iRant

[cosmolinguist]

The way Steve Jobs is being eulogized around Twitter and Facebook bothers me.

He died young, and pancreatic cancer is an awful thing*. The personal tragedy for the people who knew him is foremost in my mind.

But beyond that, the image of him as the geek messiah is worryingly pervasive. As Andrew said, people are talking as if he made every iPhone by hand out of minerals he mined from the ground.

Let's not forget how those iPhones are actually made:

Foxconn routinely forces it workers to work two to three times the legal Chinese limit and to work in brutal and often unsafe conditions that have led to many accidents... These working conditions led to 10 Foxconn worker suicides at the company's Shenzhen facility in 2010 alone. The suicide problem at Foxconn’s Chinese factories became so bad that the company put up steel wire to prevent workers from jumping and killing themselves.

And as Jobs was speaking in San Francisco [while announcing the iPhone], new measures were being secretly introduced at Foxconn to prevent the suicide scandal from worsening and damaging Apple sales globally.

Astonishingly, this involves forcing all Foxconn employees to sign a new legally binding document promising that they won't kill themselves.

And more than that, Apple are actively trying to keep you from finding out the less savory side of your shiny phone.

Phone Story is intended to serve as a reminder for users of the impact, though indirectly accusing Apple of human rights violation via dangerous extraction of coltan, a mineral used in manufacturing of consumer electronics products, worker abuse under questionable conditions at companies such as Foxconn, and launching new products every year thus creating more e-waste. Apple has thus ban[ned] the app citing reasons including the depiction of violence or abuse against children and excessively objectionable or crude content.

Content not suitable for games, apparently, but perfectly all right in real life.

And of course not all this is entirely Steve Jobs' doing either; the Phone Story game is new and its ban was not while he was CEO. Not everything is his fault (though some things, like ending Apple's corporate philanthropy to save costs, are).

But this is part of the point. As CEO he might have been good at taking the credit, doing the flashy rock-star presentations Maybe he inspired you or maybe he just convinced you to give him your money. But he did not make your MacBook and he did not make Toy Story.

I am having a massive sense of humor fail about this. And it's not just because I hate Macs, even though I do. Apple products go against everything I hold dear about computers, like the right to change and improve my own possessions, use my media and data however I like, casting off the oppression of DRM, and still having some money left in the world after buying an mp3 player.

Then there's this quote of his I saw on someone's Facebook, and also heard on the radio as I was making my pancakes this morning...

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

To which I can only say OH DO F*** OFF!

"Don't settle" isn't a choice everybody has. My dad has been doing manual labor all his life, despite being clever, fun and witty as anyone on NPR being earnestly middle-class. My mom worked an incredibly stressful and draining job helping an autistic boy through school, for less than you make working at McDonald's. Andrew has a day job he loathes, because he can't afford to do what he wants (yet!) and considers it a higher priority in the meantime to support us than to be a visionary who gives inspiring speeches for a fee that would probably see us through a whole year.

Those poor bastards making the iPhones in China; do you think this is how they wanted their lives to be? Aren't they settling just to bring us your greatest new toys, Steve? A lot of people have to settle. A lot of people have to do work they don't like. What does he have to say to them? A lot of people have families to support, discrimination to face, barriers to getting jobs, or getting good ones...and just bad luck. Some of us have to have higher priorities than waking up every morning knowing we are doing nothing but good work that we love.

I'm not saying "don't try" -- obviously it's great if you can do good work that you love -- but don't be too hard on yourself if you can't. And don't insult the intelligence and personhood of someone who works in a factory or is a teaching assistant or whatever, just because compared to iSteve their life is less sexy and flashy and newsworthy. Or because they can't afford an iPod.

* Edit: As pointed out in comments: Most pancreatic cancers are aggressive and always terminal, but Steve was lucky (if you can call it that) and had a rare form called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is actually quite treatable with excellent survival rates — if caught soon enough. The median survival is about a decade, but it depends on how soon it’s removed surgically. Steve caught his very early, and should have expected to survive much longer than a decade. Unfortunately Steve relied on a naturopathic diet instead of early surgery. There is no evidence that diet has any effect on islet cell carcinoma. I find it a little more complicated to be sympathetic now, but it's still sad people keep falling for this hippie shit.

Comments

[intellectualdwarf.wordpress.com]

At a bare minimum, anyone who ever sold something in the app store?

[andrewhickey.info]

So those people didn't make money by writing and selling computer programs, but rather because Apple created that money for them? And they wouldn't have been able to write and sell computer programs without Apple?

Seems an odd way of looking at it to me.

[intellectualdwarf.wordpress.com]

They would have been able to write the programs, and they could sell them, but it's not clear that anyone would have bought them. It's not like anyone bought Symbian or J2ME mobile apps in large quantities, and even Android app sales pale in comparison. The games developers of the 80s depended on Atari, Commodore and later on Nintendo and Sega, to provide platforms on which their games would run, and I think it's reasonable to say that the games developers benefited materially from the success of the hardware companies in selling their devices and creating a market. Apple created a massive market which acted as an enabler for others. I'm not a fan of some of the app store's policies, but it has undeniably created a new market for software products.