Occupy Steve Jobs

Last night, while walking through Zucotti Park, the center of the mico-city that is emerging within the Occupy Wall Street protest, I overheard part of a conversation about Steve Jobs. I thought that maybe he, like Radiohead, had been rumored to make an appearance. Only after I got home and online did I realize that he was dead.

My Twitter feed was full of tweets on both subjects. I follow a lot of tech enthusiasts, and also a lot of people interested in social justice, so the confluence didn’t surprise me. Many other tweeters noticed the combination, and some began to snarkily point it out, as if to expose a hypocrisy. How could anyone who is genuinely concerned about the ubiquity of corporate influence and the accumulation of wealth among an elite few, truly mourn the passing of a man who was a part of that elite, and ran a major publicly traded corporation?

One of the inherent challenges of anti-corporatism is that it has very few human villains. The system itself is said to be the problem; individual acts of benevolence fall to the wayside as the impersonal drive for profit dominates everything. The controversy around corporate personhood derives partly from this very issue. Allowing corporations to count as people isn’t just problematic with relation to tax and free speech issues; it also seems to imply a center of conscience, personality, and accountability that, some might say, aren’t just ungenuine, but also disguise the impersonal, Borg-like core that drives all the organization’s decisions. Employees are accountable to CEOs, CEOs are accountable to stockholders, and stockholders, by and large, are sufficiently removed from both the culture and products of the company that they care only about profit. The stockholders may only own the stock for a few hours, or it may be part of a fund that they don’t know the details of, yet it’s to such disinterested people that the entire company is ultimately obligated. Putting a human face on all this can seem dishonest. Not because it’s the wrong face, but because any face would be a misrepresentation. When BP CEO Tony Hayward said during the Gulf oil spill that he was eager to “get his life back,” it was easy to call him an entitled asshole; it was also easy to imagine that his resignation would only result in someone with a similar attitude appearing in his place. No one is lining up to compare Tony Hayward to Daniel Plainview, the anti-hero of There Will Be Blood, who started as an independent oil prospector, and grew to personally define and control a large part of the industry. Hayward, even to the many people who despise him, is still just some guy, almost as faceless as the company he represents.

This was as an actual ad.

But Steve Jobs was not a typical CEO, and that’s why his passing is something to be mourned, even for those “occupying” Wall Street. Jobs was a real product guy, an innovator and a visionary, truly interested in making cool stuff and changing the world. Yes, he wanted his work and vision to make him rich, and he got his wish. But, for him, it was all of a piece. And, perhaps more so than any other modern CEO, the trajectory of Job’s life was so widely understood that this was easy for many people, even very cynical people, to believe.

Two points in that trajectory pull at the heart strings of anyone who still smiles whenever they see the original company logo, remembering the beacon of hope it seemed in the mid-1980s. And the hope I’m talking about is the hope – since fulfilled – that personal computers were actually going to someday become cool. In the mind of every geek wrestling out a BASIC program on a TRS-80 was the yawning disparity between the clunky things we were using, and the smooth interfaces of all our science fiction dreams. It seemed for a while like it was going to take centuries for that gap to be closed. Computers were popular with accountants and scientists; basically, they were used mostly as glorified calculators. There was a yearning for someone to start building a different type of computer, someone who understood.

The first computer I ever used, the Apple II+.

The first point of historical drama in Jobs’ career – the one destined to someday mark the start of the second act of his biopic – is the moment he was fired from his own company, in 1985, by a CEO whom he had hired himself (John Sculley). It seemed to be a classic cautionary tale of an entrepreneur creating a corporate monster that ultimately ate him and spit him out. The soul of the company was gone, and Apple had become just another blip on the NYSE and managed by an MBA with no imagination.

The second point of historical drama – the one destined to open the third act – is the moment in 1996 when Jobs, his startup NeXT having been acquired by Apple, was given his old job back. Imagine if, in 2004, the Supreme Court had called Al Gore and told him that they’d decided he should be President after all, and could we all just put that little incident in Florida behind us?

There seemed to be a sort of admission at work; an admission that, not only did Apple need Jobs, but that companies need people. The keynote addresses in which Jobs, a college dropout, dressed in jeans and a black shirt, stood on a stage and introduced new products, were not cynically manufactured propagandistic fluff. Users were reminded that, at the center of everything, there was just this guy, who had this really cool idea to tell you about. Yes, the actual situation was considerably more complicated. But Jobs was real. He could, with credibility, speak for both the company and himself at the same time.

Noah Wylie as Jobs and Joey Slotnick as Woz

The cult of Job’s personality also made it easier to criticize Apple. When the company disappointed, users could feel that Jobs had let them down personally, and in a sense, they were right. Talk to an old-school Apple user for more than a few minutes, and you’ll be sucked into a discussion about how the Apple II – a boxy device with easily exposed wiring and large external “ports” that were basically holes in the plastic case – was really a Steve Wozniak invention, intended to be opened and tinkered with. It was Jobs who steered the company toward sleeker, closed-off systems that were noticeably designed for people who were not engineers. This was both a good and a bad thing. Books have been written about it. Jobs was a geek, but he was always a bit cooler, more social, savvy, and self-absorbed than Woz. Much marijuana-induced woolgathering has revolved around what kind of computers Apple would be making now if Woz were the CTO. But whether things turned out for better or worse, what makes the conflict resonant is that it happened, not between departments or marketing directives, but between people.

Jobs’ departure is sad, not because he was a rich and powerful CEO, but because now, finally, Apple is just another company, the way we always knew it one day would be.