In the clear light of 2012, let’s return to the Jobs Front. Steve Jobs, that is. Where even today, almost three months since he died on Oct. 5 (my birthday), he is making headlines. As in, the next big buzz-busting day in the Apple universe, rumored to be Feb. 24th (he would’ve been 57 that day), the firm (today at 2:15 p.m. [Jan. 3], the first trading day in 2012, up 1.4 percent, $410.76 a share) will launch its iPad 3.
Perhaps it’s time for sober rethinking about just what the tao of Jobs has wrought. There have been pockets of other voices. Consider, the London Review of Books, “Amazing or Shit,” a piece by Mattathias Schwartz on “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson http://bit.ly/tkQcQE. In the sea of panegyrics, it is a welcome correction:
“A talented hustler, he (Jobs as a young man) marked up junked components and impersonated a manufacturer over the phone to get free parts.”
“He tried to deny paternity of the daughter he fathered at the age of 23, and was careful to settle with her mother before Apple’s IPO.”
And in conclusion, drawing upon a comparison between Apple products and Zen gardens: “In 2020, making a video call on an iPad will feel about as sublime as booting up an Apple II does now, while a walk through the gardens of Kyoto will feel much as it did in 1920, 1820 and 1720. Jobs’s achievement was to make ephemeral machines and make them seem permanent.”
Not to mention, addictive – as the following post-holiday gift link from BuzzFeed makes abundantly (and distressingly obnoxiously) clear: http://bit.ly/vdX2w4
And here, to keep the clear light shining, a word from 2010. My Jobs blog post from September 2010:
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“Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in newspapers – and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic . . . . In America, cinema is true because it is the whole of space. The break between the two, the abstraction we deplore, does not exist: life is cinema.”
– Jean Baudrillard, “America,” 1989
Dear Steve Jobs:
Sir, I can anticipate your response to the Baudrillard. Point to the global sales of your iPods, and iPhones, and iTunes, and iTouches, and iPads, and soon to come, iTVs. When did Baudrillard publish “America” in America? 1989? In the digital age, that’s ancient history. Now, of course, that “sacramental mental space” in Europe subscribes to Apple Inc. What we couldn’t bring about with military or trade agreements, we’ve managed through technology and style. Indeed, space, speed, cinema and technology is culture. But not just in America. Everywhere.
Full disclosure: While an American citizen, I am culturally a Canadian. Not that that makes me any way superior. I think the social philosopher George Grant has it right. Canadians live next door to a society that is the very heart of modernity, and, given that nearly all have shown they think modernity is good ( ie, you, Steve Jobs, are god. Not God but small “g” god), then nothing essential distinguishes them from Americans, Grant wrote.
Suffice to say that I agree with you. And Baudrillard. And Grant. Where I part ways is the reaction to these truths. We each had an epiphany as young men when we saw in use our first Walkmans. I admit I come to this conclusion in an unscientific way. But we are the same age. I’ll hazard a guess that your first glimpse of a Walkman – mine happened when I was 19 in 1975 – was an important memory for you. But while my gut reaction was opposition, yours, undoubtedly, was opportunity.
Which is not to say that my reaction is any better than yours. And, as they say, money is a damn poor measure of success, but in America – and yes, in Europe and Canada too – it’s all we’ve got.
You’ve certainly got me there. What has my savage eye brought me? A lifetime of running, reading and writing. In your case, chasing those opportunities has led you to become an obscenely rich man, a god of our times.
Me, I put my inside out. You, you keep your inside in. Your mystique, your genius is in keeping us guessing as to what is coming next. Your eye’s on the prize: being the world’s social director. Leisure time is Jobs time. What did Curt Schilling say about aura and mystique? That “those are dancers in a nightclub.”
But like Curt, I’m not buying it. The ear buds, the iFocus. It may not happen right away, but there’s a backlash brewing. Think Carthage, Rome, England. Empires don’t last forever. Discover slowness, choose analog, try technology-free weekends.
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And, while we’re at it, here’s Pico Iyer, a fellow slowness sojourner, on technology-free weekends from the clear light of 2012: http://nyti.ms/vAv55T.
Next: Running for Your Life: Quietude and Plenitude
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