Applecore: The TV Aesthetic That Captures the Vibes of Today

This weekend has been pretty good. I made a gallon of ramen broth. I went running for the first time since, a week ago, I tripped and fell and landed hard on my shoulder. I found decent parking spaces whenever I took the car out. But the real highlight was the second-season premiere of Silo, the Apple TV+ show starring Rebecca Ferguson, Common, Tim Robbins, and Steve Zahn.

That cast alone should be enough to entice you, but fine, here’s the pitch: Sometime in the future, mankind has wrecked the Earth, poisoning the air so badly that everyone has had to retreat into a vast underground silo to wait out the apocalypse, possibly for hundreds of years, maybe longer. About 10,000 people live there, doing all the typical jobs you’d expect in a post-apocalyptic subterranean small town: data entry, farming, recycling, engineering, with a police force and an elected mayor maintaining order and democracy. But, of course, things are not as they seem, and Ferguson’s Juliette, an engineer, begins to suspect the powers that be are hiding some important truths from everyone. Oh, look, I found the trailer!

What really gets me about the show, apart from the good writing, the careful pacing, and the producers’ willingness to kill off major characters, is its aesthetic: Here in the future, in the bowels of the earth, with mankind desperately trying to survive while trying to preserve some semblance of North American normalcy, the technology they rely on is… very 1980s. Their office computers have old-school CRT monitors and clacky keyboards and text-based interfaces; the networking is awkward, and data is passed around on heavy tape drives and hard drives. More important, while computers in Silo are everyday devices, they are not everywhere—they’re used by trained people for specific tasks, and that’s it. The majority of Silo residents could live their entire lightless lives without touching or needing one.

The aesthetic looks great, distinctive. The physicality of the devices has a visual heft you couldn’t get if everyone was using touchscreens or gesture-based interfaces. All that hard, molded plastic is a reminder that the real, non-virtual world is a force the characters must contend with. (There are some surprising complications to that later in season one, but I won’t spoil that for you.)

Silo is not the only show to embrace this approach to technology: Severance, another Apple TV+ show, envisions ‘80s–’90s-style office computers. It was there in Amazon’s Tales From the Loop, which revolved around robotics, and in Netflix’s 2018 miniseries Maniac, starring Jonah Hill, which added a psychedelic angle. The Time Variance Authority in Loki has the look, although the tech is basically magic. Should we throw in the new Dune movies and series? Does Star Wars count? Doubtless there are more—maybe you can send me examples¹?

This aesthetic is not quite retrofuturism, which usually gazes farther back, to the 1960s, 1950s, and 1930s, for a vision, often very Art Deco, of the centuries and millennia to come. It’s also the diametric opposite of whatever Black Mirror is. As far as I know, it doesn’t have a name or a proper definition, so I guess that’s why I’m here! Let’s do the definition first:

1. Computers are physical devices: They have keyboards and cathode-ray-tube monitors, often monochrome. Rarely are they laptops, but if they are, they’re clunky and a bitch to carry around. Flatscreens may exist, but they’re usually embedded in a wall. You’ll never see a mouse.

2. Networks exist, but aren’t always on: Computers can connect to one another, and to a central server, but the connection must be made. It’s not a default, so information is not always at one’s fingertips. Forget Wi-Fi; this world runs on cables.

3. Computers are for specialists: While computers are hardly exotic, it’s not like everybody owns one or uses one for work. The characters who do have special training, whether it’s just knowing how to input data or actual coding/hacking skills.

4. Computers are essential, but not ubiquitous: In these fictions, everyone knows that computers are, in some sense, running the world. But they’re not the only thing running the world. They’re just one of a host of factors shepherding the stories along.

5. There are probably no mobile phones: They just complicate things too much, making some plot points too easy, others too difficult. If they do exist, they’re definitely dumb phones. Plus, walkie-talkies are way cooler!

6. Computer technology is static: These fictional worlds seem to have reached a limit in what computers can do—there’s no new software, no new hardware. The hard-molded cases and big monitors and weird interfaces just are. Other technology in the stories may evolve—power sources, space travel, whatever—but not the computers. Corollary: There are no computer brands in these stories.

7. And yet computers are capable of magic: Even though the form of computers have ceased evolving, the machines themselves can perform feats far beyond the abilities of our modern systems. Generative AI? Pffthbt. These boxy calculators can create life itself, can let us travel through time, can simulate the human brain or the entire universe—all in green-on-black monochrome.

I think that’s about it? Maybe I’ll add to or alter these points based on your input, or my own whims, but this seems like a good starting point.

Now, what to call this? Obviously, it has to end in -core, because everything does these days. So what names can we dredge up from 30 to 40 years ago that suit? Ataricore? No, the connotations of Atari are a little too basic for the tech we’re talking about. Commodorecore? I like that one, particularly because the Commodore 64 was such a tangible, tactile device. But today it feels too obscure. PC-core? Amigacore? No, I think we all know what it has to be:

Applecore.

While I’m reluctant to give the folks in Cupertino any more publicity than they’re already getting for everything they do these days, it’s the moniker that fits. (Maybe we can lowercase it?) And besides, apart from the corporate name, Apple is now far more associated with the word Mac and with iEverything. Apple, in fact, harks back to when the devices it sold were actually called Apples. My very first computer was an Apple IIc. Man, I miss it! I wrote on it, I learned to program on it, I beat Ultima IV on it. That somewhat-portable little white computer was my gateway to the future.

And I think that emotional association is why applecore (which your computer will likely autocorrect to AppleCare) is so ascendant². Today, computers are everything and everywhere, in our pockets, our cars, our ears and eyes and heads, weightlessly connecting us to everyone and everything all the time. Data passes back in forth in gigabytes, in terabytes, so fast and in such quantities we no longer pay attention. And unless you are an Old, you know very, very well how to perform all manner of tricks and manipulations with your devices, whether they’ve got a keyboard or not. There are still specialists, true experts, but compared to the denizens of applecore worlds, we’re all genius hackers.

And we’ve all realized: This sucks. We are living in an incredible vision of the future—one that was imagined and outlined in the 1980s and 1990s—and yet it’s disappointing, occasionally on a technical level (oh no, I lost my 5G signal) but mostly on an emotional level. Our shared virtual world lacks the immediacy, the vivacity of real-world connection, and every advance in computing technology only serves to draw us farther in, to make us more reliant on silicon and electrons to achieve the most basic aims of our lives. I won’t even get into misinformation and ransomware—the point is, we feel trapped by the technology we once saw as liberating. Worse, we don’t even necessarily want to escape this trap. We like CarPlay, Amazon, the watermelon game, turning on the air-conditioner on the way home from work, vegging out to TikTok and Instagram. I mean, we hate them, too, but we also like them.

Better then to imagine a world that evolved differently, where computers are still neat, still cool, still objects of wonder that make life easier now while portending a future of ever greater magic. They may be big and clunky and expensive and finicky, but they sing to us, in glorious 8-bit chiptune, of the possibilities of human invention, of tomorrows still hopeful and undefined. Applecore tech is not a panacea, these worlds are hardly paradises, but it allows the universe to be a slightly simpler place, where the conflicts and resolutions of actual (if fictional) people take precedence, uninfluenced by the algorithms to which we submit ourselves every time we scroll. It’s a world many of us lived through, and desperately think about returning to, even if it means living a mile underground with only Rebecca Ferguson to keep us company.

Notes

1. Just email me at [email protected].

2. And not just because the shows are being created by Gen-Xers and elder millennials!

Read Yesterday’s Attempt