|
That is his legacy. He was so sick in recent years that I doubt he had anything to do with the business side or the outsourcing. He was a designer and an inspirer of engineers and other designers. He sought the most beautiful, the most elegant, the most user friendly and the most amazing technology designs and implementation and would not back down from his vision of what that technology should be. While every other "brand" of what used to be reliable American products turned to crap, as the banksters and the gangsters gutted U.S. businesses, Jobs stuck to his notions of product integrity and product perfection. And I'm sure that that passion for the integrity of design consumed him in his final years and he had no time and energy for anything else. Pancreatic cancer is a very long, slow, painful, terminal illness.
It's easy enough to dis Apple for recent corporate decisions, but I do not dismiss Steve Jobs that easily. Whether I'm right or wrong about Jobs' involvement on the business end while he was ill, there was something of great value in him that we have lost with his death at a young age, and it is NOT dismissible in black-and-white, corporate/anti-corporate terms. Faux News may treat "Occupy Wall Street" protestors that way but I will not treat Steve Jobs that way. He inspired a social and technical revolution. It is short-sighted and puny-minded to just dismiss the man out of hand. Much as I loathe the Corporate Rulers, I cannot see things that way when it comes to individual genius and integrity. None of the people who are truly making life miserable for others and who are destroying democracy and killing the planet make things of value. Steve Jobs did. That sets him apart. He himself was a worker. Most of the people who are truly making life miserable for others and who are destroying democracy and killing the planet are not visible or are very hard to ferret out. Jobs was highly visible and pretty straightforward in what he was doing and it was all about design. Lord, you could dis Leonardo da Vinci or Michelanglelo for adding glory to the most rancid institution on earth at the time--the Roman Catholic Church--but that would be very narrow-minded. Design geniuses, artists, are not responsible for the societies they are born into, and have to drudge along like the rest of us and make do with what is. Their genius is in rising above their social/political circumstances with the tools at hand, with the media that is available and trying to express their humanity and pull the rest of us along, into new thoughts and modes of life, against great odds--against the inertia and deadliness of given institutions. Jobs was that sort of human being--a pioneer in human thought, an original--and he touched billions of people with his design ideas and the things he made of them.
I'm not for deification but I have to say that, when I first heard about Jerry Brown declaring a "Steve Jobs Day," I thought, "Yeah, that's appropriate," and I still do. And I don't much care for Brown and his corporate connections these days or for any of the "neo-liberal" establishment that plays along with the banksters and the warmongers. But as a statement acknowledging Steve Jobs' influence on computer technology and his personal legacy of making very high quality products at a time when others were throwing garbage out the door and calling it "consumer goods," it's okay with me. It was the right thing to do.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
