Success(ion)
The lifeblood of Chronicles is Tom Fleming, who took the reins of an interesting magazine in 1985 and turned it into an indispensable publication for anyone concerned about the future of this country. But the magazine that you hold in your hands today also owes its current form—and perhaps even its continued existence—in no small part to a man whose political vision could hardly be more different from Dr. Fleming’s.
Steve Jobs, the 55-year-old cofounder of Apple, Inc., who resigned as the company’s CEO on August 24, has never hidden his political views. A vegan Buddhist who supported Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama and extended spousal benefits to the “domestic partners” of Apple employees, Jobs—in violation of contemporary business wisdom—has even inserted his political views into Apple’s advertising. (Think of the grammatically incorrect “Think Different” campaign, which featured such liberal icons as Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ted Turner, and Mahatma Gandhi.) Reportedly a voracious reader, Jobs would probably not find much in Chronicles to his liking. Yet for almost 25 years, every issue of this magazine has benefited greatly from technologies developed by Jobs at Apple and NeXT, the computer company he founded after leaving Apple in 1985.
Lest you dismiss these remarks as the ravings of an Apple “fanboy,” let me illustrate briefly what I mean.
Before Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh on January 24, 1984, Chronicles was put together the way most magazines were. Authors sent their typewritten manuscripts (with corrections often handwritten in pencil or ink) by mail to our editorial office. The manuscripts had to be retyped (incorporating the authors’ corrections) before they were edited, and after every round of editing. To lay out the magazine, the text had to be typeset into galley form, and then cut and pasted (with scissors and glue) onto the page, and waxed to hold everything in place (and hide the cut edges). The pages were sent to a prepress house, which tidied them up, inserted images and ads, and took pictures of the composed page (one piece of film for each color on the page). “Bluelines” (essentially mimeographed proofs) were created from those negatives and returned to our offices. Any necessary corrections to the bluelines entailed recomposing the entire page, shooting new film, and running new bluelines. When the bluelines were finally approved, the negatives were shipped to our printer, where they were transferred to printing plates. Any problems discovered by the printer on any of the plates required returning to square one on that plate. (And each plate contained either four or eight pages of the magazine, so a problem on one page affected several others as well.) The printer would provide the first hard copies in about ten business days after delivery of the final, problem-free negatives.
All of that began to change in 1984. The Macintosh’s graphical user interface allowed programmers to create a “WYSIWYG” environment—“What You See Is What You Get.” That, along with Apple’s LaserWriter printer (which accurately reproduced what you saw on screen), set the stage in 1985 for desktop publishing.
Today, authors send us their text as e-mail attachments (an innovative feature of Jobs’ NeXTSTEP operating system), mostly written in Microsoft Word (which made its first appearance as a WYSIWYG word processor when it was ported to the Macintosh in 1985). Many of our writers now own a Mac, but some still use a PC running Windows, which got its start as an imitation of the Macintosh operating system, bolted on top of MS-DOS.
Aaron Wolf imports the text directly into Adobe InDesign and exports it for editing onscreen in Adobe InCopy. Adobe’s first big break came in 1985, when Apple licensed Adobe’s PostScript language for use in the LaserWriter. Aaron and I edit each article twice onscreen (30-inch Apple Cinema Displays connected to Mac Pros), before Aaron sends the galleys (as PDFs, via e-mail) to each author. Aaron enters any corrections received from the author, Dr. Fleming, and proofreaders into InDesign. Along the way, he inserts images and ads directly into the layout. George McCartney, Jr., who provides many of our covers, creates them on a Mac and sends them through e-mail and the web.
After a final reading of page proofs and the entering of any last-minute corrections, we export each page as a separate PDF (perhaps ten minutes’ work total, the time it took to wax a couple of pages) and upload them through the internet to our printer in Michigan. The printer immediately provides a digital proof of the entire issue, and we approve it onscreen. It goes into production the very next morning, and the printer provides hard copies after four business days. The production process for a single issue has gone from almost three months to less than a month. And a reader near the top of the mailstream can now read words written as late as one week before the issue arrived at his house, compared with six weeks or more in 1984.
So many of the advances that make our current production process possible happened so gradually that we sometimes lose sight of the revolution that took place in publishing over the last 25 years. And Steve Jobs was there at every step of the way, through both Apple and NeXT. Not only did the NeXTSTEP operating system become the basis for Mac OS X (and thus also iOS, which powers the iPod, iPhone, and iPad), it spurred the creation of Adobe’s PDF format (after NeXT adopted Adobe’s Display PostScript for its windowing system), the widespread adoption of e-mail (built into NeXTSTEP at the system level), and the rise of the World Wide Web, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on December 25, 1990, on a NeXT computer.
Without any one of these things, Chronicles as we know it today would be a different type of magazine.
Scott Richert and Aaron Wolf wax the final pages of the March 2006 issue on a PowerMac G5.
And it would be a much more expensive magazine, too. Or rather, it might well have folded at several points in the past 25 years, had it not been for the reductions in cost occasioned by technologies that trace their roots back to Steve Jobs and Apple and NeXT. Chronicles’ staff is a fraction of what it was in 1984: fewer editors; no typists and typesetters; no dedicated designer and layout person. (At one point in 1999, even before all of these advances had made it to Chronicles, Dr. Fleming and I put out several issues without any additional in-house production staff.) Hand-composed pages, film, and bluelines, along with the prepress services that they required, are things of the past; the PDFs that we send to the printer are now imposed directly on the plates. Chronicles’ direct costs today are about 40 percent lower than they were when I became assistant editor back in September 1997 (and they were already much reduced then from 1984).
There are many more stories I could share, such as how the e-mail and PDF-viewing capabilities of the first iPhone allowed me to take my family on a much-needed vacation in August 2007, while still managing to supervise the production of three separate Chronicles Press books and make sure that they would arrive in Washington, D.C., in September in time for the John Randolph Club—a feat made possible by print-on-demand technologies that rely on the same advances that have made their way into Chronicles’ production process. But I think you get the point: Whether you use a MacBook Air and an iPhone and an iPad or a Dell laptop and a Verizon Droid and an HP TouchPad, if you’re reading Chronicles, you’ve benefited from Steve Jobs’ efforts. In a mere quarter of a century, he has revolutionized the publishing industry in a way not seen since the rise of moveable type.
I don’t mean to downplay the contributions of the tens of thousands of employees of Apple and NeXT (and Adobe and Microsoft) who acted as foot soldiers in this revolution—indeed, quite the opposite. Over the last few years, as it became increasingly obvious that the day was coming when Steve Jobs would have to step aside as Apple’s CEO, Wall Street analysts cried doom and gloom, and institutional investors sold Apple short on every piece of bad news concerning its CEO’s health.
But those of us who rely on Apple products every day, and pay a bit more attention to the internal operations of Apple than the average person does, haven’t been overly worried. Steve Jobs’ famed attention to detail and his desire for perfection did not stop with Apple’s products but extended to the company itself. He was, as many ex-employees of Apple attest, a hell of a man to work for. But those who continued to work for him, who were loyal to both the man and his vision, who recognized that his mercurial temper went hand-in-hand with his brilliance—those employees were indelibly shaped by him. They have risen to the top ranks in Apple, and they took over the day-to-day operations on the world’s largest and most successful corporation long before Jobs stepped aside. Thus, for those who rely on Apple products, there is nothing to fear, because Jobs’ faithful lieutenants have as little desire to change the company that Steve Jobs built as those of us who have dedicated our lives to Chronicles have to change this magazine. As tech columnist John Gruber wrote on DaringFireball.net,
The company itself is Apple-like. The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.
When the news of Steve Jobs’ resignation was announced on the evening of August 24, Apple’s stock immediately dropped seven percent in after-hours trading. As I write this the next morning, it is down just a little over one percent from yesterday’s high, in line with the overall market. That indicates institutional investors and Wall Street analysts are finally realizing what some of us small investors have long known: Apple succeeded because of Steve Jobs, but the company’s success no longer depends primarily on him.
In a world that too often values quick profits and “rock star” fame above solid products and hard work and loyalty, the fact that Steve Jobs could pull off such an orderly succession may, in the end, prove to be his greatest success.
This article first appeared in the October 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. On October 5, Steve Jobs passed away, at the age of 56.
Entries(RSS)
Thank you very much for this piece, Mr. Richert.
Even though I don't believe in fetishizing billionaires, there are only two of them who are closely responsible for uplifting my family.
If John D. Rockefeller had not pioneered in manufacturing kerosene - once regarded as a dirty, crude byproduct - my grandfather would have been unable to study at night for his civil service examinations, and would have been forced into idleness after darkness. He would have been left in the tribal forest region where he was born.
If Juan Trippe had not made airlines for the masses rather than for the classes, my father would not have been able to fly to France to study in business school and our family would not have leaped out of its working class status.
Now, Steve Jobs....Steve Jobs outdid both Trippe and Rockefeller, who each had a single area of impact. He didn't just make his mark on a single field of computers. He made his mark on all the related industries that come forth from there. He even made some long road trips bearable with a few movies to watch on a handheld device. Jobs is really up there with those two.
The odds are that if Steve Jobs was conceived by out of wedlock parents today in northern California, as he was in the 1950’s, statistically he would probably have been aborted. Since Roe vs. Wade the number of abortions is approximately 53 million. You can look at it a couple of ways as the elites do – less crime on the streets, less people on welfare, less resources to share – or you can say a few less geniuses - Steve Jobs, Eric Clapton, Walt Disney, Leonardo da Vinci or Alexander Hamilton’s – all born to unmarried single women.
Steve Jobs is the kind of man a democratic capitalist welfare state desperately needs in order to fulfill its promises made in exchange for limiting humane, leisured life. He was nearly unique, and now he is gone. We will see the effects once Apple's current product pipeline is emptied.
At pjmulvey:
Another thing to consider: how much success would Jobs have had if he actually went to college? There is a distinct possibility of "not as much".
So things like GI Bills, student loan programs, subsidized colleges - who knows how many geniuses these things killed? How much initiative that would have minimized? What is amazing about Jobs is that he dropped out of college in order to prevent himself from being a burden on his poverty-stricken adopted parents.
I don't know about this. Nothing I have read about Mr. Jobs fills me with admiration or even respect. I use his products, but I also use toilet paper and iodine. Returning from Sicily, I was for 18 hours in the company of people who could not keep off their electronic devices, and a more servile and stultified group of "humans" it is hard to imagine. We have to put out chronicles with the most advanced technology, and for that we are all deeply grateful to Mr. Richert's vast expertise, but, to be quite frank, I vastly preferred the old days when we sent much of this servile work out to servile people to do it. I frequently complain that my editors have been turned into data-input personnel who spend too much time at the keyboard and not enough in working with writers. On the whole, I curse the people who invented all this junk and I long for the day when I can escape. Jobs spent roughly 25 years of active livfe on this planet--in his world, that is the only life--doing what exactly? Inventing, tinkering, improving, marketing stuff that healthy humans do not need and should not want.
People who devote themselves to the material life, no matter how rich and famous they become, have missed the point. I would not presume to pass judgment on a stranger or wish Mr. Jobs anything but a better afterlife than the one he had in this world. But of this type in general, let me conclude with a little crude Okie wisdom from Hoyt Axton (made famous by the uninspiring Steppenwolf):
You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round
With tombstones in their eyes
But the pusher don't care
Ah, if you live or if you die
God damn, The Pusher
God damn, I say The Pusher
I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man.
These days, the people with tombstones in their eyes have all been glued to their computers, iPhones, iPads, and Kindles. All kidding aside, God help us all to survive this assault upon human dignity.
Jobs spent roughly 25 years of active livfe on this planet–in his world, that is the only life–doing what exactly? Inventing, tinkering, improving, marketing stuff that healthy humans do not need and should not want.
I am however thankful that my iPod allows me to drown out the horrid muzak paraded around these days with recordings of REAL music.
Yes, technocratic society is unhealthy. But I am thankful to Steve Jobs for his excellent innovations in the field of self-isolating products, which push technocracy to its outer limits and hasten the coming of its logical conclusion as it eats itself to death.
Dr. Fleming, you once sent me a very kind and generous email, but I was surprised by a little snippet at the end of your email:
"Posted from my iPhone"
It was surprising, because I figured you to be a Luddite of sorts.
But all the more surprising, because I don't possess any new age gadgets, certainly no iProducts or Kindles, so I was surprised by the most traditionalist of all men - one who even rejects highways - to be having fancier gadgets than someone as I, who is more open to progress.
I am not claiming there is any double standards in your actions. But it is striking sign of the fact that people are such a product and reflection of their respective societies, that even an anti-technology American must have an iPhone like many other Americans.
I believe I made it pretty plain above that in the world I live in I am forced to rely on gadgets for my work and even to enjoy certain pleasures. I think automobiles and planes are a curse, but if I did not use them, I would be stuck here in Rockford whose vitality has been sucked out by the proximity of Chicago and Milwaukee, so available on interstate highways. The world created by Ford and Jobs is not a better world or a freer world, but a world in which we are more dependent on technology. As a child I attended recitals and concerts. For the most part now, I have to be content with recorded music. Muzak is, of course, one more blessing of modern life, and I too put on my headphones, though most often to drown out the music coming out of someone else's headphones.
I would point out that my original point was not that Mr. Jobs or his technology was inherently evil, though mostly the results have been destructive of any human experience I especially enjoyed. Rather, that it is important not to glorify a man who explicitly rejected any higher value he did not himself create or comprehend. His vision is the Schumpeterian ceaseless destruction of democratic capitalism. Be yourself, follow your dream, then die. Why bother? So we can listen to Queen's greatest hits on our iPhone? Frankly, when I see grownups walking down the street with headphones on, I become deeply embarrassed for them and a little frightened of what sort of zombies they are turning into. In preparing for a trip, I sometimes listen to language tapes on my iPhone for about 30 minutes on a walk. But I hold the phone up to my chest so that I can hear it without shutting out the noise of the real world going on about me. (I used to to do the same thing with little language paperbacks) I would rather look at the birds and the freaks, but my time for study is limited. I use technology as an antidote for the poison of technology.
I do not think that a decent human life is incompatible with modern technology, but please do not try to tell me that any of this junk has made my life better, because it has not.
On the plane I saw a particularly stupid and dishonest Woodie Allen film about a young man in Paris who escapes to the 20's where he meets a girl who dreams of escaping into the Belle Epoque, and when she does, she meets a painter who wants to escape to the Renaissance? See the point? It's bad to sigh after a Golden Age when one is really living in one. And who needs a dirty anti-Semite like Ernest Hemingway, when we have Woodie Allen. The real truth is that they were all right.
My family and I spent a very nice afternoon today at the Grand Opening of the Music Academy's new facility in downtown Rockford. Well over a hundred students of piano (including our oldest daughter, Rebekah), violin, viola, cello, and flute gave recitals for several hundred Rockfordians, ranging from toddlers to the most senior of citizens. I noticed a few local Chronicles subscribers in the crowd, and two friends of The Rockford Institute, William Scarpaci (professor at Rock Valley College) and Frank Schier (publisher of the Rock River Times), volunteered their time. Frank's dedication to the Music Academy stems from his devotion to his former professor, the late Rockford Institute board member Peter Stanlis, whose wife, Eleanor (d. 2000), founded the Music Academy at Rockford College in 1985.
All in all, it was a wonderful afternoon, and a sign of hope for Rockford at large, and especially for downtown.
But nobody is capable of predicting a negative side effect of a technology in advance.
Somebody might make a virtual reality world headset, in which badly injured people confined to hospital beds may live a fictional life where they can move and walk. If a negative side effect occurs afterwards, with those people being stuck in that virtual life and becoming horrified of ever coming out and being disabled again, then it might be bad.
But nobody knew in advance that such a thing would happen. All people knew was that it could keep confined people a little more entertained, and nobody can hold a possible problem against the technology before the problem has actually come about.
Same with all this modern technology of iPhones, airplanes,.etc. No single inventor or organization intended, predicted, or expected the ways people could use them to ruin their lives.
Muzak is, of course, one more blessing of modern life
Yes, I agree: if there were no Muzak there would be no need for the iPod. But technology was already ruining society and Interstate highways already destroying small and medium-sized cities long before Apple came into the picture. My point was that I am grateful that they have accelerated the downfall with products that make it all that much easier to get away from an increasingly unbearable society.
My friends Nicholas and Scott do not get, because they do not get the basic principle that technology does not liberate but enslave. People get dumber every year, because they listen to the radio, watch TV, text message, Tweet, and Google. Dumber and less human.
And yes, people--even mad old Nietzsche--do know in advance. Perhaps not the greedy little inventors who make up this junk, but many of us knew. I knew as a child that cars and TV were ruining what was left of the old America and replacing it with food chains, highways, and mass advertising. I also knew when computers came along that they would make people stupid. The first student I knew who used a computer in his dissertation began with entirely false assumptions about the nature of the Greek hexameter, spent thousands of hours working on a program based on these false notions and thousands more trying to fine-tune his program. The poor chump never actually learned to understand the hexameter. I remember the first book advertised as word-processed, some piece of ill-written fatuity by Jimmy Carter.
And Scott, if you really think the Music Academy founded by my friend Eleanor Stanlis and to which I am very grateful for the training it gave my children is a sign of hope for a city whose symphony orchestra plays pops plus broadway, whose art museum preaches the gospel of ugliness, that is because you do not remember how good the music was here even in the early 80's. People have to try their best, of course, and I salute the Academy and wish its hardworking and talented teachers the best in their new headquarters. But lying to ourselves about the condition we are in and what the causes are makes one part of the problem. When I was you all's age, I had the sense to listen to an older generation whose experience preceded the age of filth and conformity in which I was brought up. But, one more sign of the Jobs' effect is that in the ceaseless reinvention of the human race, the past--as Jobs explicitly declared--had no lessons to teach. The past is a trap, be yourself--and then what? Die wishing you had spent more time with your kids, meaning, wishing they appreciated you better?
The question was raised whether or not Jobs would have benefitted from college. He might have made less money, but poetry and philosophy might have taught him a bit more about the human condition than the bubble gum card cliches he was fond of spotting. Frankly, there is more wisdom in a fortune cookie than in all of Mr. Jobs' pronouncements I have read. "Confucius say that man who live in virtual reality have virtually no reality."
Here is the final proof. We are carrying on this conversation over the internet, via Apple computers, but no one seems capable of listening. To quote another pop artist of the same generation, "Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life." Substitute any word your like, Internet, Twitter, Apple, and you'll get the idea.
And if anyone thinks he is really escaping unbearable unreality by putting on earphones, he is utterly and completely mistaken. Turn it off before it's too late. If you must be hooked up to something, watch Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and in your mind understand the the Pod People are really iPod people.
One of the worst aspects of the internet is that it finds me here at the office--I am not hooked up at home except through the iPhone--working on a column requested by my editor at the Daily Mail. I am hating every minute of this servile work but I am hoping it will gain some exposure for our magazine. Why bother, though, if our readers are all hooked up? My old man used to say, in his early 60's, that he was grateful he would soon be gone and no longer have to deal with an increasingly stupid world. How right he was.
If I can finish my column on "Occupy Wall Street," i am going to spend the day grubbing in the yard and reading an Italian novel I don't like so far--Scerbanenko's Non Rimanere Soli. And I am going to stick to a new resolution not even to look at a computer except for the purpose of writing until after lunch. Let the healing begin!
Before I exit this conversation, I should explain that my intention was simply to remind people that while tools can be valuable they are merely a means to an end. We don't value the chisel for itself but for what it can help us to do. We judge by the fruits. On that basis, it is very easy to condemn all electronic technology for the deleterious effect it has had on the intelligence and literacy of those who depend on it.
My second point was that in this world we are left with little choice, if we choose to pursue certain careers and interests. Suppose most decent books were destroyed except in electronic form--virtually the case in poor benighted Rockford. Naturally one avails himself of the alternative. I subscribe to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae which has most Greek texts down to about 1500 AD. I could not possibly buy one tenth of them.
My third point, though, was not to get caught up in these things. Use them as you must for work and entertainment. There is no decent drama here in Rockford and very little music except for the Mendelsohn Club. It is hard to go to Chicago for concerts. So, we listen to recordings. I will say that I enjoyed a brass band in Palermo, commemorating St. Dominic and the Rosary, almost--but not really-- as much as the Chicago Symphony, but I can't go to Palermo all that often.
If you find yourselves feeling grateful to Steve Jobs and his gadgets, then it is time to detox. If you are nervous after a day, then try a week. When I see these things being used, for example, at a restaurant or in a meeting, I feel the IQ flowing out of me in a torrent.
Finally, Mr. Sanjay does have a point. I think I am setting a bad example by posting on the internet. My intent was to share a pre-postmodern point of view to a younger audience, but I see now that the medium really is the message, and all that many people appear to have learned from this is that it is OK to rot your brain on the computer. I have become, if not the pusher, then at least the enabler.
My friends Nicholas and Scott do not get, because they do not get the basic principle that technology does not liberate but enslave. People get dumber every year, because they listen to the radio, watch TV, text message, Tweet, and Google. Dumber and less human.
No, I got the point, but MY point was this: TV was leading us down the road to perdition and personal computers and smartphones have accelerated the decline headfirst. At long last we can start looking for ways to scrap things together.
And if anyone thinks he is really escaping unbearable unreality by putting on earphones, he is utterly and completely mistaken.
I am well aware that to escape unreality these days, one must go into to the wilderness. That is why I go camping at least one weekend a year and I fully endorse and love pilgrimages with tents. (Unfortunately I think next year I will be on the logistics team, as I am starting to show my age and for the first time finished the hike with a very bad inflammation in my ankle and a strained ligament in my knee. Can't get more real than that!)
HOWEVER...
Last night I was having dinner with eight of my best friends. At the start of the evening, we men were in the living room having an aperitive and the wives/fiancées were in the bedroom tending to a newborn baby and watching over a newly pregnant woman as she napped. The topic of our conversation was « Mieux vaut investir dans la pierre que dans la bière » ("Invest in stone, not in beer"--although, naturally, we were all drinking alcohol in a borrowed apartment). I suggested a compromise: « Investir dans une micro-brasserie ! » ("Invest in a brewery!"). Then someone started playing a game on his iPhone and we started discussing the game, and the iPhone 5 and when it would come out in France. Then someone else started playing a game on his iPhone. Thirty minutes later, the room suddenly went eerie silent. I was surrounded by three buddies on iPhones and one on a Blackberry. « Soiréé des iPhones ! » I remarked. The guy on the Blackberry cheered, « Oui, c'est merveilleux ! » I was disappointed, but of course I went over to my coat, fished out my iPhone, and started clicking mindlessly.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Fortunately, the lady of the house woke up shortly thereafter and started breaking out the entrées, so our little iParty was interrupted, the wine bottles were opened and life was normal again.
Yes, one must go into the wilderness to escape unreality these days, but I have a major problem: I do not like being alone, at all, ever, and I am already cloistered enough at work as it is (I'm much more productive that way, but the days are kind of sad and start to run together). I suppose iLife is better than loneliness at times.
There is so much wisdom in Dr. Fleming's comments that I am almost tempted to throw my laptop out the window immediately (not my iPod or iPhone since I own neither one), but I do have one contrary thought.
We all know boys who like to tinker and play with gadgets. Many such boys grow up to become repairmen or mechanics of previously existing technology, but it seems to be almost inevitable that the smarter ones will be tempted to invent new things of their own. Dr. Fleming seems to assume that greed was Mr. Jobs's primary motivation in life, but while I have no doubt that he enjoyed acquiring fabulous wealth, I suspect that when he first started out it was the joy of tinkering and fooling around with technology that primarily motivated him. If advances in technology have destroyed society and enslaved us, how can we get young men of this type to channel their energies in different directions? (In theory, that is - obviously in practice it is likely much too late. So maybe I should say - how could we have averted young men of Edison's or Ford's generation from taking this path?)
feeling grateful to Steve Jobs and his gadgets
Grateful?? When I look at the mess of Apple products that is my desktop, I think that Apple ought to be paying me a commission for advertising every time I have people over.
James Kabala,
A friend of mine, Eric Brende, has written a book called, Better Off,(HarperCollins 2004) about he and his wife's life after graduating from MIT -yes, Massachusettes Institute of Technology. Most of the book focuses vividly on a year they spent living in the country with an Old Order Anabaptist group they call "Minimites," where he says they learned practical knacks and principles of technological selection they now apply in their urban home.
They are in the St. Louis area now and live a very interesting life in the city, raising kids, making soap, pedaling a rickshaw and playing the piano. Eric was always very talented at science and math and I believe has a doctorate from MIT but always had a strong conviction about technology serving its human creators instead of determining their ends. You might want to take a look at his book some time if you have the time or inclination. As Dr. Fleming has said tools can be helpful and we human creatures seem to have always been interested in creating them,from Java Man to Steve Jobs. Some are more helpful than others but most are a mixed blessing at best.
Regarding technology, just think of "Nobel's Blasting Powder." Technology can be useful or it can be misused. Is all technology likely to be misused and avoided? Should we become Luddites?
I should stay out of this discussion, but I should say that I do not think that greed was Mr. Jobs' primary motivation, any more than it is the primary motivation of most successful businessmen. I do think that success is habit-forming and that it is a bad habit to be forever devising new means of satisfying desires when we should be finding ways of being less dependent on the material universe. I also agree with Mr. Kabala that many men--not me, by the way--love to tinker and that it is not a dishonorable practice in general because it is consistent with man's need to improve upon the imperfect natural world, and is thus akin to gardening. One needs, however, a sense of proportion.
To become a "Luddite" (remember, though, the Luddites were not opposed to technology per se) is not only not necessary, it is a foolish response to circumstances. We have to take the world as we find it, which is why I drive a car, admittedly a beat-up car that barely runs, use computers and iPhone, watch movies on my TV that cannot receive a signal. If we cut ourselves off completely, we run serious risks. As wise men from Aristotlte to Sherlock Holmes have reminded us, if we try to hard to become saints, we are more likely to become monsters. And there, again, we have the problem of Mr. Jobs, who really did talk as if the limits of human nature could be transcended by technology. In his philosophy, he comes across as a second-rate George Gilder.
Let me retell an old Taoist parable I remember from my foolish youth. A sage (one of those hated Confucianist types) came across a peasant laboriously drawing water from a well in a bucket and pouring it into an irrigation ditch. The sage asked: Haven't you heard about the device that will allow you to do this work much more easily? (I think he had in mind something like the shadouf) Yes, said the peasant, "I know of such things, but my master (obviously a Taoist) told me that men who use these things become servants of the machine." Obviously the peasant took things a bit far, but his underlying point was a correct intuition. There is always a trade-off between what we gain in ease by use of technology and what we lose in freedom and independence and creativity. As crazy old Nietzsche once said: A lame man may get on a horse and ride to the top of the mountain, but when he gets there and dismounts, he still limps.
I paid Mr. Jobs nearly no attention while he was alive and continue to largely ignore him upon his demise. (I read Mr. Richert's tribute but can't recall it at all--most unusual for me, whose habit it is to turn to Mr. Richert's contribution to each issue of Chronicles first) Jobs belonged to a subset of humanity, the inventor-entrepreneurs, whose exploits fill me with ennui almost before I hear of them. I use his wares, as I use the products of the others (including the electric light), sparingly, I think, in part because I, like Dr. Fleming, am no tinkerer and don't want the stuff to break down prematurely from over- or (unintentional) mis-use (if they rust from disuse, I toss them happily).
I can't read any discussion such as this without thinking of what Paul Goodman said of technology, that, properly regarded, it was a branch of ethics, a matter not of nuts, bolts, and engineering but of right and wrong, good and evil. As far as I can tell, Goodman's understanding is not only not much current now; it wasn't in the 1950s-60s when he pronounced it. To the extent that it is, as in the protests against space exploration, industrial agriculture, the pharmaceutical transformation of psychiatry and other medical specialties, and contraception, it is represented as quaint when it is not called irrelevant.
Finally, and this really is finally, in reading over and pondering the discussion, I can see that I have left a possibly erroneous impression. I began by saying "I don't know about this," and I don't. Obviously, Scott and I do not agree on the contribution technology has made both to our world and to the magazine, but we probably don't agree on the value of Polka music, either. His article is a very good piece, and I don't have to agree with everything in it to appreciate the value of his contributions. I actually proposed the subject of his new series of columns, because I am aware of my own prejudices that prevent me from having a balanced and useful view of information technology and all the personal stuff that goes with it. Even when I was a fairly hip and wild young fellow, I was already a fuddy-duddy, forever mooning about ancient Greeks and symbolist French poets. I'm worse than ever now that I'm a graybeard.
My complaint that my editors spend too much time on data entry should not be misread to be a criticism of their work, but quite the opposite. It was intended as an expression of sympathy and gratitude for doing all the boring stuff I no longer wish to do and probably could not if I wanted to. I do think we need another pair of hands and eyes, however, to free them up for the higher editorial tasks. Everyone who knows how stripped down our operation is expresses incredulity about what we get down with a minuscule staff. The bulk of the credit goes to Scott for streamlining and mechanizing the process. Yes, I preferred it when I had a full-time editorial secretary who read proof and arranged my schedule, when we had a full-time keyboard operator and a full-time artist/design person, but we'd go broke today with such a staff.
So hats off to Scott and Aaron and, at least a tip of the hat to the late Steve Jobs for helping to make it possible.
(I still don't have to like it.)
THE FUDDY-DUDDY FACTOR AND HELLENIC THEATER
In mid 1980's I was at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (Drama - minor, English - major - which I yet have to master).
But I became in instant FUDDY-DUDDY, when my professor (the late William Packard) started us with a most serious study of Greek culture and how theater remains inseparable from the Ancient Greeks. Words like theater come from Greek Te-Ah-Thron (a seeing place) therefore of highest impact is what you see on stage - not what you hear, which the Romans later perverted into Auditorium (a hearing place - commonly used in our Academic circles and applicable except in Croatian language where "theater" is called Kazaliste (speaking place).
Tragedy (Greek Tra-goi-dia) goat's cry, a slaugthered goat at the end of play gave us the word tragedy.
Peripetia - (same as in my firs language - Serbian) a turn-around, within a conflict or a new sub-conflict.
All those Ancient Hellenic elements of Drama are contained in Aristotle's Poetics and Dr. Fleming must have read it in Greek - I have not.
But,
Johan Wofgang Goethe, William Shakespeare, Edmond Rostagne, Christopher Marlowe, Eugene O'Neal, Henrik Ibsen, Tennesee Williams, Berold Brecht, Anton Pavlovich Chekov, etc. etc. all employed these ancient dramatic principles - that is where Jobs failed most miserably = we have hundreds of thousands of people sitting at their desktops, laptops, ipods, etc. and they don't have the first clue about the basics. The more "advanced" we get, the more distant we are from the true, (pure) source. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. But not even the change helps, since it's very superficial and most kids can get those cliff-notes (yellow and black striped) about Hamlet, Macbeth etc. etc. without ever being able to comprehand the work and even modestly enrich themselves - that is the truest and deepest flaw (Hubris - fatal flaw in theatrical Hellenic Greek), of the modern day devices. Yes, I also use toilet paper and computers too, even a few cell phones.
Not to mention the factor of profound alienation (Erich Fromm theory from the 1950s, that has befallen us more and rampantly through the use of these devices.
As if it weren't self evident (my lack of discipline) to proof my text or use the spell check before I hit the post-it (publish/submit) button - which has haunted me all my life, on the basis that if I know something - I know that I know it, if I am unsure - I will keep my trap shut and will abstain from proving that there are massive holes in my knowledge too. Therefore, anybody and everybody that has seen my few comments here and there will notice a pretty consistent pattern of typos, but never a lack of forethought or knowledge, (it's the packaging that I lack - the Steve Jobs part obviously escaped me).
In one of his books the (classically educated) physicist Werner Heisenberg discusses that same parable of the peasant & the sage & the well which Dr. Fleming mentions in #19.
Though one might be surprised at such a reaction from a scientist, Heisenberg clearly appreciates the parable's sentiment.
He then goes on to make several comments which strike me as pretty insightful. One is that maybe the harm done to culture and the life of the spirit is due less to any particular technology, and more to the fact that the innovation nowadays occurs too quickly, at a dizzying pace. Hence man has no opportunity to develop customs to go with the new tools, thereby (so to speak) civilizing them. In an world of continual innovation, our tools are necessarily barbaric. We don't even begin to learn how to use a new invention humanely and rationally before we throw it away, to make way for the 2.0 version.
Had we in the past been somehow confined to, say, railroads and telegraphs and the like, we might have, after many generations, perfected a dignified society and decent existence to go along with them.