By Akili Moree
The children's novel “Alice In Wonderland” follows Alice, who plummets down a rabbit hole into a world teeming with absurdities. She meets a talking rabbit, a disappearing cat, and a hookah- smoking caterpillar. She partakes in a croquet match where flamingos replace mallets, and hedgehogs serve as balls. Her journey culminates in a surreal courtroom trial, where the verdict precedes any presentation of evidence. Beneath “Alice In Wonderland’s” whimsical facade lies a disquieting exploration of control, logic, and the unsettling fluidity of perception. Alice's journey is marked by constant disorientation. Her body expands and shrinks, the rules of the world shift at a moment's notice, and the inhabitants seem to speak a language of nonsense. Alice’s journey through Wonderland isn’t simply charming chaos, it is a story about losing your grip on reality, on the very foundations of order and self.
At twelve, I had brief encounters with my own version of a distorted reality. My brain would misinterpret scale, warping my perception of my body and the world around me. My head and hands would balloon in size, while my legs seemed to stretch endlessly, making me feel as if I'd grown into a giant. Time itself became elastic, expanding and compressing in unsettling ways. My symptoms, according to a neurologist, were the hallmark traits of a rare neurological disorder that disrupts your brain’s ability to process sensory input. It is called Alice In Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS). I haven’t had one of my AIWS episodes in at least a decade, but I have recently found myself in the midst of the same profound feelings of incoherence, chaos, disorientation that Alice experiences in the world she falls into.
I worked at Apple for three months as a design intern during the summer after my junior year of college. A true technology fanatic, to me, Apple represents an interesting intersection between tech, beauty, coolness, and art. I'll never forget my dad's iPhone 4, the first smartphone in our house. Back then, it felt less like technology, more like a glimpse of the impossible. My mom and I marveled over it like some artifact from another world. Playing with the iPhone was less about the apps themselves, and more about inhabiting the slick, futuristic space it represented.
I believe that technology encourages us to occupy our own mini- Wonderlands. That is to say, we can use technology to distort ours and others' perceptions of the physical spaces that we inhabit, we can alter our bodies or faces to look differently than they would in real life, use augmented reality to transform what is in our visual field, and craft entirely new virtual worlds to explore and interact with. Part of the appeal that I saw in working at Apple was about placing my body, in the futuristic space that Apple represents, and then using that space as a way to define myself, distort my image, and ascribe my life with a new meaning.
In Faith Holland’s performance art piece “Wire Bath,” she engages in a ritualistic act involving technology and the body. The video begins with Holland throwing bundles of ethernet cables into a white bathtub. As the cables pile up, she turns on the water and adds soap, creating a murky, grey-brown bathwater. The scene is visually striking and unsettling. The typically clean and relaxing environment of a bathtub is transformed into something polluted and grimy. Undeterred, Holland steps into the bath, immersing herself in the tech-infused water. She speaks about her desire to entangle her body with technology. “I reconnect with the physical cables used to transfer data. The tub becomes a miniature model of cyberspace and repositions the cloud underwater, where much of the physical infrastructure of the internet does in fact exist. I embed myself in this cybertub and the cables and I wash and relax together,” Holland writes. In another one of her pieces, “Body Devices,” a collection of GIFS showcases various electronic devices––iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches––with their screens replaced by close-up, abstracted images of skin sourced from pornographic videos. These fragmented visuals are intentionally ambiguous, devoid of any explicit content, but retain a subtle erotic charge. The GIFs depict disembodied hands interacting with the devices, fingers scrolling, zooming, and caressing the skin-like screens. “Just as the body is a site for multiple uses, so are our technologies,” Holland writes.
Faith Holland calls “Wire Bath” a “fetish video.” Her work questions the boundaries between the technological and human body, and explores whether an erotic charge exists in the spaces where they meet. These are questions that, after my brief stint at Apple, I find my mind constantly wandering back to. Right now on the homepage of Apple's website, the words "Unbelievably Thin. Incredibly Powerful.” are emblazoned above a sleek, dark image of the iPad Pro. The device is shown in profile, its thinness exaggerated by the elongated, almost sensual curves of light reflecting off its surface. This visual presentation, coupled with the suggestive language, evokes a sense of desire and allure, hinting at the iPad Pro as not just a tool, but an object of fascination, and even physical attraction. Further down the page the description reads, “The all-new iPad Pro packs astonishing power into an unbelievably thin, light, and portable design.” There is a relentless miniaturization in the way that Apple designs and brands their products. With each new generation, their machines become thinner, yet paradoxically more powerful. This mirrors the way we perceive and evaluate human bodies, where thinness is often equated with sexual desirability, and therefore power.
Technology, according to Simon Fraser University Professor Alessandra Capperdoni, has always “been framed as objects of sexual desire and invested of techno-erotic impulses.” Capperdoni suggests that in the 19th century, the observable characteristics of industrial machinery— their size, shape, and rhythmic motions—often served as metaphors to describe and understand human sexual responses. The digital age further shifted the erotic connotations of technology. With the advent of computers, cybersex and virtual encounters became possible, allowing individuals to explore their sexuality and identity in new ways. The online persona, untethered from one's real-world self, offers a space for greater sexual expression and experimentation. Anonymity enables the exploration of fantasies and personal transformations that might be otherwise difficult or impossible in real life. “Gender becomes fluid. Sexual desire escapes the boundaries of the body and is released into the circuitry with unpredictable consequences,” Capperdoni writes.
Jia Tolentino discusses this cyborgian, techno-human fusion in her essay “Always Be Optimizing.” She delves into the elusive concept of the "Ideal Woman," an ever-shifting archetype that has been molded and remolded throughout history, reflecting the dominant desires and anxieties of each era. Though constantly evolving in form and function, the Ideal Woman––a reflection of societal values and aspirations projected onto the female form–– always remains. According to Tolentino, today’s ideal woman uses technology to meet the demands of patriarchal system that she exists within. She “looks like an Instagram—which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace.” An “ideal woman” enthusiastically takes advantage of technology in the way that she “broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself.” Her domestic labor has been replaced by beauty labor. Tolentino points to Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” as a means of understanding, and escaping the confines of the pursuit of any sort of ideal womanhood. The cyborg is a “hybrid of machine and organism,” but she is powerful because she “grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because she accepts without question how deeply it is embedded in her.”
The foremost symptom of the Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS) is an “altered body image,” and at some point during my internship, my brain lost track of where my body ended and where Apple’s began. When I accepted my job offer I posted a still from one of their Mac commercials to my LinkedIn profile. It shows a dimly lit studio brimming with creative chaos, a woman stands absorbed in her craft, guitar in hand, poised at the microphone, she’s looking down at her Macbook Pro. The room is a patchwork of her artistic endeavors; walls plastered with images and shelves crowded with books, each object a testament to her pursuit of knowledge and expression. The words "Test the Impossible,” typed neatly in Apple’s SF Pro font, sit at the center.
In the Test the Impossible film a magnetic voice atop an inspiring track says “You have no idea what you’re doing. This is great. People who know what they’re doing know the rules, and they know what is possible and impossible. You do not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can.” Before I arrived at Apple, my fantasy was equal parts youthful delusion and calculated aspiration. I’d pictured myself moseying around a large warehouse in San Francisco that Apple had converted into a creative studio. I imagined a big round table where the designers and copywriters gathered to sift through moodboards and chat over sandwiches from Tartine. There was a big white wall filled with post its, scribbles, and magazine cutouts from National Geographic. Somehow we worked on a student budget, stringing together some of the best advertisements the world had ever seen without the constraints of bureaucracy or any corporate oversight. Sitting together on the weathered floor, a projector in front of us beamed our latest cut of the iPhone 14 Pro commercial onto an exposed brick wall. We’d shot the commercial ourselves. We were a team. Every Friday after work we’d hop into someone’s car, pick up burritos in The Mission, a case of beers, and head over to Ocean Beach. Sitting around a bonfire, we’d joke and flirt. Under the glow of the moon and the haze of adolescent longing, we'd lay in each other’s laps and trade half-baked schemes fueled by The Impossible.
I waited all summer for my chance to Test The Impossible. I waited in the bed. I waited on the way to the parking lot of the hotel they’d put me in where I’d chain-smoke American Spirits. The ritual of it—the bitter smell, the sting in my throat—almost made the waiting feel productive. I waited at In-N-Out. With a cheeseburger, a basket of Animal Fries, and a Coke in front of me, each bite pulling me further away from my mental reality. When I could no longer wait, needing to opt-out of consciousness, I’d drift over to 7/11 for my usual pickup: a pack of American spirits, a few 16 ounce cans of Mikes Harder Lemonade, a Big Gulp cup filled to the brim with just ice, and a straw. The can would be opened and tossed in the trash before I even left the 7/11 parking lot, its contents sloshed into the iced Big Gulp. Then I trailed the train tracks back to my room, to wait. In between waiting, I'd have a meeting or two – obligatory bits of productivity theater sprinkled into vast stretches of unstructured time. We were operating under a hybrid work model. Most employees were scattered all over the country, so all of our meetings were virtual. On some days I’d wander alone around Apple Park, Tim Cook’s austere billion-dollar glass behemoth that employees had nicknamed “The Spaceship.” As I walked its circumference, just like Alice, I started shrinking with every step. I felt like a loose screw in a massive machine, my purpose swallowed by the workings of a much larger operation whose intricacies remained beyond my grasp.
William Gibson first coined the term “cyberspace” in his 1984 book Neuromancer. He called cyberspace a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation.” Decades later, in his novel Spook Country, Gibson would predict the future, claiming that cyberspace was “everting.” It was turning itself inside out, pouring into the physical world and inextricably intertwining the virtual and the real. In retrospect, my Apple fantasy was a personal manifestation of cyberspace eversion. It was a meticulously curated montage of feel-good moments, lifted directly from the imaginary iPhone commercial playing on loop in my mind. This moving image wanted to escape my internal screen and project itself onto my reality. Apple's advertising taps into this very desire, promising a life where technology can evert, unlocking a world of real-life possibilities. In Unlock, an iPhone X ad, a high schooler’s life is transformed when her face unlocks not just her device, but everything around her. Each locker that she glances at bursts open. Books and school supplies shoot out into the hallway. Each look toward a cabinet or drawer in her school's art room causes an explosion of color. Frogs jump out of containers in the biology room. Her face makes fire shoot out of beakers in chemistry class. The magic—the reason we buy new iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks, even though most of them are virtually the same—lies in this intoxicating promise of transformation and power. The rituals of existence—answering a call, scrolling through photos, tapping out of a text—are elevated into miniature epics. Each gesture is imbued with meaning. Unlocking your iPhone becomes a testament to your ability to create change in the world around you. Apple appeals to the inmate human desire for agency, and to see our effect on the world around us. They seduce us with a vision of ourselves not as users, but as cyborgian super-humans, wielding our iPhones like digital extensions of ourselves, orchestrating our own personal narratives. I mistook the act of crafting Apple's fantasy for a ticket into that fantasy itself. I believed that working at Apple would be so transcendently magical, so jaw-droppingly immersive, that the line between reality and fantasy would disappear. And one day, after I’d done everything right, I’d wake up and find myself inside of an Apple commercial, my body forged in Titanium and super-powered by the M7 chip.
In creating my own Wonderland, I was perhaps subconsciously designing a world that could infuse my own life and work with a greater sense of purpose and significance. My Apple fantasy was not just about a prestigious career. It was a vision of a scrappy, almost utopian existence, filled with teamwork, unbridled creativity, and the power to shape beautiful, meaningful images—the kind of life I saw reflected in the “Test the Impossible” campaign. Today, I wonder whether my search for meaning created a distortion, or whether we have to distort the world to create meaning. On some level, I think that in order to preserve any youthfulness, excitement, or wonder about the world, we have to believe in our own mini Wonderlands. We have to remember that the rules on what is possible and impossible were made by people who had not yet tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them.