JOSH MARSHALL highlights a reader's comment on "iFascism", or the question of whether Apple, despite being traditionally seen as the "counterculture, leftist" operating system, actually represents more uniformity and centralised control than Microsoft, traditionally seen as the "rightist, fascist" operating system. "The interplay of aesthetics (which Mac has in spades) and centralised control (which Mac also has in spades) is an interesting one," Mr Marshall writes. There is an interesting kernel here, but it's less about Apple's focus on clean aesthetics than about the seamless interoperability and user-friendliness of the entire Apple product line; clean aesthetics are just one part of that. And that's an issue that really does have sharp relevance for contemporary politics. In many areas—health reform, financial reform, urban-planning reform, and more—efforts to make life more user-friendly for citizens are targeted by both libertarians and by vested commercial interests as vaguely fascistic efforts to centralise control or limit freedom.

Operating systems have been inextricable from connotations of fascism and revolt ever since Ridley Scott's "1984" Macintosh TV commercial during Super Bowl XVIII. (My enjoyment of the ad during its sole on-air broadcast was muted, as I was watching my beloved Redskins get crushed 38-9 by the Raiders.) At the time, the contrast in operating systems was between the imagistic, right-brain Mac, with its graphical user interface, and the dull command-line world of DOS. So it made some sense to depict Microsoft and IBM as uniform totalitarian drones, controlled seamlessly by a giant Big Brother-like overlord. But over time, and as IBM declined, it became clear that Microsoft operating systems were anything but seamlessly coordinated. Microsoft's business tactics were focused and in some cases monopolistic, but its products were not so much uniform as cheap, messy, hard to understand and dysfunctional. They suffered from legacy problems that made them bloated and inefficient. And while the plethora of Windows machines and software theoretically offered users greater choice, the typical non-expert Windows user faced more frequent confusion and struggles with tech support than their Mac counterpart. Once Apple launched the iMac/iBook era, it became clear that Microsoft could not offer anything like the seamlessly integrated hardware, software, and commercial website system of iMacs, iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and so on. And peripherals manufacturers like Sony and Nokia couldn't keep up with the ease of use and interoperability Apple software could guarantee.

Like Microsoft operating systems, America's health-insurance system is incoherent, hard to understand, often dysfunctional and bloated by obsolete legacy systems. (Though unlike Windows machines, it's not cheap.) Different parts fail to operate properly with each other, and the whole thing is incomprehensible to most users, patients and doctors alike. But try to set up a central authority like MedPAC to make decisions about how to fix Medicare, or to mandate that policies cover a set of basic conditions, or to make end-of-life counseling available to seniors so they don't go through their final weeks in a blizzard of legal confusion—try to fix any of this stuff, and you'll be accused of "taking the control of health care out of the hands of patients and their doctors." This rhetoric is often driven by vested commercial interests. Medical-industry groups don't want a panel of experts making decisions about Medicare because it reduces their ability to buy concessions through congressional lobbying.

The same goes for the banking and credit-card industries, where small-print legal confusion is used as a tool to extract money from customers, and efforts to ban such practices are attacked as restrictions on consumer freedom. In health insurance or credit cards, freedom's just another word for not understanding what's in your contract. A perfect illustration, from Republican congressman Jeb Hensarling: "The ironically named Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) would have the power to strip from consumers their freedom of choice and restrict their credit opportunities in the midst of a financial recession—all in the name of 'consumer protection'. Positively Orwellian."

What's Orwellian is describing your credit-card company's ability to arbitrarily raise the interest it charges you on past debt to 35% as "freedom". More broadly, we need to move away from the Orwell "1984" paradigm. It was a brilliant description of the most important threats to freedom in the middle of the 20th century, but it no longer describes the most important threats to freedom today*. It was already clear how creaky the paradigm was in 1984, when the Mac ad came out; it's only gotten creakier over the past 25 years. Orwell didn't pay much attention to the problem of an oppressive blizzard of "choices" designed to take advantage of the consumer or citizen by manipulating asymmetries of information. But that is the way the American commercial and political landscape feels much of the time.

And that is the kernel of truth that connects the Mac v Windows debate to concerns of freedom and unfreedom. It's true that Mac users feel they are freer than Windows users. But few of them really feel like countercultural rebels taking a hammer to The Man. Rather, they feel free because...well, I shouldn't use this platform as a product testimonial, but when I went back to Mac this winter after a decade as a Windows user, my experience was that whenever I plugged in a peripheral, installed software, connected to a Bluetooth device, or whatever, the machine just worked. That, to put it mildly, had not been my experience with Windows. I feel the same way about the ease of use of European versus American health insurance and care. And I believe many Europeans consider themselves freer than Americans because they have guaranteed health care. Conversely, there are complaints that Apple's commercial behaviour towards third-party software and hardware partners is exclusionary and unfree; clearly, one could imagine how freedom for the users may be a tradeoff against freedom for the designers. But a lot of issues of "freedom" these days are really about the freedom to operate in safe, functional, comprehensible environments where you can understand the basis for making choices. Creating those kinds of environments requires a certain amount of centralised design. In these contexts, opposition to quality centralised design doesn't make you freer. It just leaves you confused and helpless, and forces you to spend much of your time figuring out how to accomplish basic tasks, rather than doing the great things you wanted to do with your computer/life.

(*NOTE: This analysis not valid in Iran, China, or Myanmar. Always read the fine print!)