I did retail theft at an Apple Store

I hope Jane Appleseed is okay

In 2014, I robbed an Apple Store.

Twice, I should say.

In my defense, the Apple Store in question is no stranger to theft, in that it a) pillages the transient beauty of Grand Central by suspending the motion of humans traveling to and from money/love/death with its commercial siren song, and b) actively conceals the labor mechanics that enable the illusion of everything in our pockets.

So what I’m saying is that even if my theft wasn’t commonplace, it was at the very least appropriate: when I plugged my lifeless iPhone into one of the laptops on display, I was only stealing power from a company that had sucked the power out of mostly everything around it.

My first theft.

Because this robbery was going to take some time and I didn’t want to draw suspicion, I played the part of interested consumer, double checking that the computer did indeed have a dictionary, a calculator, a camera, and assuring the concerned Apple employee that no, they couldn’t help me find anything and that I knew perfectly well where to access the internet and how to ask it questions like “where is the nearest exit” and “can you get in trouble for plugging things into other things” thank you very much.

These escapades led me to open the Mail app, which one would expect to be empty (seeing as this was a computer that did not yet have a human counterpart), but for the fact that Apple profits off of the complete and utter obfuscation of emptiness. We are not empty, we say along with rectangular pieces of glass. See here? Red circles, feeds to refresh, the past to dwell on. We do not even have time to consume this tiny black box, let alone the world. We are stuffed, fat, living, happy.

So the inbox was happy too, full of emails about the lives of fictional characters, presumably written by Apple marketing executives, nay, Apple marketing staff, nay, Apple marketing interns, presumably working in prim white rooms with no windows or doors, the kinds that served as backdrops for early-aughts Apple commercials.

I thought about these interns, about how while their colleagues were creating Super Bowl commercials or at the very least, copy for the Apple website — work that would be seen by millions of people, would manipulate millions of people — they were to deal only in the margins of our desires. No one would read their writing. Tech bloggers would not read their writing; Tim Cook would not read their writing; even the very people they were writing for — the consumers — would not read their writing. We would only double check to make sure that there was writing, the promise of movement, life, and that we could acquire this promise in exchange for money. The emails say “no emptiness here” and nothing more. They are chimeric holograms, pools that disappear the second you dive in. But you will never dive in.

I dove in. 

More than anything I felt like I had been airlifted into a surreal parallel universe, in which everyone is wealthy and on vacation and having beautiful children who go on field trips to aquaria.

The inbox in question belongs to Jane Appleseed, and one wonders whether Jane knows her private life is being used to sell hardware and promises.

Utopia. Geoffrey went to Thailand and “couldn’t have asked for better weather.” Q4 sales are outperforming expectations. Lily’s soccer team finished the year in second place.

Everything is second place. Nothing goes wrong, nothing exceptionally well. The world is quasi-infra-ordinary. Everything is perfectly imperfect. 

Something else to know about Jane’s friends and coworkers is that they all use two spaces after periods.

I paused. There was somewhere I needed to be. I do not remember where — this was over ten years ago — but if I am anything like Jane, someone invited me to brunch. We made reservations.

I closed the Mail app but then hesitated, opened it again, exported the entire inbox, zipped it up, and emailed it to myself. An email full of emails.

My second theft.

You were expecting something sexier, I know. I baited your click with promises of a fast-paced heist. A box of iPhones under my jacket, a car chase, a furtive alleyway black suitcase handoff.

Now let me bait you again: this is only half the story.

I get home and I read more emails. A full year later, I go back to a different Apple Store and download the emails again. I missed some. They are still there where I left them; nobody bothered to change anything. Jane hasn’t sent or received any more messages. I hope she is okay.

I take notes on Jane. I am a little obsessed. As far as I can tell, her job is to receive pie charts and Keynote presentations. She went to college with Elliot Page (not that one). A dog named Sissy. A child named Katy. 

Then things get stranger: 

Ms. Barnes sends an email in June inviting Jane to a science fair in May. 

Curtis emails that he will be in town for the weekend and does everyone want to go to a basketball game? A full two years later, Kirk responds by suggesting they go to a dinner after the game.

Nina sends Jane an email about brunch. “If you're interested, let me know so I can talk to the other Dads and start looking into restaurants,” Nina says. “Maybe we could give the moms some time together and take the kids to the park.” Do Nina and Jane identify as dads? Were Apple’s notoriously strict brand standards, in pre-marriage-legalization 2012, cool with this?

I think about what it all means as an Apple marketing strategy. I realize the strategy doesn’t matter. And this is why it all matters to me: it was someone’s job to write this nearly invisible copy. It is not contrived in the ways everything else is contrived. Someone in a room was given the opportunity to write and they did. They created a fucked up universe and that’s okay because nobody will read it and because the universe is fucked up. This is real. Blissfully mundane but expressively important. They left extra space between the sentences for you.

In April 2011 something interesting happens. Jane Appleseed receives an email… from Jane Appleseed.

I double check the email addresses. They match. A resume is attached.

Nothing of this sort for a while. maybe it was a fluke, Jane was having a confusing day. But 2 months later:

The saddest email I have ever read.

I still think about Jane and her emails. I think about Jane’s children. Have they grown up? Moved out of the house? Do they check in on her? Are they looking at the same moon as me?

But most of all, I think of the intern that wrote Jane into being. About whether they have freckles, whether they were promoted to an office with windows. Maybe they maybe know a Jane? Maybe Jane and the intern went ice skating once, maybe on their way out they didn’t want to take off their skates because it would mean they would need to stop holding hands, maybe they never stopped holding hands, maybe it took the intern weeks to finish these emails because they only had one hand to spare and maybe two pairs of feet grew numb under shoelaces under a desk in a white room without windows and maybe the numbness and absence of windows didn’t matter because they were in love. 

I think they were. I see it in the late night emails about camping trips, in the school supplies list, in the spreadsheets. Most of all, I see it in the spreadsheets.

I am projecting. Does it matter? Project with me.

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🐌 Snail mail

Replies from readers

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As much of a singular phenomenon as Thrones was, it was the focus of a brief era when Facebook was sending a flood of traffic to publications, and nearly every major media company sold out the things that differentiated its publications in order to take a sip. I don’t think there was any illusion about how precarious a reliance on social media would be, but it was surprising just how quickly that source evaporated. Internet platforms shifted away from distributing articles, the page view boom times ended, and still today, publications are reeling.

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🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

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