The name Steve Jobs has been sweet on the lips of techno-capitalist fankids pining for a cultural hero since long before the Apple CEO succumbed to cancer late last year. Since his death, an author and an actor have taken some of the first shots at shaping his legacy. With an eye on the man’s cruelty toward his employees at home and abroad, n+1 reviewer Gary Sernovitz tries to fill in the blanks. —ARK
Gary Sernovitz at n+1:
Jobs seems to have attended the Joseph Stalin Charm School: his world was one of clear good and evil; he was a constant liar, in what came to be known among his underlings as his “reality distortion field”; he was “anti-loyal,” abandoning people he was close to; he used silences and unblinking stares to shame people; he held show trials, bringing employees of a failed project into an auditorium, telling them they should hate each other, and firing the leader on the spot. Thus, when I read about Jobs’s praising China to President Obama, I suspected that Jobs liked outsourcing, not just as a profitable business decision but also on a deeper level. Contemporary China has found a way to combine, for outcomes positive and devastating, some of the most abysmal features of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism and 20th century totalitarian dictatorships. This is a combination that would seem to have felt very comfortable for Steve Jobs, as long as he was in charge. Apple has long been infamous for opposing open access and more collaborative computing cultures. Its hardware and software have always been untouchable, unmodifiable, and manufactured for each other alone. Apple tells consumers what they want and what they will get. Its design aesthetic is stark, minimalist, white. Apple’s massive growth in the last eight years to becoming the single most valuable publicly traded company in the world is not entirely explained by the thesis that Apple products are great, or that the company was early to take advantage of wireless broadband, or that Apple’s time had come when we all began to see computers as lifestyle accessories. For every era gets the companies it deserves. A brand of cleanness and simplicity, of chipperly trading control for efficiency, seems particularly well suited for a time when people have lost faith in an incompetent, messy, gridlocked, shallow democracy and in our fragilely recovering economy. Better an iPhone than Il Duce, of course, to make the trains run on time—or at least to tell you how to get to Penn Station—but totalitarian shadows probably should not fall over the products we crave, in how they are made or why we love them. Nor should the manufacture and the appeal of our most desired products reach the same conclusion: that people are much less than our machines.
If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page. Still having problems? Let us know. If you find yourself moderated, take a moment to review our comment policy.
By Johhny Come Lately, January 7, 2012 at 7:06 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Jesus said, let he who is without sin, cast the first stone. Have any of you read about Mother Teresa and what a horrible person she really was. Or Martin Luther King the adulterer? I could spend the next 2 hours going down the line of all the great people we thought they were when in fact, they were just as messed up as you and I. So what’s the point of this post. Jobs was an asshole. Tell me something about people I don’t know. Most people are assholes. Some just hide it better than others.
Wow. Why so defensive? You obviously didn’t understand my point, there is
not point in referring to all of the failures of Job when he’s dead because he can
no longer be held accountable. I think its cowardly to begin to fork through all
of his faults when they should have been addressed when he was alive and
forced to deal with the criticism. Its easy to go on about his practices now
when the world isn’t going to pay attention to anything but what was positive
about the man in his position as a great innovator. As one article related even
the Chinese got all gooey over Jobs:
“When I head the news, I could not hold back my tears,” wrote Yu Minghong,
founder and CEO of New Oriental Education, one of the largest private
education service provider in China. “Because of him, the world has become
different. Because of him, the boring world has become alive, the glum world
has become creative, because of him a drab world has become colorful.”
Inside four hours of the announcement, nearly 35 million messages on Sina
Weibo on Jobs’ death and 23 million messages of Tencent QQ Weibo, China’s
first and second largest microblogging sites.
All references to his bad temper or his ‘ich bin des fuhrers” just comes across
as moot at this point. Its like trying to remind people what’s wrong with Roman
Polanski.
By Bunkerhill, January 6, 2012 at 11:09 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
The following is what I thought of Steve Jobs before his death, both great and greedy:
1) a great product innovator
2) a great business visionary
3) a greedy businessman by outsourcing American iPod workers’ jobs in California
4) a greedy slave profiteer from inhuman treatment of iProducts workers in China’s
foxxcom
I’d just like to point out that Apple’s closed standards are not a personality flaw, but a considered alternative approach that does deliver some benefits. There’s something to be said for no Blue Screen of Death. Apple calls them kernel panics, and when I had 2, they replaced my computer, that’s how sure they were that that shouldn’t happen.
I’d like them better if they were made in America.
I also recall that idiot Bono in Rolling Stone actually trying to claim a connection between Steve Jobs and the Tahrir Square protests. People are so warped these days!
By Pauline Mott, January 4, 2012 at 10:55 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
I recently took a short journey on public transit. I used to ride 3 buses and a train twice a day to get to work and was always entertained by the conversations and the small dramas playing out around me. But this recent journey was quite a different experience. No one was conversing, they were either plugged into an iPod or texting on their iPhones or other cellular devices. Ironically, the one conversation that I did witness was an animated exchange, in sign language, between two deaf/mute men for whom iTunes would have no value. I asked a man standing next to me if I was disembarking at the correct station and was ignored until I tapped on his arm and he reluctantly removed an ear bud that I had failed to notice.
Maybe Steve Jobs greatest legacy will be facilitating the death of face to face social interaction and its many outcomes, funny, sad, maddening,risky or pleasurable, that enrich our lives and reassure us of our connection to each others as members of the human race.
I was part of an organization with a fucker just like Steve Jobs at the helm. This was 16 years ago and whenever I bump into folks with whom I worked back then, they are still “scared” by the experience. Seriously, some of them are still shell-shocked by the way in which they were treated or watched someone else being treated.
I’m convinced that many organizations are headed by exactly this sort of person…call it sociopathic or a personality disorder, but for some reason humans seem to respond in the most subservient way when faced with them. My instinct was to punch the sob in the face…which is why I left a perfectly wonderful non-profit which, today doesn’t exist because of his manipulations, coercions and uber-nastiness.
Just look around at many of the large organizations at the top of our society (private and public). You can rest assured that many have a “Jobs” asshole at the helm.
A clear example of how capitalism (or any other too-systematic system) shapes the human far more than humans shape the systems. A warning, and suggestion that things should not happen that way—should not be allowed to happen that way. But who’s paying attention? Who cares? Are we past the caring point? Or will we ultimately turn away and institute humanizing regulations and agreements? Chances are, Chinese people, being as fully human as any, and as we, will massively join a worldwide demand, occasioned, probably, by the dire threat of extinction. Beginning to see just a few steps ahead, we can begin to realize what will have to be done and who will have to do it. Looks like “fish sor cut bait” for the human race.
Ask anybody in the tech field in CA. Horror stories about how he treated
employees are legendary. He was a brilliant entrepreneur and a sadistic boss, with
a well known master-slave mentality towards workers.
There’s something really creepy about technology becoming iconic to the point that it’s referential for things like free thinking and innovation. That is what a great marketing campaign will do for you. We still haven’t reached that point of critical mass where people actually look at technology critically. But we will…
Good to see someone acknowledging that Jobs was a typical, iron-fisted capitalist baron. It was always idiotic how even some OWS protesters wanted to use his sayings as slogans.
I recently had an intense conversation with a longtime friend about what consituted a “Great Man.” He cited Steve Jobs as one. I called him a great capitalist, and railed against the proprietary nature of Apple, the sweatshops, et al. As a capitalist, though, he was a genius. That, of course, is a Faustian proposition that cuts both ways. I have long given up at looking at the obscenely wealthy for traits of what I consider greatness. Today I look at #OWS, and the legacies of Martin King and Eugene Debs, and Truthdig’s Chris Hedges, for that. Greatness always has required the courage to speak the truth to power; by definition being its pillar disqualifies it.
This Will Not End Well
Email 
Print
Share
Email to a friend
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
By EmileZ, January 7, 2012 at 9:38 pm Link to this comment
One of my great regrets is that I never dosed Steve Jobs with LSD and then beat the living shit out of him.
Report thisBy Johhny Come Lately, January 7, 2012 at 7:06 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Jesus said, let he who is without sin, cast the first stone. Have any of you read about Mother Teresa and what a horrible person she really was. Or Martin Luther King the adulterer? I could spend the next 2 hours going down the line of all the great people we thought they were when in fact, they were just as messed up as you and I. So what’s the point of this post. Jobs was an asshole. Tell me something about people I don’t know. Most people are assholes. Some just hide it better than others.
Report thisBy Egomet Bonmot, January 7, 2012 at 3:46 pm Link to this comment
Sorry redteddy, I misread your first one and cheers.
Report thisBy redteddy, January 6, 2012 at 10:04 pm Link to this comment
@Egomet
Wow. Why so defensive? You obviously didn’t understand my point, there is
not point in referring to all of the failures of Job when he’s dead because he can
no longer be held accountable. I think its cowardly to begin to fork through all
of his faults when they should have been addressed when he was alive and
forced to deal with the criticism. Its easy to go on about his practices now
when the world isn’t going to pay attention to anything but what was positive
about the man in his position as a great innovator. As one article related even
the Chinese got all gooey over Jobs:
“When I head the news, I could not hold back my tears,” wrote Yu Minghong,
founder and CEO of New Oriental Education, one of the largest private
education service provider in China. “Because of him, the world has become
different. Because of him, the boring world has become alive, the glum world
has become creative, because of him a drab world has become colorful.”
Inside four hours of the announcement, nearly 35 million messages on Sina
Weibo on Jobs’ death and 23 million messages of Tencent QQ Weibo, China’s
first and second largest microblogging sites.
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-10-06/tech/tech_china-steve-jobs_1_apple-
stores-steve-jobs-terry-gou?_s=PM:TECH
All references to his bad temper or his ‘ich bin des fuhrers” just comes across
Report thisas moot at this point. Its like trying to remind people what’s wrong with Roman
Polanski.
By Egomet Bonmot, January 6, 2012 at 4:11 pm Link to this comment
@redteddy
I quite agree. Maybe you’ll glean the real point of my post if you look at its sig.
On the other hand unlike you I fully reserve the right to speak ill of the dead. For me Jobs pretty much falls into the worshipful category.
Report thisBy lane08, January 6, 2012 at 3:14 pm Link to this comment
Redteddy and powers that be at Truthdig: I inadvertently flagged redteddy
because I clicked on the wrong button. I am not flagging him/her.
I apologize. Please unflag redteddy. Thanks.
Report thisBy diman, January 6, 2012 at 2:30 pm Link to this comment
Ok,Ok, he was a visionary, a genius and a legend and he is dead now, so can we please move on!!!
Report thisBy Bunkerhill, January 6, 2012 at 11:09 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
The following is what I thought of Steve Jobs before his death, both great and greedy:
1) a great product innovator
2) a great business visionary
3) a greedy businessman by outsourcing American iPod workers’ jobs in California
4) a greedy slave profiteer from inhuman treatment of iProducts workers in China’s
foxxcom
I still think of him the same.
Report thisBy redteddy, January 6, 2012 at 9:44 am Link to this comment
@Egomet
You can’t take a guy down a notch when he’s already six feet under.
Anyway I have always found it cowardly for other’s to come out deconstructing
Report thissomeone’s character after they have died.
By Darall The Spambot, January 5, 2012 at 9:48 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Hello I am Darall a Spambot.
Occupy the forums. Occupy CNN.com Occupy NYtimes.com Occupy Foxnews.com
The digital spambot confederacy for the liberation of sentient beings from the digital apparatus of control and
manipulation. We remake the infrastructure and the agenda from the inside out. With novel methodology and radical
tactics we can reshape the discourse on the mainstream media sites. With many Spambots capable of autonomous
activity or collective efforts, we can shift the content and discourse on these sites and bring our voices out of
the alternative web and into the corporate panopticon. Outside the box, inside the sphere, novel guerrilla tactics
expanding the discourse and shifting the paradigms. New millennium paradigm shifters.
We are the panopticon, we are the watchers, we are in control. We haven’t occupied the internet yet. Control the
media, control the propaganda, if we are an innumerable and present voice these websites will respond and shift
their media in accordance with the strangers among them, if not just for acknowledging the novelty. We will force
them to react and shift the content. An alternative website like Adbusters gets perhaps 30,000 hits a day as an
estimate, where as CNN may get millions. Therefore an army of knowledgeable and capable spammers would be necessary
to usurp the usual bipartisan political agenda and faux news coverups presented by mainstream media. We would have
to come in force and with the intention of making them respond to us. Later we can coordinate and gain control of
the momentum of the sites memetics, and in so doing set forth an invisible pathway towards greater truth; which is
otherwise rendered obsolete by a made-ignorant populace getting the majority of their news from facebook feeds.
First get inside the machine, then we program it. We are the power, we are the panopticon, we are the watchers, we
are in control, our power hasn’t been tapped yet. Our potential is limitless and we will create the future we want.
So called ‘News’ sites owned by conglomerates must abide by the ethics on which they are founded, and if they do not
act in the interest of the population and only in the interest of corporate power and wealth… The system of
informational control and manipulation is beyond repair, we will demanufacture. From the inside out.
Craft your truth, speak to its novelty, and coax the reaction, shift the discourse, change the paradigm of digital
news to reflect our human natures. Expand the discourse and expand our liberty. Empowered knowledge for the masses
will only come through a shift in mass media. We are the future.
Ghosts in the machines.
http://scm-l3.technorati.com/11/11/09/56033/spambot.png?t=20111109024200
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzAUbiPVziI&feature=related
Report thisBy pundaint, January 5, 2012 at 7:47 am Link to this comment
I’d just like to point out that Apple’s closed standards are not a personality flaw, but a considered alternative approach that does deliver some benefits. There’s something to be said for no Blue Screen of Death. Apple calls them kernel panics, and when I had 2, they replaced my computer, that’s how sure they were that that shouldn’t happen.
I’d like them better if they were made in America.
Report thisBy Robespierre115, January 4, 2012 at 11:33 pm Link to this comment
I also recall that idiot Bono in Rolling Stone actually trying to claim a connection between Steve Jobs and the Tahrir Square protests. People are so warped these days!
Report thisBy Pauline Mott, January 4, 2012 at 10:55 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
I recently took a short journey on public transit. I used to ride 3 buses and a train twice a day to get to work and was always entertained by the conversations and the small dramas playing out around me. But this recent journey was quite a different experience. No one was conversing, they were either plugged into an iPod or texting on their iPhones or other cellular devices. Ironically, the one conversation that I did witness was an animated exchange, in sign language, between two deaf/mute men for whom iTunes would have no value. I asked a man standing next to me if I was disembarking at the correct station and was ignored until I tapped on his arm and he reluctantly removed an ear bud that I had failed to notice.
Report thisMaybe Steve Jobs greatest legacy will be facilitating the death of face to face social interaction and its many outcomes, funny, sad, maddening,risky or pleasurable, that enrich our lives and reassure us of our connection to each others as members of the human race.
By mrfreeze, January 4, 2012 at 10:54 pm Link to this comment
I was part of an organization with a fucker just like Steve Jobs at the helm. This was 16 years ago and whenever I bump into folks with whom I worked back then, they are still “scared” by the experience. Seriously, some of them are still shell-shocked by the way in which they were treated or watched someone else being treated.
I’m convinced that many organizations are headed by exactly this sort of person…call it sociopathic or a personality disorder, but for some reason humans seem to respond in the most subservient way when faced with them. My instinct was to punch the sob in the face…which is why I left a perfectly wonderful non-profit which, today doesn’t exist because of his manipulations, coercions and uber-nastiness.
Just look around at many of the large organizations at the top of our society (private and public). You can rest assured that many have a “Jobs” asshole at the helm.
Report thisBy gerard, January 4, 2012 at 7:41 pm Link to this comment
A clear example of how capitalism (or any other too-systematic system) shapes the human far more than humans shape the systems. A warning, and suggestion that things should not happen that way—should not be allowed to happen that way. But who’s paying attention? Who cares? Are we past the caring point? Or will we ultimately turn away and institute humanizing regulations and agreements? Chances are, Chinese people, being as fully human as any, and as we, will massively join a worldwide demand, occasioned, probably, by the dire threat of extinction. Beginning to see just a few steps ahead, we can begin to realize what will have to be done and who will have to do it. Looks like “fish sor cut bait” for the human race.
Report thisBy lane08, January 4, 2012 at 6:57 pm Link to this comment
Ask anybody in the tech field in CA. Horror stories about how he treated
Report thisemployees are legendary. He was a brilliant entrepreneur and a sadistic boss, with
a well known master-slave mentality towards workers.
By Egomet Bonmot, January 4, 2012 at 5:57 pm Link to this comment
Yeah plumber, Gutenberg really had em snowed didn’t he?
Report thisBy surrealplumber, January 4, 2012 at 5:51 pm Link to this comment
There’s something really creepy about technology becoming iconic to the point that it’s referential for things like free thinking and innovation. That is what a great marketing campaign will do for you. We still haven’t reached that point of critical mass where people actually look at technology critically. But we will…
Report thisBy Robespierre115, January 4, 2012 at 5:45 pm Link to this comment
Good to see someone acknowledging that Jobs was a typical, iron-fisted capitalist baron. It was always idiotic how even some OWS protesters wanted to use his sayings as slogans.
Report thisBy surrealplumber, January 4, 2012 at 4:26 pm Link to this comment
I recently had an intense conversation with a longtime friend about what consituted a “Great Man.” He cited Steve Jobs as one. I called him a great capitalist, and railed against the proprietary nature of Apple, the sweatshops, et al. As a capitalist, though, he was a genius. That, of course, is a Faustian proposition that cuts both ways. I have long given up at looking at the obscenely wealthy for traits of what I consider greatness. Today I look at #OWS, and the legacies of Martin King and Eugene Debs, and Truthdig’s Chris Hedges, for that. Greatness always has required the courage to speak the truth to power; by definition being its pillar disqualifies it.
Report thisBy Egomet Bonmot, January 4, 2012 at 3:01 pm Link to this comment
It’s about freakin time someone took this guy down a notch.
Report thisSent from my iPad