When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: An excerpt from the new book by Steven Pinker

Through the tale of a new computer, a Super Bowl ad, and the rise of Apple, the Harvard psychologist explores the impact of common knowledge.

Those of us who have lived through the steady democratization of computers… recall that the sharpest turning point came in 1984. That’s when Apple introduced an affordable personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI), the Macintosh. Before that time, home computers were difficult and tedious to use. Their monitors displayed twenty-four rows of eighty characters each, and their operating systems required textual commands like “rmdir c:\foobar” whose syntax had to be memorized and which could fail with an errant keystroke.

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Early adopters of Apple’s alternative were dazzled by the windows, icons, menus, and mouse which today we take for granted. Richard Dawkins marveled at the time: “I have been an intensive programmer and user of a wide variety of digital computers for twenty-five years, and I can testify that using the Macintosh (and its imitators) is a qualitatively different experience from using any earlier type of computer. There is an effortless, natural feel to it, almost as if the virtual machine were an extension of one’s own body.”

Yet the takeover by the GUI computers was not a foregone conclusion. They had been invented a decade earlier at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center—according to legend, Steve Jobs stole the idea after a visit in 1979—and Apple itself had introduced a version in 1983, the Lisa, which flopped. The problem was how to jump-start the mass acceptance of an exotic new computing platform.

Enough people had to buy one that the price could come down, communities of users could share software and expertise, and a market could develop for third-party peripherals, apps, and consumables like floppy disks. Until they materialized, few consumers would take a chance at buying a computer, however “insanely great,” that might leave them as oddballs and orphans. But how could Apple sell enough units to create those “network externalities,” as economists call them, if no one was willing to buy one until it did?

Apple cut the knot with an ad that ran only once, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII. Directed by Ridley Scott of Alien and Blade Runner fame, it said nothing about windows, icons, menus, or mice; nothing about an effortless natural feel or an extension of one’s own body; nothing about the product at all. A line of sackcloth-clad drones, prodded by riot police, trudges into a cavernous hall where a projected face intones corporate drivel about “information purification directives.” The blue-gray monochrome is intercut with shots of a lithe blond woman in red shorts and a tank top sprinting into the hall with a large mallet. She hammer-throws it into the screen, which explodes in a white fireball, leaving the drones gaping…

It captured people’s attention during the Super Bowl, which is an American national rite, standing out in the calendar like a religious holiday. Not only were a lot of people watching, but everyone knew that a lot of people were watching. A Super Bowl ad generates common knowledge.

(Excerpted with permission from When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows by Steven Pinker, published by Scribner and distributed by Penguin Random House India; 2025)