On worshipping Steve Jobs

The recent death of the Apple founder and wunderkind Steve Jobs was greeted by a vast outpouring of grief, adulation and near-worship. There were gatherings of the faithful, floral bouquets, candlelight vigils and every sign but a papal blessing to indicate that a saint, if not a savior, had passed.

Now, Jobs had always marketed his personal image as cannily as his products. He introduced each new product roll-out personally, wearing his trademark turtleneck sweaters (no stuffy CEO here, just the eternal boy genius) on a bare stage occupied by himself alone, with nothing but a hand-held mic dipped up and down like a magician's wand. Once again, Steverino had conjured something out of nothing that everyone would have to own!

This was capitalism at its quintessential best: creating a product that had never existed before, and that no one had previously realized they couldn't live without. Sort of like a hi-tech heroin.

In all the panegyric, the most over-the-top claim was the characterization of Steve Jobs as our era's answer to Thomas Edison. Edison was a shrewd businessman and promoter too, but he actually did invent things— you know, the phonograph, the light bulb, and such like.

Steve Jobs never invented anything. He scarfed up other people's ideas and apps, slickly combined and packaged them, and slipped them into the hand or the pocket.

The empowerment idea

No doubt that took a certain kind of talent and ingenuity. But what Jobs sold wasn't a product so much as an idea— the idea of instant access to the universe, and with it of personal empowerment. How, we came to wonder, was it ever possible to leave the house without the ability to instantaneously communicate everything about oneself to anyone in the world?

Tilt the glass a little, of course, and empowerment became vulnerability: Now anyone could reach you, and, by picking your pocket, discover all there was to know about you. No need for surveillance cameras or cranial implants: You already carried your surrendered privacy with you.

No wonder, perhaps, that Jobs inspires worship. In colonial Massachusetts, the zealous Puritan willingly exposed his conscience to his God. We give our data to iCloud.

Life without Apple

I have somehow managed to survive without any of Jobs's devices. I don't want my world sucked into a vortex that fits the palm of my hand (or, perhaps, yours). Nor do I want to engage the rest of the world that way.

True, I have the time of day on my wrist, and more personal data than I'd like to carry in my wallet. But I'm not obsessed with monitoring or manipulating these things, and they haven't yet turned me into one of the zombies I find myself dodging on the street, so plugged into the Jobsian universe that they seem to have lost all consciousness of inhabiting a common public space.

The loss of this space, and the habits of courtesy required to share it, have eroded the sense of community and the democracy on which it rests more directly and pervasively than anything else I can think of. One of the tasks the Occupy movement seems to have taken upon itself is to restore this space. For this reason alone (and there are many others), it deserves our gratitude. The Occupy protesters are the very antithesis of the mindless mourners of Steve Jobs.

Robert's Law of Technology

To be sure, human civilization and technology have advanced hand in hand from the first stone chipping tools. Simple Luddism is no answer to today's problems. But there is a severe natural law— let us call it Robert's Rule, for lack of a better term— that for every advance in technology there is a corresponding cost, and the cost frequently if not typically exceeds the benefit.

It's astonishing to think that only two centuries ago, the farthest and the fastest that human beings could go, at least on land, was by riding an animal's back. Now we have the railroad, the automobile and the airplane; we also have global pollution, species extinction, and the prospect of catastrophic climate change. We have the armament of modern medicine, and also Avastin, Vioxx and Thalidomide. We have sleek skyscrapers, and children who can't identify a single leaf.

Well, you get the idea. Think, if you want a single word, Fukushima. Or Hiroshima.

The gods we worship generally resemble ourselves. In making an idol of Steve Jobs, we worship a man who excelled in creating toys for adults and thus infantilize ourselves. Considering the mess we've been making of the world around us, it is an indulgence we can ill afford.

The outpouring of grief and acclaim for Steve Jobs, a clever packager and salesman of other people's ideas, is of a piece with the mindless worship of technology that characterizes our culture. It's a luxury that, increasingly, we can ill afford.♦


To read responses, click here.
To read Dan Rottenberg's response, click here.