The Snowden Laptop
There are lots of interesting things going on in museums inspired by the General Election. I'm hoping to get up to Manchester for the People's History Museum's ‘Election! Britain Votes’ show, a part of which is changing as the campaign progresses. The V&A is staging All of this belongs to you, looking at the role of design in public life and what it means to be a public institution at this time.
The exhibition comprises a series of interventions into the existing V&A galleries. It includes new commissions and loaned objects, as well as interpretation bringing out the relevant histories of collection objects. One loaned object is a MacBook Air used to store files leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower. It was symbolically destroyed by Guardian editors in 2014 under the eye of GCHQ officials after the government threatened the newspaper with an injunction.
I've been honoured to be asked by a colleague Rebekah Higgitt to comment for her Guardian blog The H Word on the V&A's inclusion of the laptop in its exhibition. You can read the rest of the piece and other responses on the blog. My thoughts are cross-posted below.
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In an exhibition designed to get you thinking about the role of design in public life, what could be more symbolic than a MacBook. It is impossible to move in London these days without stumbling over someone using a piece of Apple technology, and there’s something fascinating about this willing adoption of a herd identity created through supremely successful branding. Apple design and Apple functionality will be crucial for any art historian of the future seeking to understand our era, just as the symbols and structures of meaning behind the Civil War or Reformation are for 16th- and 17th-century objects.
There is, therefore, an interesting act of iconoclasm tied up in the totally symbolic destruction of Snowden’s laptop, when the contents were known to be duplicated elsewhere. It seems partly an attack on the ubiquitous power of stylish, complex technology in ordinary people’s hands.