Credit-Card Data Exposed at Michigan State U.

Yes, but (no offense) your two lines didn’t move me to tears the way TR’s penultimate paragraph did. 

Claire,

This was a brilliant reflection on the Jobs encomium industry that suddenly bought out all of the media 36 hours ago. Thank you so much. You expressed so many of the things I was thinking.

I do respect and admire Steve Jobs but I find it disturbing that so many memorials to him involve people saying how he changed their lives forever. I think to myself, “really?” This is what their lives were about? Not having to open awkward menus on the old IBMs? Cool graphics and flashing flat surfaces? Bright shiny objects?

I have overcome many things in my life — I was raised by lesbians in the 1970s when our race and the sexual otherness of my family unit was life-threatening. My mother moved to the suburbs when her original neighborhood was burnt down in the riots of 1967; in the suburbs our house was egged, we were threatened, and I was tortured on a daily basis on the way to school. Then my mother died when I was a teen and my father and her partner got in an ugly legal battle that left me isolated with nowhere to stay; I dropped out of college, was taken up by a street gang of drag queens, and had to resort to unspeakable things to raise the money to return to college. Soon afterwards, I narrowly survived cancer, barely made it through grad school, and ended up having to sign up with the Army in order to avoid being laid off in the California budget crisis. I found myself soon an active duty, outed as bisexual, kicked out of the officer corps, then forced to remain in the Army at the lowly level of private with a PhD. Through all that I managed to get my PhD, get my wife a PhD, be a father, author books, and teach 3,000 students.

Nothing Steve Jobs did had any effect on my life. I am one person, I know; I cannot generalize. But I just don’t see how the iPhone, clicking mouses, ClarisWorks or the iPad transform people’s lives or lift people from misery. I know what DID save me from murder, cancer, suicide, depression, and homelessness: my faith in God, learning to put others before myself, tenacity, a true understanding of the preciousness of life, and a yearning to overcome the unjust barriers thrown up by others. 

Your essay above has probably changed my life more than Steve Jobs because you name what is so disturbing in this strange fascination with Steve Jobs. I think what I found unsettling was that people I know — specific individuals — who cared nothing for whether I lived or died, whether I came back from war or died after being gang-raped in a tent down range, whether my daughter and wife could have a roof over their heads or would have to be deported…. people who jog you out of their lives, use you for emotional support than snub you, drive you out of jobs, block your career, betray you, mock you, condescend to you… these people say that MacIntosh products were their greatest salvation. It explains and clarifies so much. 

This is indeed what the liberal intelligentsia is — the HRC, NOW, GLAD, the Courage Campaign, the Rainbow Coalition — these people so abstracted from the visceral exigencies of real life that the silly Macintosh campaign that defines youthful hip identity against the stodgy tie-wearing PC is somehow a deep existential statement. It makes sense to me now why I have felt so alienated from it all ever since I set foot on Yale campus as a shy studious boy from Buffalo, back in 1988, and could never understand why liberal intellectuals fight so judiciously for categories and show such abhorrent contempt for people. Perhaps I’m not a conservative — just profoundly saddened that the ancient struggle for human self-improvement could degenerate into flashy icons and faster download times.

It is sad. People need something more than this. I have Jesus in my life — an imperfect salve, I know, and one that cannot solve everyone’s problems. But the quest for a messiah in Steve Jobs betokens something much more sinister, much more deleterious, about the state of today’s humanity. I hope we can all remember the strange insights these last two days have brought to us. Live well.

Steve Jobs was the techno saint, the apostle of the American belief that all problems can be solved with technology. The lord high prophet of a false god. The leader of an international cult that still believes wrongheadedly that transcendence can be achieved through mere electronics. An exploiter of Third World children and a despoiler of the earth with devices that never should be allowed in a landfill. And it is “too early” to speak in this way of him because some of the gullible still expect him to rise on the third day.

Very important post, especially as combined with your last post about clocking overtime in academia. It points to something awry across academia and across the working world. For another take, see my blog-post: Everybody’s working through the weekend

Jobs made all the evil of Bill Gates possible. Proprietary, over-priced technology of Apple forced workers onto cheap, non-user-friendly, outdated PCs with DOS and Windows operating systems that crashed and were memory hogs.

Jobs products were great for the artsy and loved by the publishing industry, but totally anti-science and anti-business. Mac users were well-healed snobs with contempt for business and science, so it was a match made in heaven! No scientist or business user can work on a Mac, but clueless Mac users never met a scientist or businessperson in their lives. Gates and Jobs helped destroy the American economy by dividing up the market for short-term monopoly profits.

The coup de gras was Jobs destroying the music industry by seizing all the profits from recording artists and the industry that cultivated new artists. Way to go Steve! He stole the mouse and GUI, WYSIWYG from Boeing, and drove Apple into near bankruptcy twice, then created demand for very expensive and useless products that look pretty and confer status for the unproductive children of the wealthy.

Thanks for the thoughtful and well-written post.

Since I have never used a Mac or any other Apple product, I have not experienced first-hand what many friends characterize as their eminent usability.  From afar, however, these products appear to be the ultimate expression of baby boomer affluence.  They remind me less of technological brilliance than expensive bottles of wine, homes or vacation spots.  Contrast this with the open source movement, which seems a truer expression of the hippie ethic than Jobs, whom some talking heads have so annointed.

I’m conflicted about the legacy of Steve Jobs.  As a musician and software developer, I can’t help but admire his creativity, energy and insistence on quality.  Ethically, however, I see him as an egotistical elitist who made his early fortune by thievery (Xerox-PARC) and padded his later fortune by exploitation.  Given this, he seems the perfect symbol of the educated (albeit self-educated in his case) elite, doing good, doing bad and living a life most people in the world will never have.