Good afternoon /wri/

Well. I went ahead and posted something to a blog website today for the first time. I started out just ranting on paper about how silly everyone's idolization of Steve Jobs was early in the morning, but a funny thing happened as I started to finish up. I decided I liked it a little bit and that maybe other people would too which is somewhat out of character for me.

So I set up a wordpress account and there the piece sits at this very minute.

I know almost nothing about blogging which is probably pretty obvious and it's really admittedly a sort of "look how edgy I am with my unwarrented opinion, everyone is stupid but me on this issue", but my intent was to write a critical Mark Twainy Op Ed.

I haven't done any free writing since I got my English degree and promptly sold out at the first sign of a decent job, so I feel rusty and rather insecure and unqualified.

Please let me know how I can improve on my writing. If you can add anything to the blog-promotion info on the website, I'd be really pleased. I don't want to be internet famous, but a healthy trickle of responses and comments in the future would be really fulfilling. Mostly though, I'd just like criticism on the writing itself. The substance is obviously the most important thing.

Hell, obviously I'm not quitting my day job. This is for fun. Thanks all. I'll include the link at the bottom of the text itself if anyone can help with format as it appears. I am not trying to advertise, and do not ask that anyone comment within the page if they don't feel like it, link to it or whatever earns bloggers ego-bonus points.

Enjoy, and thank you:

Why We Actually Like Steve Jobs

Trying to euologize someone in the wake of a tragic decline is never easy, especially when they’re famous. Even moreso when there is anything of substance that can be said about them and even moreso still when everyone seems hell-bent on turning that very morally-average person into some kind of demigod. I can’t say how much I respect someone who could take the failing Apple Corporation of the mid 90s and turn it into the 35,000-employee monster that it is today. But what Steve Jobs actually contributed to that rise, the reason behind his Facebook status sainthood at this time, and as his exemption from the disdain of the Bastille Day crowd now curled up in their sleeping bags as part of the Occupy Wall Street campaign are the same. Jobs probably hasn’t written any programs or soldered anything together in years, so all of you who think that the mad scientist behind the literal engineering of your phone is gone from this earth can rest easy. What Steve Jobs knew how to do really well was the act of taking ordinary stuff and making you love it and him. Like everything else Jobs and Apple ever accomplished, other people had already done that too. But Jobs was perhaps the best at it.

It was an awful thing to see Steve Jobs, who has always been an enthusiastic and seemingly (I’ve never met him personally and neither have you) friendly head of Apple Computers pass away this week. We all liked Jobs and Apple and he was one of the rare Forbes-level executives who would actually come out and hock all kinds of stuff like any other salesman. And so here was a company that actually seemed to listen to us and almost altruistically develop products that helped us with the things that we needed to do, like playing and storing illegally downloaded music or attaining the bragging rights entitled to those with the latest phone browser that was arguably the very best when it was released following the production of bales of similar items by other companies that never seemed to catch on the way it did.

Like I said, I never met the guy, but again, I’m pretty sure that I like Steve Jobs. He had that certain kind of perceived personality and drive that I tend to respect even when he was trying to sell me things. So it makes sense to me that other young people would take a break from yelling at every other major CEO in the country this week and call him things like “visionary” and “icon” and variously thank him for “changing the world” which I guess now means receiving lots of money in exchange for Chinese builds of pre-existing technology, wrapped in beautiful cases and even more beautiful marketing.

The collective portrait of him, created by these very people who label themselves as young revolutionaries and dissidents, although not unexpected, seems a little out of whack with their Guevarian self-image. It is absolutely right to mourn the loss of any person, especially one as brilliant as Jobs, but to lionize him in this particular way this way when real humanitarians and visionaries die every day isn’t necessarily appropriate.

Anyone who cares to take a quick spin around Google and examine the various works and miracles of Steve Jobs will find that in addition to providing all of us with nice things, Jobs was under investigation right up until October 5th for a stock backdating scandal that allegedly allowed him to pocket $20 million that were never taxed. There are also widely accepted reports that Apple used underage workers in its Chinese factories as recently as 2009. Jobs probably didn’t have any direct input on either of these issues and I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt in saying that at the very least, he was so rich that he would have tried as hard as possible to avoid both had they been brought to his attention. This sort of thing just happens to companies of Apple’s size. My only point is that if he had been the CEO of Bank of America or Pfizer, Matt Damon, Michael Moore, and various socio-political action groups would be trying as hard as possible to crucify him. But they never have, regardless of whether he was in stout or declining health.

Because Jobs was so adept at selling his products as an accessory to what came to be percieved as an entirely new type of existance, any action taken using Apple’s devices came to be regarded, at least in part, as an action taken by Apple or even Jobs himself. When Arab Spring protestors used their Iphones to organize and upload video, it wasn’t because they were desparately trying to use any resource available as a force multiplier. It was because Apple, being the revolutionary corporation that it is, designed and distributed these tools specifically to help people like them. When people who rarely leave the house are suddenly able to fill the infinite expanses of cyberspace with their uneducated opinions, Myself included, it’s because Apple and Steve Jobs liberated them. And while that isn’t necessarily untrue if you think about it in a certain way, it could just as easily be said that these phenomena are just a byproduct of Steve Jobs being a good businessman. So if Steve Jobs is held up in public opinion as some sort of “Q”, working tirelessly to develop technology to promote free thought and expression accross the globe, is it possible to hold him to the same standards or even discuss him in the same way that we discuss other executives? Absolutely not.

That isn’t just luck. Steve Jobs really was a genius. It’s why his life and death are truly noteworthy and why I admire him personally.


http://floriandlee.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/why-we-actually-like-steve-jobs/