Steve Jobs’ Apple

There are many stories about the bitten fruit in the Apple logo, the best being a reference to the old story in the Torah of the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden not included in Adam and Eve’s snack menu. That, in one of the interpretations, opened the first couple’s eyes to reality, and thus, knowledge. Moralists later picked on the state of their nakedness as a symbol of the transgressed bliss of their innocence in the realization that they walked around without figs covering their bared unmentionables!

The hardcover copy of Apple’s Steve Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson was too expensive for my pocket but its popularity found an audience with the Chinese readers. My students lugged copies of the Chinese version, Apple’s financial success being of interest to members of China’s money-minded and wealth-hungry generation. 

A cheap, not-so-legal English copy was available in back sections of bookstores where proprietary rights are still casually ignored, but we were not in the market, so we thought we would wait for the paperback edition. This October, however, in a hurried trip to Honolulu to visit elderly Mom at the hospital, my brother, a bit on the proprietary side, had a copy lying around deteriorating under the sun. (He sleeps outdoors in solidarity with the displaced native Hawai’ians). We appropriated the book knowing that it is easier to ask for forgiveness later rather than seek permission beforehand.

We are an iMac user since Apple aimed “to connect everyone to the Library of Alexandria.” Steve Jobs was the favored dartboard image to many who took exception to his management style and esoteric creative bent; the other Steve of the techie side of the company, Wozniak, is the cuddly notable of the tinkering duo at a Los Altos garage before Menlo Park and Silicon Valley became famous IT centers.

Clear in Isaacson’s narration is the dichotomy in personal computers of one that is left open like the PC of Windows so the laissez faire of the marketplace determines directions, against the fastidious Apple OS design that promotes intentionality in the marriage of aesthetic and function before the market’s bottom line.

Microsoft of Bill Gates represented the first while Steve Jobs’ Apple the second. Both exercised strong leadership roles at head office but Microsoft harkened to market research and the clamor of the stock market for substantial profit. He served the market well. He took it for a ride all the way to the bank.

Vision coupled to mission, engineering guided by design, was Apple’s simultaneous forte and Achilles heel. It developed incredible products, letting the engineers be subservient to the imagination of designers, skewing deadlines and costs until Jobs is satisfied, making simple elegance concomitant to affordability. Microsoft kept the bank happy in the short run; Apple took a bundle to Ireland’s tax haven while at the cutting edge of cyberspace technology.

Corporate boards stick to the Microsoft model; entrepreneurs are disciples to Jobs’ refusal to let company divisions stray from central control. Operationally, the dichotomy is false. Mercurial Steve Jobs, compared to the affable Bill Gates (who had enough sense to marry fair Melinda), just happens to be a more controversial person, and thereby a better copy, for press coverage. 

The implication on governance is, however, not lost to political thinkers. Built into the U.S. Constitution, and the prevailing mythology of its federal system, is the necessity of the separation of powers. It developed when frivolous royalty was still fresh on patriots’ minds, along with a pessimistic view of nature from Adam Smith’s invisible hand (enlightened self-interest gone sour), the Malthusian trap (we breed faster than we grow food), and eventually, Darwin’s natural selection process that confirmed Europe’s predilection to consider the superiority of the fair skinned Aryan race over any shade of color. Christian theology’s view of human nature as rooted in original sin abetted the prejudice, and we created governance as the management of fear and distrust.

In the ’90s, I lived inside the DC beltway. I was told that there were nine folks doing oversight work for every implementing personnel. This is check-and-balance gone awry. The recent gridlock when a few disgruntled legislators shut down the federal system reveals an emasculated government in all its branches. Nine justices are hardly wise, at-loggerheads Boehner-Cruz-Reid are either indecisive or petulant, and Obama is now caricatured as the Joker rather than Batman. Perhaps, it is time to bite into the apple, and face the truth about our lives once more. And do so at Adam Smith’s enlightened-self level, the fuel to the nation’s ideology.

The Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is “selfie,” a self-portrait one takes with a smartphone and posts on social nets. What if we expand that and create a mosaic of selfie-nets taking potshots at how decisions are shared at the local level, how to sustain the Earth, and how we create symbols and images that proclaims the reality of our time: that all the Earth belongs to all the selfies?

PCs (Apple, et al) to the ready! Begin.