Can a great man be a good man? - Martijntje Smits
A short introduction to ‘ Steve Jobs’, the filmreleased in 2015, named after the late Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle with a screenplay by author Aaron Sorkin, given at the Corporate Bodies festival in The Hague, 11 and 12 February 2016
The Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, was more or less the very first personal computer with a mouse and a graphic design. It was launched with a short advertisement that has become famous as a ´masterpiece in advertising´,on the top of thelist of 50 greatest commercials ever.
In the commercial we see a dystopic, industrial setting with blue and grayuniform people slowly marching like slaves through a long tunnel; the whole atmosphere is clearly grim and saddening. Then a young colourful woman, dressed in white and orange appears, running through the slow, uniform masses andshe carries a large hammer. She races towards a large screen with the image of a Big Brother-like figure and hurls the hammer towards it. The screen is blown apart and in the following smotherthe commercial ends with the text: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like Nineteen Eighty-Four." The ad of course alludes to George Orwell's dystopian novel. And the symbolism is obvious: mankind should be saved from conformity.
Conformity - that was IBM, at that time the biggest and most powerful computer firm, whilst of course Apple was the young and competitive runner, the underdog that had to fight the giant to possibly liberate mankind. Well, after all, it needs no further prove that Apple succeeded to escape its underdog position. But did it indeed herald a new era of liberation? I think today, the irony of this all is clear. Apple today might be like IBM of 1984: The king is dead, long live the king!
Why a film on Steve Jobs, why numeorus books, biographies, documentaries, and now a third film (the predecessor of 2013 being a flop). Why all the fascination for this man?
I like to confess that I am not one of those fanatic Apple addicts, those people powered by a religious conviction that Apple products are just more beautiful, smooth, ingenious, luxurious, or just better than the computer products from other firms. So I am not the happy possessor of an Apple watch, an IPad, an IPod, or even not of an I Phone or an I Mac, and I never had a Macintosh, though I had an early experience with it during an internship in 1989 – and at that time there were already Apple addicts, strangely swearing on those underperforming primitive computers, and I didn’t understand those fanaticsat all, for I only remember the quite inconvenient property of Apple computers that they were all the time “incompatible”withother systems, and intentionally so. So that I couldn’t use my software and files from other systems, which was quite annoying. So, I just liked to say,it is not my special my Apple affiliation that makes me introduce this film on the late Steve Jobs.
And there is a second confession to make, maybe a more embarrassing one. I have to confess thatunlike everybody else, so it seems, that I, before 2011, the year of his death, I had never realized that this man, Steve Jobs, had already gained such a highly iconic, heroic status in this part of the world, the status of a super genius, a visionary, a source of inspiration, a hero of our time. I was indeed quite surprised when his death was met with spectacular expressions of grief; that he was mourned so much in the media when he died in 2011, maybe even more than a popstar, so much that even those Apple addicts worldwide at that time burn candles in the form of an Apple for him before the Apple shops. Had I missed something very obvious?
So this was in fact the first time I started to wonder about Steve Jobs. Why all this grief, what was it all about? Wasn’t he just another CEO from a big company, bringing about new, absurdly over-priced gadgets that become obsolete long before their technical liftetime, a firm constantly and annoyingly renewing its products to gain more money, with all kinds of commercial tricks and sophisticated commercials to let you become loyal and pay too much, wasn’t this Steve Jobs just another villain of the big companies, exploiting poor workers, in particular the pitiable Foxxcon employees in China, whilst himself earning astronomic salaries in neoliberal economy? Why had he gotten so saint-like famous and heroic, beside just pioneering the computer industry, besides being innovative which he seemed to have in common with many other inventors, though none of them I had mourned before?
Is it because of the exceptionality of those specific gadgets? Some indeed say so. After his death, many peopledeclared that Appledeeply had influenced their lives, using its products on a daily base, having them constantly around. So these gadgets took a vital, indispensable place in the lives of many of those, often young people, often in combination with social media. “He changed our way of living!”, they cried.
But let’s get real. There are other indispensable products, probably much more indispensable, like medicine, antibiotics, electricity generators, solar cells, clean water technology, and did we ever mourn their makers? And still, even if these gadgets would have been miraculous saviours of the pains and flaws of our world, why would we worship its makers? And besides,Steve Jobs obviously is not the only maker of these products. All the time he was surrounded by many other geniuses and dedicated geeks playing key roles,for example by his youth friend Steve Wozniakalso figuring also in the film, pioneers that maybe just differed form him by being less inclined to step on the front stage.
Further, as the innovation economist Marian Mazzucato has pointed out (in her book the Entrepreneurial State) , it is certainly not just Jobs, or Apple, that invented and brought about all these interesting products out of the blue, so why should Jobs (or Apple) get all of the credits? Mazzucato shows that the technological basis of them was entirely developed in the public sector, with public money. The click wheel, microprocessor, micro hard drive, liquid crystal display, signal compression and lithium ion batteries that went into the first-generation iPod were all developed by employees of the US government, in the department of energy or the department of defence. The internet, touchscreen, GPS, Siri and cellular technology that went into the iPhone and iPad were all developed by the state.
Thus Apple, just like Microsoft before it,has taken public property and commodified it. Apple has patented as much of its product as possible to prevent competitors from producing it and to keep up the prices. Again, it is not Jobs or Apple that should have the credits, solely.So again: why being so famous?
It even might be not his lofty language, his famous campaigns and slogans like “Think Differently” (1997), his fine quotes, like the famous one about death, telling: “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life”? It might not be his visionary blending of technology with calligraphy – the only course he took at University.
Slowly I became more and more curious about this Mister Jobs and his fame. And then I discovered something else, another aspect that maybe givesa more satisfactory explanation. . He is not just seen as a saint, of Nelson Mandela or Malala like proportions, but there also seemed to be a lot of ambiguity about him. Precisely that mostly triggers my fascination, I think. Interesting is that he, on second face, was not at all the obvious neoliberal “corporate body” (the title of the festival we’re in). Being the biological son of a Syrian refugee, being adopted by a poor family, being an early drop –out of school, he had everything that could have kept him in the lower parts of the social ladder. Other contradictions are there as well, being a counterculture rebel, rebelling against the state and against big powerful companies like IBM in the 70s nd 80s; a vegan, a disciple of Zen Buddism, etcetera. Or isn’t there a contradiction?
Probably we should look at him as a supreme incarnation of neoliberal Zeitgeist. ; a so-called countercultural rebel, competing like neoliberal economists and politicians against the ' state' (and the IBM's of this world) and then founds his own monolithic state.
So Jobs is not just loved, but also fiercely criticized. I found designations like “he was the epitome of cool captitalism”; having a mix between Michelangelo, Mies van der Rohe and Henry Ford—with some John McEnroe and Machiavelli thrown in. A former friend calls him an abrasive, condescending personality, with a ballistic temper.
Can a great man be a good man? That is the question the film deals with. The film is split up in three acts around three product launches and we’ll follow Steve Jobs in the last minutes before he climbs the stage, meanwhile having confronting discussions with all of the important persons in his life. I hope that after viewing the film, you can understand my fascination for this complex, ambiguous icon of our times, Steve Jobs.