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

[barakta]

And he may not have needed to die quite so young as it seems he didn't actually use proper medicine to treat it for ages: http://skeptoid.com/blog/2011/10/05/a-lesson-in-treating-illness/

That isn't about blaming him for the outcome or knowing for sure, but it says something about using hippy crap and not getting good care cos of it and how pervasive and dangerous things like that can be - and how many people might have copied him?

[cosmolinguist]

Oh I didn't know that. What a damn shame.

As a friend of mine commented on Facebook, "it says a lot about the cult of personality he built that posts i'm seeing about him are largely empty "inspiring genius" stuff or grumpy fact-laden stuff."

The man who said Bill Gates would've been better if he'd dropped acid or gone to an ashram would've been better himself if he'd had a bit more respect for the grumpy fact-laden stuff than the empty stuff. I worry how his cult of personality continues to affect people.

[barakta]

*nods*

I'm a lot kinder about good old Bill these days, he talks and seems to do a lot of SENSE in the third world with his money - kinda like he's had his egomaniac running the world and now he's using the proceeds for something worthwhile.

I wonder if it is possible to be as big as Apple without being evil. I mean Google is fairly damned evil these days. It seems to be a thing that beyond a certain point the evil takes over.

[chiller]

Thank you for writing this. I found you when a friend linked this entry on twitter. I've watched the eulogies roll in all day, and nobody has summed up what I was thinking until I read this (hope you don't mind if I add you).

[cosmolinguist]

Thank you. I had the same frustration (I was sure all these friends canonizing him on Twitter and Facebook would hate me, but so far the response has been only positive -- and traveled oddly far!) and so little sleep I'm glad I managed to sound anything other than a gibbering curmudgeon.

And far from minding if you add me, I think it flattering :)

[chiller]

I was kind of relieved to see someone saying what I was thinking, tbh - it's very easy to get swept up in the "oh what a great man" thing - and he unarguably was, in terms of invention and achievement. But I don't think anyone can be that great unless they care about other people. Maybe it's ok to be a gibbering curmudgeon, sometimes. ;)

[cosmolinguist]

It's that chicken and egg thing, isn't it? Does being big beyond a certain point make you evil, or do you have to be evil to get that big in the first place?

I am not clever enough to answer this question.

[cosmolinguist]

And it's not just that which bothered me, it was also the way he was being credited with everything the company had ever done, as if he had built all the iPods and drawn Buzz Lightyear himself that got to me. Even in the bits of the corporation that Apple's willing to admit to (i.e. not the suicidal Chinese workers) and that Pixar has, there are thousands and thousands of people innovating and achieving, and just because he gets to stand up there with his powerpoint presentation about the new iPhone every year doesn't mean he should get all that credit!

[chiller]

Yep! There was an interview with Alan Sugar on the BBC earlier and he said "what people don't realise is that the guy who designs the look of all these cool things is actually a Brit", and I got the impression the interviewer was really uncomfortable that he'd brought up the inconvenient fact that Jobs didn't single-handedly knit all the iPods himself. That's not to downplay what an astonishingly good businessman Jobs was, but ... hm.

[cosmolinguist]

...but you can't be a good businessman in a vacuum, so to speak. You can't do it without a lot of people around you, and a lot of them will be doing menial jobs that no one notices or values (this is another thing that bothers me about "Don't settle"; if it wasn't for a lot of people settling, he wouldn't have been in a position to be an influential, innovative, accomplished businessman making that speech). To not acknowledge any of that makes me wonder how so many people are sucked into this cult, this personality that doesn't care about them at all.

[fabulousblueporcupine.wordpress.com]

It was the "don't settle, stay hungry" bollocks being touted around like the wisdom of the gods that really got to me. All very well to "stay hungry" until you actually get, you know, hungry.

It's not just Jobs either, all sorts of great-and-goods get paid for giving variants of this advice in various contexts (including plenty of broadsheet careers pages) and it just winds me up. They honestly seem to think there's a cause-and-effect relationship between "I stayed hungry/didn't settle/worked hard/followed my dreams" and "I enjoyed huge success". All the millions of tiny circumstances beyond their influence, all the little switches that had to be flipped the right way, even the macro-economic circumstances of their birth and young adulthood, for heaven's sake - it all gets absorbed into the post-factum narrative in which *their* actions were the critical factor. I really do think this is a corrosive creed - a slightly more sophisticated version of the idea that going on reality TV will make you rich and famous.

It never seems to occur to people like this that there might be millions of others for whom these exact same techniques did not work at all. It's partly a failure of imagination, but I guess partly they never have it brought to their attention because (shocker) nobody ever asks those other people to give presentations on why their life didn't entirely work out the way they wanted.

I suppose he was addressing a roomful of Stanford graduates, however, and the chances are not many of them will be forced by circumstances to settle, so in that sense it was a well-pitched speech.

Sorry for piggybacking my rant on your rant.

[chiller]

YES, exactly this. It's interesting how this plays into the Zeitgeist of the recent chorus of "nobody does it on their own" remarks in political circles regarding the tax evasion of the richest / the "social contract" between the successful and those who paved the roads for them.

[intellectualdwarf.wordpress.com]

The Foxconn suicide story is compelling, but only if you don't consider that estimates for the annual suicide rate in China vary between 13-30 per 100,000 people, and Foxconn employs 300,000 people in Shenzhen. That means that suicides of 40-90 people per year would be 'normal', although also deeply troubling. The extra counseling and suicide prevention at Foxconn only came about because of the pressure that resulted from the connection to Apple; if the resulting suicide prevention efforts kept employee suicide rates down to less than 40 per year, that would be better than the average. God, this sounds incredibly callous to write, but I suppose it's no worse than being fact-based when considering the survival rates associated with different cancer treatments.

As for the "he didn't build the iPhones himself" argument, that's obviously true as a statement. As a metaphor for Apple though, I'm not sure that it works. Jobs co-founded the company, and it was successful during his first time there, and floundered after he left. Apple was a spent force in 1997 when he returned, and since that point has undergone a dramatic recovery. The only variable there was Steve Jobs as CEO. Gil Amelio practically ran the company into the ground, going so far as to license their OS to competitors and laying off substantial numbers of Apple staff - probably what prevailing corporate orthodoxy told him to do, but still a fantastically stupid idea. Jobs turned that around, and it's hard to see that change happening with his personal involvement. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to say "no Jobs, no iPhone".

"A lot of people have to do work they don't like. What does he have to say to them?"

I dunno. He was talking to an audience of Stanford graduates at the time, and I think what he said is appropriate to that audience. I don't think he was insulting the people not in the audience by saying what he did to the people who were.

I don't really disagree as much as it sounds like, but I just don't see the point in resenting someone for encouraging people to make the most of their lives and work, and I don't see the point in denying his pivotal role in building a company which, whatever you think of it, has created prosperity for many.

[andrewhickey.info]

This is exactly what I was trying to say in my Doctor Who post yesterday, actually...

[andrewhickey.info]

"has created prosperity for many."

Has it? Who?

[andrewhickey.info]

Except that the stuff linked by that blog doesn't actually say what the blog says it does. It says he tried 'various alternative therapies' in the nine months before surgery, without saying what those alternative therapies were (they could actually have been effective - some are) or why he waited nine months (possibly not through choice - it's entirely possible he had to be in better shape than he was for surgery or something, in which case trying something else while he waited, even if it *was* ineffective, would make perfect sense). It also does say he changed his diet - *after having his pancreas removed*. Which seems reasonable to me.

And the thing about median survival times is that by definition half the people don't survive that long...

[cosmolinguist]

Nothing to apologize for; this is stuff that was on my mind to; it was a well-pitched speech for its audience, yes...but on the Facebook pages of friends who complain about their lives and jobs and relationship choices and so on, it seems a little incongruous.

I even heard it on Radio 4 today and -- okay I forget, for all my devotion to it, that I am not Radio 4's most targeted demographic, which is more full of people haven't been settling (though I'm sure everyone with not just #firstworldproblems but Moneybox problems thinks they are settling because they want to know if they can squeeze in only two skiing holidays this year, or something). But even so, Facebook and the radio, in using this to canonize the man, are going out to a much wider audience than Jobs was addressing.

If I didn't make this clear I should've: my problem here is not with him but how he's being presented, if not canonized and mythologized, now that he's gone.

[intellectualdwarf.wordpress.com]

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

[cosmolinguist]

The suicide rate itself isn't just what troubles me; it's the apparent living and working conditions of these people, the paltry salaries, the way the "suicide prevention techniques" make it look more like a prison to the people there, and who can blame them for thinking so? And that it's not just suicide but people working to exhaustion and illness, and the company's apparent lack of acknowledgement of this.

It fits that the counselors and so on are an Apple thing, only because such measures seem so paltry and tacked-on, maybe letting rich white guys in America feel better should they ever spare it a thought, but it's difficult to see how they could have much of an affect on workers' lives. If involvement with Apple could get this, surely it could do better too.

I don't mean to say "Apple would've been EXACTLY THE SAME without Steve Jobs!", I'm just trying to counteract people who say "he INVENTED THE WORLD." I know the first initial rush of eulogies are not usually used to problematize Great Lives but, well, I didn't have a lot of sleep and I was cranky :)

[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.

[intellectualdwarf.wordpress.com]

Fair enough. I'm not a fan of the working conditions in China either. At this point I guess people divide based on what they think is realistically achievable - is it possible to give Chinese workers higher standards of living? I think it is, and I think that the attention focused on Foxconn is part of raising that standard, but I don't think it's reasonable to blame Apple if China doesn't raise living standards fast enough. Of course, some people basically think that nothing can be done - we had to go through the bad sides of the industrial revolution and so will the Chinese - and I wouldn't defend that argument. I just think that Apple are, on balance, more of a force for good in this equation than for evil.

I agree about some of the more starry-eyed eulogies; it will be interesting to see what people think in 10 years' time.

[cosmolinguist]

I think I ended up sounding like I'm blaming Apple for working conditions in China, which is obviously not the case. They have a part to play, but it's a huge complex thing that, no doubt, I and everybody I know are complicit in to some degree because all the laptops and smartphones and a bunch of everything else seem to be made in places with horrifying working conditions. And since most of us feel there's nothing we can do about this, it's sublimated guilt most of the time, which rises every now and then often as anger, and it seems to happen to me when I think too much about iPhones :) But I know it's not just Apple, or Steve Jobs, but I apparently can't sit quietly and politely while people tell me he is magic and a wizard.

[fabulousblueporcupine.wordpress.com]

Ha, so you were. I hadn't read it before. Must be something in the water. Or we're just right about everything all the time.

[andrewhickey.info]

I suspect the latter. (BTW I didn't expect you to have read it, I was just too tired to remember to actually put in a link. Also, you should blog more.)