that brought you cancer-free work environments. The Chinese workers didn’t have a strong enough labor movement to procure safety and wage regulations – that’s why Steve Jobs used them. Some of those working people wrote Jobs a letter in February, noting that the hexyl hydride used to speed up the manufacturing of touch screens in their Chinese factory was, in fact, killing them. Jobs made no response, though the factory reverted to using alcohol. Those iPads sure are frictionless fun unless, it turns out, you happen to inhale while you’re manufacturing them. Let’s glance toward the actual design of those Apple products. No description of Steve Jobs’s accomplishments is complete without caressing the soft curves of the Macintosh or confessing the pleasures of stroking the iPod’s slidebar. His products are sexy and accessible and California fun – the Katy Perrys, if you will, of gadgetland. Apple is notorious for letting no one inside their gorgeous handiwork. No tinkering, no fixing. If you need something done, bring it to the Genius Bar. This disempowerment says in the most explicit terms: “You are not smart enough to manage this tool, which is more perfect and more sophisticated than you.” It’s a similar attitude, come to think of it, to that of high financiers who have long won exemption from criticism by their reputation for “smartness” in an industry that claims to be too sophisticated for ordinary people to comprehend. It cultivates a dependency on the company’s services, and replaces experimentation and choice with awe for what is. This could not be in greater conflict with what might be described as the Left of the technological world – those who advocate open source technology, freeware, and so on. These micromovements have developed to prevent a tiny elite from holding a monopoly over the design and manipulation of increasingly integral parts of our lives. As
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the blogger “Armed and Dangerous” pointed out, the “freedom” of a Mac was the myth that disguised an unyielding design; but “such was Jobs’s genius as a marketer that he was able to spin that contradiction as a kind of artistic integrity, and gain praise for it when he should have been slammed for hypocrisy.” Combine these elements with Jobs’s contempt for philanthropy, his shameless appropriation of others’ ideas, and reputation for bullying subordinates, and you have a particularly despicable (or honest) card-carrying, private-jetflying member of the 1 percent. But this is not Steve Jobs’s reputation. Recently in New York magazine, Frank Rich wrote a tirade against the depredations of the twenty-first century elite, called “Class War.” He made the good and necessary point that these elites will not be the ones to save us from the crisis they ushered in. But it contains as well this nostalgic gem: If you love your Mac and iPod, you can still despise cdo s and credit-default swaps. Jobs’s genius – in the words of Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley marketing executive who worked with him early on – was his ability “to strip away the excess layers of business, design, and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.” ... That bipartisan grief was arguably as much for the passing of a capitalist culture as for the man himself. Finance long ago supplanted visionary entrepreneurial careers like Jobs’s as the most desired calling among [sic] America’s top-tier university students, just as hedge-fund tycoons like John Paulson and Steve Cohen passed Jobs on the Forbes 400 list. Americans sense that something incalculable has been lost in this transformation that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
Ah, shed a tear for the titans of old! There’s a sort of producerist mythology that clings to Jobs and differentiates him in the public eye from the
evil ceo s of finance. Steve Jobs made things, beautiful things, while all those financiers have done is gamble. He was a craftsman or, in Malcolm Gladwell’s insipid and mildly counterintuitive New Yorker article, a “tweaker” of great designs. He represents a friendly face of capitalism to people like Rich and Gladwell, where people aren’t exploited for gain; great ideas are! But it’s been a long time since Jobs was building his visions himself in a garage in Los Altos. We all know that Jobs was a ceo ’s ceo – he exerted an huge amount of control over his workers, whose ideas he often presented as his own, brutally exploited labor where it was most downtrodden, and got filthy rich off our cravings for his well-marketed products. We’ve seen this before. But think of the treatment that other exploitive captains of industry receive. I recently saw Lloyd Blankfein’s head on a pike in downtown Manhattan. Frank Rich wants to kill him too. Can you imagine this happening to Jobs? Huge student movements have arisen in the last couple decades to ban sweatshopped goods from campuses. Alterglobalization activists have shamed Nike into reforming its global sweatshop system. But Steve Jobs is a hero. Jobs, it would seem, gets moral credit for good design. Those “think different” ads still inform the company’s marketing message. Now the ads feature a lame old dude (pc ) and a hip young dude (Mac) whose amusing interactions underline the Mac’s facility with the technologies of selfexpression and its out-of-the-box integration with your daily life. In short, Macs are attractive add-ons to help you be you. They’re the best parts of us – our creativity and wit – reaching out into the world in technological form. There’s even some sociological evidence that we feel this way. In a 2009 study delightfully entitled “Self-admitted pretensions of Mac users on a predominantly pc university