For years, Apple has milked its image as a company for free thinkers. Its iconic 1984 Superbowl ad sums it up best.

Which is amusing because Apple has been the tyrant, not IBM nor the hundreds of companies that sprang up to build PCs. Windows computers are open source; Macs are not. (There is some benefit to Apple’s controlling ways.)

Apple gouged its customers with high profit margins. Apple operated with an iron fist. Apple could have been a huge winner if Steve Jobs had taken Bill Gates’s advice and licensed the Mac OS.

Apple still portrays Windows users as dorks and its customers as cool. Y’know, like Martin Luther King, Einstein and Gandhi. Think different and all that.

Now, they’re playing with fire.

Apple’s filed a patent on a design for a device that won’t let its owner use it unless that person demonstrates that she has complied with an advertiser’s demands by paying attention to an ad and taking some action indicating her dutiful attention.

It’s amazing how many of these vendors fail to understand Chekhov’s first law of narrative: “A gun on the mantelpiece in act one is bound to go off by act three.” That is, if you design a device that is intended to attack its user — by shutting her out of her own files and processes against her wishes and without her consent — someone will figure out how to use that device to attack its user.

Or as Mitch Kapor once quipped, “Architecture is politics.” Designing your device ecosystem for 1984 gives you…1984.

Cue Apple Fanboys who want us all to understand that the infallible and immortal Steve Jobs would only use this power to show us lovely, interesting, and informative messages that we’re happy to receive in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1….