By Jack
Shafer
If BMW had an auteur—the kind of auteur Apple had until last
night—would his fans gather at local BMW dealerships when he died to light
candles and toss flowers in front of showroom windows the way Steve Jobs fansare now
at Apple Stores around the world? Would they storm Twitter to post
recollections of the first and second BMWs they owned and thank Mr. BMW for
having made their ordinary trips to the store for milk and eggs more like
cosmic adventures in motoring?
Obviously not. No other gadgets have wormed themselves into
the global psyche the way Steve Jobs’s have. Like most of Jobs’s coups, the
takeover was a matter of design. Although he had been synonymous with Apple
since the late 1970s by virtue of the computer he developed and marketed with
Steve Wozniak, and the cult of Apple was already in full bloom at the time of
the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Jobs didn’t fashion himself the
maximum leader of the cult until he returned to the company in 1996.
Jobs’s restoration was read by his followers as a
resurrection, and he encouraged this interpretation by using his regained
powers as Apple’s guru to further mesh his identity with that of the company’s
products. Jobs became his Macs and iPods and they became him. By and large,
they were pretty good products, if not a little pricey. (Ask me, I’ve owned a
few.)
What Jobs understood was that there was and is room in the
computer market for a prettier or marginally better product—packed tightly in a
very fashionable box—that could be sold at a premium price if he marketed them
as “Veblen goods,” luxury products that convey status upon their purchasers.
Jobs hasn’t been alone in this discovery. Take the modern American kitchen. It
has become our most densely populated Veblen-goods petting zoo, with its Viking
six-burner range with griddle and double oven, its Sub-Zero
refrigerator-freezer, its Bosch silent dishwasher, and its MoMA tea kettle.
The modern kitchen appliance signals the high status of its owner to friends
and neighbors, and so do Apple’s products. When Appleheads visit your home or
office and see your iMac or MacBook Air, you can see the Oh,
you’re one of us! thought
bubble forming over their heads. Conversely, these folks emit a palpable sense
of disappointment if catch you with a Dell or a Toshiba. But
you seemed so creative! You
can observe this sort of messaging on the subway, too, as Apple owners steal
glances at one another, bonding wordlessly as they pinch and flick their way
through their iPhones and iPads.
Becoming a loved brand wasn’t easy for Apple. Given the
automatic hatred the creative class (or those who think of themselves part of
the creative class) has for corporations, Apple and Jobs should have been
targets of scorn. What he and Apple had going for them at the beginning was
their underdog position against IBM and then Microsoft. Apple wisely projected
itself as the alt-computer company, a distinction Jobs cemented with the 1984 Super
Bowl commercial. Just using Apple products was supposed to be an act of
rebellion against the system.
After the Jobs resurrection, he made sure that salvation came
with every purchase. For what are Apple Stores but places of worship, with
priests who possess secret knowledge manning a Genius Bar at the far end of the
temple? Is the Apple logo on the wall not a late-20th century cross? Is every
Apple employee toting a handheld credit-card scanner not a human
tithing-station? You laugh, but I can’t tell you how many Sundays I’ve gone to
my neighborhood Apple Store to renew my faith, and to indoctrinate my children
in its fundamentals.
Jobs’s flirtations with Eastern philosophy give credence to my interpretation, as
does the energy he spent playing the role of the infallible leader. Jobs told
his customers, point blank, that if they wanted his products and services,
they’d have to use them the way he delivered them. Just as the pope doesn’t let
anybody take a bath in holy water, Jobs wasn’t about to allow anybody to
jailbreak an iPhone without at least risking excommunication.
Evidence of Jobs’s psychological hammerlock on the culture
can be found in today’s news stories about his life and times, which quote
heavily and without caustic comment from his speeches and interviews. These
quotations would be ridiculed as Khalil Gibranian nonsense if spoken by anybody
else. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow
already know what you truly want to become,” Jobs has said. And, “I want to put
a ding in the universe.” And, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you
can only connect them looking backwards.” And, “You have to trust in
something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” And, “There is no reason
not to follow your heart.” And, “Death is very likely the single best invention
of Life. It is Life’s change agent.”
I predict a quickie book, The Eternal Wisdom of Steve Jobs,
in stores and e-book shops soon.
The doublethink of the Apple slogan “Think Different,” revealed Apple as an
oddly totalitarian organization (no, you can’t change your own battery in your
iPhone). What the company has always wanted its followers—I mean, its
customers—to do was think like Jobs. Follow your bliss! But do it inside
Steve’s cocoon. That so many customers regarded Jobs and Apple as rebel leaders
instead of techno-conformity ringleaders does not flatter human perception.
None of what I’ve written is intended to subtract from the
products and services he helped create, his extraordinary business comeback, or
his tenacity, all of which I admire. My problem isn’t with Steve Jobs but the sloppy
veneration of Steve Jobs. He made computers, pretty good computers. Isn’t that
enough?
******
Charles Arthur shares some pop psychology ideas on why
some people love Apple and some people hate it. (I’m in neither group.) Use
your Mac to send hate mail toShafer.Reuters@gmail.com and your iPhone to monitor my Twitter feed.
(This RSS feed rings
every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is
filed.)
Photo: Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs gives a wave at the
conclusion of the launch of the iPad 2 on stage during an Apple event in San
Francisco, California March 2, 2011. Jobs took the stage to a standing ovation
on Wednesday, returning to the spotlight after a brief medical absence to
unveil the second version of the iPad. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach
Source : Reuters
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