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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 9, 2011
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
Who is not an expert in technology, today? Indoors or out, one may look around at one's contemporaries, and see how many have mastered, are indeed in the act of using, various electronic devices; most having something to do with communications. Canadians once led the world in telephone use per capita. We were the (adopted) nation of Alexander Graham Bell. Now it is as if the whole world has gone Canadian. Or Californian, which is about the same thing. (California is Canada's principal foreign colony, after Florida.)The late Steve Jobs had no Canadian identity, so I am creating one for him. Not only the nation of Marshall McLuhan, and Harold Innis; but of George Grant, who wrote Technology and Empire - Canada's whole life could be presented as an essay in the invention, adaptation, extension, and interpretation of technology. This was needed to bridge great distances, but also to exploit our vast resources. One of the least-appreciated aspects of the Canadian economy is its industrial essence. From the fur trade to mines, forests, wheat, fish, and (hydro-dammed) rivers: not resources, merely, but the technique to winkle them out, process, package, and ship. Canada has often led the world, not in the design and manufacture of highly visible consumer products, but rather, very specialized equipment for use in remote places. And in turn, that how-to, can-do spirit enabled Canadian companies to reach globally: to Brazil, Africa, India, China, and wherever our equipment could find an extractive mission. Not resources, but the means to winkle: that was the secret of our success. But it is also how they succeed in the rest of the world. We have all been reading, for days, about Steve Jobs, the unCanadian. We now know things about him that he might have forgotten himself; including much that may be true. Reading the memoirs, obituaries, and tributes, with the nose of an old-fashioned journalist ever sniffling for B.S., I've been reminded how deeply time is enfolded. Jobs was a man of my generation, so that I can glimpse the stages of his life through the stages of my own: where he coasted, and where he offered fight. Anecdotes of Jobs and that other Steve (Wozniak), depend largely on the frailties of human memory, mythologized in the retrospect of later achievement. Jobs himself became larger than life, his vices subtly transmuted into virtues in the public mind. Like the late Princess of Wales or our own fallen NDP leader, he was a brilliant and charismatic self-salesman. (And had been at least since adolescence, when he brought himself to the attention of Hewlett Packard's CEO, just to get a summer job.) Unlike Diana and Jack, he had products to bring to market, stamped with the ineffable mark of his personality; and is now lionized almost in spite of the fact he was a capitalist entrepreneur. Here was a man whose company's cash reserves have sometimes exceeded those of the United States of America. Who made it company policy to give not one penny to any philanthropic cause. Who pitched entirely to the mass market, with cleverly purposeful branding. Who imparted intangible fashion qualities to those products, through fanatic attention to industrial design. Who rode often brutally over opponents; who had anger management issues; and was the boss from hell to anyone who didn't perform according to his exacting specifications. A great salesman, as great a nerd (hundreds of patents with his name on them), and finally a great artist, in an age when art has taken the strangest egalitarian forms. More positively, he carried the hallmarks of an artist, even into his salesmanship, from the attention to fine detail to the Zen drama of his presentations. It is rare when so many gifts, not necessarily compatible, combine in one man and are harnessed together. An orphan, adopted by step-parents who misrepresented themselves and their situation to get hold of him. (Later, a college dropout himself.) His ancestry was secularized Syrian Muslim; he was born in 1955 to a young couple "not ready for children yet." Twenty years later he would surely have been aborted: together with who knows how many others with commensurate gifts. Yes, Steve Jobs could be a poster boy for "Pro-Life." A man who genuinely changed the world, though, let me add, not entirely for the better. For the cumulative effect of all these ingenious electronic devices is to train the attention of a huge population narcissistically inward. And from the moment they look out, to assist them in finding the distraction of cheap and mostly worthless entertainment. The iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc., are all instruments of distraction. Each reduces some segment of reality to the virtual, and each reprograms the habits of its users within the spiritual confines of a kind of computer game. But that is the story of all technology, since the "apple" first presented to Eve: a dubious good, whose merits are made visible through salesmanship. Whose costs are subtly hidden. Technology by increments has conquered the world, from the harvesting of fish to what Stalin called "the engineering of human souls." We are caught in the net of our own ingenuity. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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