Steve Jobs gave us the future? I beg to differ. I say that he tied the poor, bleeding future by its neck to the rear bumper of his Time Machine and dragged it into the past. The molded plastic cases and backlighting may look like a spaceship, but their swift and planned descent into obsolescence is straight outta Detroit. I mean, look, I've got an iPod; it's neat; it's cool how much music is on the little bitty thing; but it has not revolutionized my fucking consciousness. I have not attained my non-dual state through the addition of an 8 megapixel camera in the iPhone whatever. Despite the best efforts of this here user-friendly intuitive interface, samadhi escapes me, or I it. This is not to disparage the guy's intelligence. He was very smart. He built as successful a scam as any human could ever unreasonably expect. He changed forever the amount of money you are willing to spend on shit you do not really need and, even worse, already probably own.
61 comments:
Whoever IOZ is, she or he is awesome.
Yes, that, and also, SOMEONE ELSE WOULD HAVE INVENTED IT, for better or worse. These assholes are replaceable like the rest of us. Genius is a fantasy, not far off from belief in kings' divine right and such.
he do the dead rich guys in different voices
OOOOOOHH! You Droid fanboys never quit, do you?!?!?
credit where due, he revolutionized kitsch. here's to less chintzy molded plastic cases!
I'll agree with the ludicrous nature of the praise heaped on the guy, but why does he deserve this abuse? Are you mad because he seduced you? I say unto you that Steve Jobs dragged no one anywhere they weren't trying real hard to get to anyway.
I thought this movie was reasonably prophetic about the whole thing :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdOnUtHamko
may the creative forces of the universe have mercy on our souls, if any
We cannot know whether someone else would have done what Jobs did at Apple. However, I would point out that even now, with the actual Apple products in existence to study and steal ideas from, Microsoft keeps on cranking out Microsoft-like products. Android is OK, but I still don't find it as intuitive.
Even granting that the iPhone would have been eventually matched and superceded by something else: we all live a finite time. By dragging the iPhone et al four years back from the alternate future where it otherwise would have been invented, Jobs gave us all an extra four years of just-right tech.
As for planned obsolescence: IOZ, dude, you know we are talking about computers here, right? Moore's law? My iPhone, less than two years old, looks and works just fine. But it's a 3G -- technology already obsolete. Unless I get unlucky and fall in a river or something, I'll replace it long before it wears out.
And no: it has not revolutionized my fucking consciousness. Really? Really? It has revolutionized my ability to talk to people, fight boredom, take pictures, etc. while in places other than my house or workplace, because it is light and small enough that I actually carry it around routinely.
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; if you make them really think, they'll hate you.
That's why he died a multibillionaire and you're not going to.
I really hope my iPhone gives me cancer. I want to be just like Steve Jobs!
This is either the most iconoclastic thing you've ever written or the least. I'm more inclined to say the latter but damn if my Facebook feed doesn't have a solid case for the former.
Nutella - it's like that old SNL joke from season 1:
"Hey Feodor - about your new novel - writing it was the crime and reading it was the punishment"
It's not that we're not all thinking it - it's that M'sieur actually wrote it (with a neat title that appropriately alludes to The Wasteland) ...
To Leonard Hatred ...
Hurry up, please. It's time.
If porn in my pocket isn't samadhi, I don't know what is!
Come on Lenny that's some propaganda shit. Monsieur is talking about purposely holding features back because Moore's Law doesn't drive obsolescence fast enough. While this is a dick move, it requires cooperation from those with more money than brains who believe the next iteration will change their life.
Now he baits progressives and apple fanboys -- JUST LIKE HITLER DID.
He also invented whips and agriculture.
stolen from UOJim: In tribute to passing of Steve Jobs, Chinese assembly workers at iPhone plant allowed pee break.
Well, now what are the Singularity Prophets going to do with their ManGod?
The Second Coming of Steve?
To the extent that he is responsible for the plight of Chinese electronics assemblers, I'll admit that he is due some vilification.
We used to have people that made real discoveries in science and engineering. No more. Now you're a "genius" if you repackage some existing technology in a fluorescent case and charge a 500% markup, and people actually buy it.
I love all the media hyperventilating over "what will Apple do now without Steve Jobs?" As if the man's job ever entailed anything other than accumulating and moving around money, and hiring other bosses to do the same.
Steve Jobs was not toiling away twenty-four hours a day coding every program, designing every interface, manufacturing every iPhone by hand (that's what Chinese sweatshops are for). He was just the smug little face that trotted out this year's model whenever the time came to do so.
That iPod you've got didn't spring fully-formed from Steve Jobs's receding hairline - it was the product of a lot of invisible workers, some well paid, most paid for shit. But the credit goes to the boss, the man who did the least amount of work to make it, and made the most amount of money off it. That's the foundational myth of capitalism right there: that you need the boss, that he's anything other than a fucking leech.
Some marrcunns see the super wealthy as royalty. Bottom line, even with all his dough cancer got him anyway. Scary.
Steve Jobs will be remembered as among the chief propagators of the emergent cyborg culture. Hard to know whether he will be loved for this or regarded as a tool with a jones for Braun.
We are sold on the idea of functional omniscience in the palm of one's hand, how cheap and easy that's turned out to be, but simultaneous with this is a gradual erosion of consciousness. Memory is being replaced by intuitive search engines. Personal identity is being crowd-sourced.
"functional omniscience in the palm of one's hand"
Is "omniscience" the Latin word for "hair", as in - you know - "functional hair on the palm of one's hand"?
God, I had to shut off twitter last night. Bleggh.
god I have to watch that movie again!
Gawker agrees with IOZ? That Hamilton dude left himself wide open with that last paragraph though.
And let's not forget, workers jumping out of windows over at Foxconn
Richwhitedude is dead. Long live the new richwhitedudes.
Low hanging fruit this Jobs guy's passing, he was the standard amoral asocial richwhiteboy, but oBviously the preachment is not for the choir.
Capt'n Obvious
P.S. Fuck my IPhon, liked android 10 times better but tmobil is a gaggle of shits with eyes, and the blasted thing is a fucking PHONE 1st!!!
Memory is being replaced by intuitive search engines. Personal identity is being crowd-sourced.
Worth noting that one of Egypt's pharohs said something very like this about the invention of writing.
Agreed. And the same hypocritical pwogs who see the Koch brothers under every bed are mourning Jobs's demise.
To the extent that he is responsible for the plight of Chinese electronics assemblers, I'll admit that he is due some vilification.
Agreed. And the same hypocritical pwogs who see the Koch brothers under every bed are now mourning Jobs's demise.
By the way, what have you done that’s so great?
Steve Jobs gave us the future? I beg to differ.
Yes. You would have to beg.
I say that he tied the poor, bleeding future by its neck to the rear bumper of his Time Machine and dragged it into the past. The molded plastic cases and backlighting may look like a spaceship, but their swift and planned descent into obsolescence is straight outta Detroit.
Descent into obsolescence? Like, getting updated for following versions of iOS with tons of new features, unlike say, most other manufactures, including Android that potentially *could* update, but doesn't for most devices sold?
Oh, and "obsolescence"? You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means. Do they stop working or perform less in any way?
"Obsolescence" IS NOT you "having to have the next version that just came out".
I mean, look, I've got an iPod; it's neat; it's cool how much music is on the little bitty thing; but it has not revolutionized my fucking consciousness. I have not attained my non-dual state through the addition of an 8 megapixel camera in the iPhone whatever.
Well, they revolutionized their respective industries (music and mobile phones).
Your "fucking consciousness" can wait.
He was very smart. He built as successful a scam as any human could ever unreasonably expect. He changed forever the amount of money you are willing to spend on shit you do not really need and, even worse, already probably own.
Yes, people are idiots. And buy what the "don't really need".
While you, say, "really need" to have what you have.
And you "really need" to express yourself in this blog. Because you are a notch above the rest, and you are such a good communicator. Right.
6.06 AM-
U Mad?
I NEED TONS OF NEW FEATURES NOM NOM NOM. I should talk about macs more often. Better than Progressives!
SOMEONE ELSE WOULD HAVE INVENTED IT
Usually, someone else did invent it. Apple's great success lay not so much in devising radical new technologies as in applying good design and superlative marketing to technologies which were just approaching maturity, because someone else had already done all the hard development work. I was programming touchscreen smartphones five years before the first iPhone was released.
My God has a shinier touch screen than your God.
Wow, ya, it turns out it is really controversial to not absolutely fucking love Steve Jobs.
Creating Jobs, and taking them away.
@606
Obviously the preachment was not for the choir.
In a world with more poetic justice, Jobs would have ended in a ditch with three benjamins, series O, W, and Z, stuck down his gullet, sometimes in 1986.
Capt'n Obvious
Not my Steve Jobs!
So this video is very fascinating to me. It's a bit subtle at first, but there is something very interesting to notice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6WrD26VPUE
You'll note that when the cat attacks, it never does so head on. It goes around the mirror to attack the "other" cat. That doesn't make any sense? It's clearly perceiving and open space in front of it, yet when it comes time to strike it correctly avoids the obstacle between it and its target.
My theory is that the cat is sensing the presence of the mirror with its whiskers. They can do that. They use their whiskers to feel the air currents. this is what allows them navigate *total* darkness.
Somehow, the brain is holding the two contradictory pieces of information at once. It sees that there is another cat standing directly in front of it with nothing in between, but it feels that there is a solid wall that it must go around. Despite the fact that these two pieces of information are completely contradictory, both are held and acted upon as if they were true.
Fucking awesome, even without all the richness of metaphor.
Cognitive dissonance.
there's a lot of good cat videos on the internet
Umm ... Nutella - Occam's Razor suggests the notion that the cat thinks the mirror is a ...
...
window.
It may understand transparent solid objects, but they would have a consistent background. It wouldn't be the central part of the room to the left, and the inside of a closet to the right.
The cognitive processes of a cat are hard to infer. I don't think it's safe to assume that comprehending and misapplying the notion of a transparent solid is simpler than acting simultaneously on two disparate pieces of information. If anything, I'd say the cognitively less complex thing would be my scenario, and hence what one might expect from a less sophisticated brain.
Far be it from me to try and disabuse you of any notions in the future.
But if you should ever feel the need for me to abuse you ...
Nony is sensitive or I'm misreading tone.
I agree you could be right, my way is just more interesting is all.
Eurythmics actually suffered from the reverse of this effect. Some of them both want to and want to be abused, simultaneously.
From Patsy Kline to the Eu's ...
... remarkable when you think about it ...
... I wonder what sweet dreams memes dream ....?
meta-memes?
If you could somehow apply the cognitive processes of a cat to an iPhone, that would be the cat's meow.
To Anon @ 11:37 AM
I love you.
@3:31
I was the Nony at 11:39, but it appears I was two minutes late.
I'm so sorry I wasn't the Nony at 11:37 (actually, there wasn't any),
but if you can't tell time, you probably can't count to 28 either, so all may be for the best ...
Anonymous at 11:37 was the seventeenth commenter. By telling time, you mean "reading."
You think he was buried in that black turtleneck?
nony @6:09 -
Ah I see.
It's still for the best, then.
I'm so not a morning person.
Enjoy your brunch, you two lovebirds.
He was a CEO who actually gave a shit about what his firm produced. That this is remarkable says more about us and our overlords than him. He has no peers.
So he gave a shit about the miser produced by the 400,000 chinese laborers slaving away in the factories?
Well, at least it's an ethos, I guess.
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