pushed back on stories like this, insisting that creators have total autonomy. Frankly, I believed them at the time; shows like See and The Morning Show were not “family friendly”. And moreover, why should Apple meddle in a process they fundamentally have no expertise in? The quality of their programming was clearly evidence, to me anyway, that they were letting the professionals work.
So when John Stewart says Apple denied him the ability to talk about this issue, well, I believe him. And it highlights how different the stakes are here. Because that prohibition isn’t about setting the right tone for content on Apple TV+, and it’s not about an issue that might highlight a personal slight against the CEO. This is about the reality of one of the biggest issues in technology today.
Still, the clearly-bad look of this is something Apple should have anticipated. Why would Apple have decided that it would be better to alienate a star like Stewart, and ultimately tank one of its own shows, in order to not provide a platform for a show that communicates these two terrible truths:
- Tech companies are developing AI not to further humanity, but to help corporations spend less on yucky and expensive human resources; and
- Apple is engaging in bullying, monopolistic practices, putting their own increasing market value ahead of customer experience.
I don’t think either of these facts are terribly controversial… at least, not to anyone who pays attention to the tech industry. I guess it’s more painful to hear when it comes from John Stewart on a popular mainstream TV show, than, say, in an erudite opinion piece in The New York Times.
Still, this feels like yet another red flag against Apple. They were never going to stop that message getting out, and they were only ever going to look like frightened control freaks.