Which Is to Be Master

Yesterday, the Independent reported that researcher Derik Kauffman had revealed that Apple’s iOS keyboard contains a hidden list of around 100,000 words and phrases, across every major language, that it won’t autocomplete or swipe-type.¹ Most are vulgar, drug-related, or violent – the boring, defensible majority of any blocklist. But buried in it are phrases that are politically alive: »dictator Trump«, »United Ireland«, »occupied territories«. In Hindi, you can’t swipe »Modi braggart«, in French, »immigration too high«.

»A speed bump is the Judge Dredd of traffic law enforcement: it builds the verdict into the road, and there’s no appeal. Apple has done something similar to political speech«

Nothing is banned, strictly speaking. You can still type in every phrase letter by letter. What disappears is the predictive suggestion, the swipe that completes a thought before you finish moving your thumb. Try »United Ireland« and the keyboard offers »United Iceland«; try »dictator Trump« and it offers »dictator trumps«, with the name quietly reduced to a common noun. Kauffman calls this »a very light-touch form of censorship«, adding that »at the scale that Apple is operating, it only takes a light touch to have a big impact«.

French philosopher Bruno Latour has a theory about this. His essay on »mundane artifacts« treats the speed bump, or »sleeping policeman«, as a moral decision a town chooses to delegate to poured concrete rather than to a law, sign, or police officer.² A law can be debated, appealed, repealed. A speed bump is the Judge Dredd of traffic law enforcement: it builds the verdict into the road, and there’s no appeal. Apple has done something similar to political speech. Nobody has to defend the position that »dictator Trump« is too dangerous to suggest, as no one has stated that position. It’s just how the keyboard silently behaves.

But Apple’s list is softer than a permanently poured speed bump. As firmware, it can be revised at any time by anyone with the right access, for reasons nobody outside Cupertino will ever see. This is closer to what philosopher Gilles Deleuze meant by control societies. Rather than imposing fixed rules, control works through continuous modulation: not a set mould but »a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to another«.³ A password revoked; a credit limit updated while you slept. A keyboard that decides, at some point nobody will ever name, that »dictator Trump« is no longer worth suggesting.

The same logic operates in the physical world. Digital signs along Stockholm’s E4 motorway change the speed limit when traffic grows heavy. The underlying research describes a different experiment, involving trials elsewhere at higher speeds.⁴ The results were modest: if anything, average travel times became slightly longer. What improved was consistency: fewer very long queues, steadier speeds across lanes. The researchers’ own verdict (»variable speed limits only have benefits«)⁵ rests on goals most drivers would struggle to recognise as the point: lane balance, emissions, compliance, rather than the one thing an artificial queue actually costs them, which is time. But who decides what counts as an improvement? And how are we supposed to know whether the system is working?

Sociologist Susan Leigh Star’s writing on infrastructure offers one answer. Infrastructure’s power is that it disappears; it becomes visible only at the moment of breakdown.⁶ Kauffman found Apple’s list because his thumb stuttered – swipe-typing »bad boy« was blocked where »bad girl« wasn’t. The inconsistency makes this feel less like a conspiracy: a deliberate political philosophy would be more coherent than this. Perhaps the entries accumulated case by case over the years, examined by no one, until the list became fossilised in the keyboard.

Editor Gordon Lish famously took author Raymond Carver’s manuscripts and cut them violently – sometimes by more than half – reshaping endings and shortening sentences to create the spare voice the world would come to call »Carver’s style«. Carver was in anguish about the changes; he begged Lish not to publish What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in its cut form. The book made him famous anyway, as someone he had not entirely chosen to be.⁷

The difference between Carver and the rest of us is that he knew who was reshaping his voice, and could rage at him.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty says: »The question is which is to be master – that’s all.«⁸ He’s talking about power. Apple would call it product design. Carver’s editor would have called it craft. A billion iPhone users didn’t even know it was happening.

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