Steve Jobs: From rebel icon to merchant of cool

Lakshmi Chaudhry and Sandip Roy

Farewell, Steve Jobs, ye of black turtlenecks, blue jeans and sneakers. The man adored by legions of Apple fanboys and iTards. Over the past decade, Jobs has been celebrated as a marketing guru, corporate whiz, and above all, a technology god. The Mac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad, each a testament to his prophetic vision.

“Steve Jobs could be arrogant and unpleasant, a brutal man a sane person would not want to work for. But the products he created will be his monuments,” declares New Yorker writer Ken Auletta.

But those products once signified more than just Jobs’ technological genius. At a time anyone with money is toting around an iPhone, we’ve forgotten the days when owning an Apple product symbolised a certain worldview, a cultural badge of honour that signified a certain set of values. The days when Jobs skyrocketed to Silicon Valley success by becoming not just a successful CEO or tech maverick, but a bona fide cultural icon.

The god of liberal things

It’s a black-and-white world, a totalitarian dystopia peopled by identical drones, marching in frightening unison. George Orwell’s nightmare come to life, but now interrupted by a woman dressed in bright red shorts. She comes running into the large hall, wielding a giant hammer which she hurls at the screen that shatters in an enormous burst of light. The advertisement ends with these words: On January 24th, Apple will introduce Macintosh. And you will see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’."

There is no computer in sight, except for a rudimentary sketch of a desktop on the woman’s t-shirt.

“PCs were introduced in the 1970s as tools - utilitarian objects designed to facilitate specific tasks. In the 1980s, they became full-fledged commodities -shiny consumer products defined not just by their use value, but by the collection of meanings, hopes, and ideals attached to them through advertising, promotion, and cultural circulation,” writes Ted Friedman - and the 1984 Apple ad marked that forward leap into the world of cultural meaning:

It turns the confusing complexity of the Information Age into a Manichean battle of good vs. evil. There’s the bad technology -centralized, authoritarian - which crushes the human spirit and controls peoples’ minds. Read, IBM. But we can be liberated from that bad technology by the good technology - independent, individualized - of the Mac.

Buying a Mac was no longer about acquiring a new gadget but making a profound personal statement, about choosing rebellion over conformity, the underdog against “the man”, the individual instead of the crowd. The positioning of Apple and Jobs himself as creative revolutionaries was a runaway success -more so with the ascendance of Bill Gates and Microsoft. Jobs could not have asked for a better foil than the omnipresent, ruthless monopolist - aka the Evil Empire - to help him play his part.

Through the eighties, opting for the more expensive Mac was a point of pride for liberal yuppies, artsy professionals, recovering hippies and libertarian geeks. Though Jobs left Apple in 1985, he loomed large in the Silicon Valley imagination, a tech icon whose lefty background - freewheeling parents, adventures in buddhism and drug use - made him a perfect example of the creative power of the free-spirited sixties generation.

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The king of cool

Both Steve Jobs and Apple have travelled a great distance from their origins as icons of hippy capitalism. When Anil Dash recently tried to cite the “non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s” as evidence that liberal values make for good business, he was promptly pooh-poohed by his peers like Andrew Leonard :

Is it ’liberal’ to exploit cheap Chinese labor in massively dehumanizing monster manufacturing complexes? Is it ’liberal’ to lock down absolute control over the computing ecosystem? Is it ’liberal; to wield a ruthless intellectual property litigation strategy to ward off competitive threats to market share?..

Apple does a fantastic job of marketing itself as the cooler alternative to its dowdy, mainstream competitors. But cool does not equal liberal. If there’s a single quality that Apple exhibits above all others, it’s the way the company has managed to mint gold out of Steve Jobs’ totalitarian control-freakery. Creative, yes. Liberal, not quite.

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Jobs has reinvented Apple by refashioning an upmarket version of that old pre-1984 paradigm. Technology is once again a lifestyle tool. The difference marked in the marketing campaign for the first iPhone. There is nothing on the dark screen except the sleek, gorgeous phone, and the hands of the unseen user as he scrolls through each of its different functions: “This is how you turn it on. This is your music. This is your email….”

Cool tools for cool people from the coolest company in the world. And Jobs, its unquestioned king. Apple remains at the cutting edge of creative. It is still revolutionary, but now strictly in the technological sense. It’s a company that sells exquisitely designed, state-of-the-art toys to those who can afford it. The iPad, in a sense, is no different from a Louis Vuitton bag. It says little about its owner except perhaps to indicate the size of his bank balance.

New Apple, new Jobs

In a way, the same can be said about Jobs and his company who have lost much of their anti-establishment sheen. Apple has not changed as much as it has grown; its Wall Street success revealing the cracks between its image and its bottomline. It has long been replaced by Google as the star of righteous capitalism with its promise to do no evil (though Google too is losing its do-gooder cred). Apple today is just a very successful 35-year-old company with 50,000 employees, close to $100 billion in annual sales. And that kind of success has its price.

Apple was recently singled out by Greenpeace and the Guide to Greener Electronic for its abysmal record in recycling and its huge carbon footprint? “Apple has made no changes to its policies or practices since the launch of the Guide in August 2006,” Greenpeace said. “The company scores badly on almost all criteria.”

When the news appeared about worker suicides in Shenzen, about factories where workers slogged 13 days straight, 12 hours a day to produce the first generation of iPads, Jobs appeared tone deaf. “Although every suicide is tragic, Foxconn’s suicide rate is well below the China average. We are all over this,” Jobs wrote in an email.

Fortune magazine’s nine-page profile of Apple too was revealing, and not in a good way. Jobs came across as paranoid and ruthless, sweeping meeting rooms for electronic bugs. He was a “corporate dictator” who didn’t just take decisions about iPads and iMacs but also about what food would be served in the cafeteria. And God help you, if you disappointed Steve Jobs. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” Jobs reportedly barked at the team that produced the much-panned MobileMe email. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” The team leader was promptly fired.

As Darrell Etherington wrote in his blog in Gigaom if Apple was a country, it would be Singapore. “It’s closed, restrictive, and authoritarian. And there’d deserve to be an insurrection if things just didn’t work so damn well.”

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Trading Places

Over the past decade, as Apple has moved from one corporate success to another, Jobs and his bete noire Bill Gates have traded places. In his new post-Microsoft avatar, Gates is the kinder gentler megalomaniac, obsessing about grand issues of health and hunger and poverty - rather than scheming to put a Windows OS on every personal computer. Where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation doles out $2-3 billion a year in grants, Jobs’ name rarely appears in the annual lists of philanthropic giving.

He may be more lionised in the biz-tech circles, but in the broader culture, Jobs is often on the unflattering end of comparisons with his old rival, once dismissed as “cutthroat capitalist”. Here, for example, is Leander Kahney in Wired debunking the remnants of Jobs’ old image:

Jobs has been portrayed as a man of art and culture. He’s an aesthete, an artist; driven to make a dent in the universe.But these perceptions are wrong. In fact, the reality is reversed. It’s Gates who’s making a dent in the universe, and Jobs who’s taking on the role of single-minded capitalist, seemingly oblivious to the broader needs of society.

Gates is giving away his fortune with the same gusto he spent acquiring it, throwing billions of dollars at solving global health problems. He has also spoken out on major policy issues, for example, by opposing proposals to cut back the inheritance tax.

In contrast, Jobs does not appear on any charitable contribution lists of note. And Jobs has said nary a word on behalf of important social issues, reserving his talents of persuasion for selling Apple products.

As Jobs prepares to exit the stage, the coverage of his departure feel strangely like the obituary for a man who is not dead. There may well be another Steve Jobs waiting round the corner. But it’s not clear whether his health will allow him a similar post-Apple avatar - or if he is even interested in building that kind of legacy. The truth is we know so little about the man beyond his company that hard as it is to imagine an Apple without Jobs, it’s even harder to imagine the reverse - a Jobs without Apple.

Jobs was once criticised for using great cultural icons - Gandhi, Lennon, King - to sell his iMacs while remaining silent about the social issues they symbolised. Now as he enters a different chapter of his life, he could do worse than embrace his company’s old slogan: Think Different. Grammatically incorrect, perhaps, but exactly right for Steve Jobs.