From what is maybe my favorite book ever, Pale Fire:
This index card, this slender rubber band Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand, Are found in Heaven by the newly dead Stored in its strongholds through the years....
I loathed Steve Jobs while he was alive. Now that he's newly dead, I have to stop. There's only a short list of people you're allowed to keep hating after they're dead; monsters on the level of Henry Kissinger and Woodrow Wilson. So my wish for Jobs -- as it is for all of us -- is that he find in heaven whatever he lost while he blundered his way -- as we all do -- more or less damagingly through the world.
That said...
I'm amazed, and rather dismayed, at the outpouring of sentimental hagiography his going hence has evoked. Apple is a very totalitarian outfit, specializing in a kind of hipster Fascism. It's a Pinkertonian enforcer of intellectual property, and a monopolizer of the distribution chain (think buyTunes, errm, iTunes). It runs brutal sweatshops in China. This is not a benign outfit; nor is it a friend to human liberty.
And yet NPR dribbled on all day yesterday -- I was on the boat, so a captive audience -- about Jobs as if he were Rousseau and William Blake and Mahatma Gandhi rolled into one.
Bill Gates must be so furious. He's just gotta know he's never going to get this treatment when his inodes get deallocated and re-linked to the free list. Five minutes of Jobs dead is cooler than a whole lifetime of grubby ill-barbered Gates alive. There's justice for you.
I remember, years ago, Jobs making a slighting reference to Microsoft, saying 'they have no taste'. This struck me funny at the time, because I had just spent a couple of years working at a company (not Microsoft, I hasten to add) which paid me to take Apple computers apart and figure out how they worked under the hood. The hardware design was a joke; and the system software was as much a dog's breakfast as Microsoft's stuff was. Which is saying a lot. The difference was in the styling; even then, Apple products managed to look cooler, somehow. That slick laid-back suburban-California minimalist thing.
Perhaps the most over-the-top encomium Jobs got yesterday came from a somewhat unlikely source, Mike Bloomberg, who compared him to Einstein. This made me spit out a mouthful of cheap boat wine. Coco Chanel would have been a more appropriate point of reference.
Comments (11)
And truthfully, when it comes to style, Benny had it in spades. Jobs was just a dude possessed of a religious hatred for squared corners.
Posted by Jack Crow | October 8, 2011 5:50 PM
Posted on October 8, 2011 17:50
Not sure it would be so easy to find a dog's breakfast inside an iPhone.
Posted by dd | October 8, 2011 8:11 PM
Posted on October 8, 2011 20:11
Lambast him all you want, but there will come a time when you will wistfully recall Jobs's refreshing attitude to "giving".
Posted by sk | October 8, 2011 8:13 PM
Posted on October 8, 2011 20:13
I've always liked what Charlie Brooker had to say about Macs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/feb/05/comment.media
Posted by JTG | October 9, 2011 12:12 AM
Posted on October 9, 2011 00:12
Don't give a damn. Hurray for the innovators, I'm sorry anyone dies of the pain or the psychic misery that is cancer. Having noted as much, actions speak as loudly as words, and the man allowed his company to be attached to overseas sweatshops, which is 19th century production, which is no longer neccessary. That's bullshit, no matter which philosophical rationale some will claim for it. No one has the right to chain any section of humanity to machinery. No one. It's too huge a contradiction to ignore. It's not okay. I'm not glad the cat is dead, I just don't think it's a deep human tragedy. We all die, and most of us die without ever having had a taste of what it is to own an hour or two of one's life. That's the tragedy, and the death of Steve Jobs doesn't override that.
Posted by Michael Hureaux | October 9, 2011 4:18 PM
Posted on October 9, 2011 16:18
I jumped down the throats of some of my friends who were gushing about Steve Jobs' accomplishments the day after he died, and their response was usually that he deserved admiration--if not adulation--for being an "innovator." Apparently it doesn't matter if your innovations were built on the backs of abused workers and child labor, just as long as you make life a little more convenient for the middle class.
Posted by Adam Trovillion | October 9, 2011 4:52 PM
Posted on October 9, 2011 16:52
I don't think the guy was an innovator. I think he was a packager. And at that, of course, he was a genius.
It all makes me think of that fella Rapaille who did some work for Detroit designing SUVs:
Posted by MJS | October 9, 2011 5:28 PM
Posted on October 9, 2011 17:28
The package is the content.
Don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle, etc.
Posted by Boink | October 9, 2011 9:26 PM
Posted on October 9, 2011 21:26
Michael H:
Are you really sure we don't "need" sweatshops anymore? Is the implication that the factory system is no longer needed? I guess I'm skeptical if one is operating a capitalist industrial economy.
Posted by Brian M | October 10, 2011 11:57 AM
Posted on October 10, 2011 11:57
Nice call, Brian M. I don't know if sweatshops ever were neccesary to anything but the survival of capital. My phrasing is terrible in that part of the post if that's what you came away with but I think you know what I mean.
Posted by Michael Hureaux | October 12, 2011 12:56 AM
Posted on October 12, 2011 00:56
I have a great list of bad Steve Jobs jokes right here: http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2011/08/some-top-stevejobs-jokes.html
Posted by SocraticGadfly | October 15, 2011 6:35 PM
Posted on October 15, 2011 18:35