The myth of Steve Jobs and the truth about us
Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine is book-ended by a question that nags the filmmaker: Why did legions of complete strangers weep over Steve Jobs’ death? He leaves it open-ended, asking us instead to look at ourselves, the way we’re forced to when we lock an iPhone’s screen and see our faint reflection. But after watching the two-hour exposé on Steve Jobs’ many transgressions, I was left with the impression that Gibney knew the real answer. All those people wept because they had no idea Jobs was such an a-hole.
Throughout The Man in the Machine, Gibney (who made the stirring Scientology exposé Going Clear for HBO) tries really hard to establish the premise of his documentary. Steve Jobs wasn’t a good person, the viewer is told over and over again. He left his girlfriend after getting her pregnant. He abandoned his daughter Lisa, then named the first Mac computer after her. He built illegal telephone blue boxes with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in the ‘70s to “stick it to the man” but harassed writers of tech blog Gizmodo decades later over an iPhone prototype that landed in their hands. He took credit for other people’s ideas and accomplishments. He yelled at his employees. He parked his unlicensed car in handicapped spaces. He manipulated Apple stock and let his executives take the fall. He terminated Apple’s philanthropic programs, believing that giving away money was a waste of time.
Interview footage of Jobs over the years is interspersed with comments from Gibney’s resource people (mostly former Apple employees and authors of similarly critical books) because he needs their bias to provide the context that Jobs’ own words would not. Footage of Jobs yelling at a brainstorming meeting is supposed to be evidence of him being a bully, even if it’s just basically a clip of a dude stubbornly making his point. Another manager’s account of Jobs yelling at him for leaving Apple is supposed to be shocking and not a normal thing that sometimes happens in highly competitive companies.
This is not to say that Jobs wasn’t a horrible person (he probably was), but a lot of the supposed proof looks flimsy. Somehow, I get the sense that this hardly matters, or at least not as much as the rhetorical question posed by Gibney at the start of the documentary. The nitty-gritty of Jobs’ legendary douchebaggery isn’t as important to Gibney as the idea that he really was a douchebag. Because what The Man in the Machine really wants to present is the contradiction of Jobs’ legacy: that he developed a technology that sought to connect while he lived a life of disconnection (alienating colleagues, pushing his girlfriend and daughter away, etc.), and, perhaps unwittingly, made that technology alienating instead.
“He was going for a computer that really felt like an extension of the self,” author Sherry Turkle says in the documentary. She refers to Jobs’ approach to the first Mac computer in 1984, but this becomes a refrain throughout the documentary, one that spans his entire career. “When I was growing up, computers weren’t something to love,” Gibney says. “It was something to fear.” Jobs turned something that was big and intimidating into something that was small and personal. This was his real legacy. He was the first to turn computers into household items, but not the first one to make its smaller future versions, where the personification of technology was already intrinsic. Yet Jobs keeps getting credit in the documentary for personalizing everything: the portable music player, the laptop and the phone. I found this very strange.
Any electronic device, once domesticated, comes loaded with personal significance. When I was a kid, our cassette player was my guardian angel driving the monsters away from my bedroom. As I grew older, it became my best friend. When I was a teenager, game consoles became the cool friend who showed me how to have fun. The moment we got a personal computer in our house, it became a vessel for my imagination, where all my awkward writings were stored.
Apart from my iPod that I treated the same way as I had my Sony Discman before it, I’ve never really owned an Apple device, let alone “loved” one. I never saw Steve Jobs as a hero or an inspiration. Like Gibney, I also wondered why people cried over his death.
Devices offer a tangible connection to the world while simultaneously making it look lonelier. But modern life is inherently alienating and lonely. I refuse to give Steve Jobs the credit for that, too. The more layers of man-made constructs we put over our lives, the more unnatural they become. The paradox is that this phenomenon, in itself, is natural. It is the logical consequence of being human and inventive and eternally anxious.
What Jobs has done is put a more complex and more engaging layer on top of our inherent loneliness. Twenty-first-century devices make us feel like we’re really a part of the world and its daily conversations. The smartphone, our perpetual closeness to the Internet, makes life ostensibly easier, but it doesn’t make us any happier, considering that it’s what makes social media an increasingly depressing source of envy. It’s like TV and movies, except our expectations are now influenced by a different sort of fiction: It looks real because the characters are no longer fictional.
Apple’s “Think different” campaign was supposed to be a paean to the boundless power of imagination. But its success rests on the people who lack it. The kind of person who follows Apple as some sort of cult, who cries over its CEO’s death, is the kind of person who needs to be told that products can be personal. These people need to see the same device in a different color, in sleeker packaging, with a different branding strategy before they can feel themselves in it. They get their philosophy from a person whose job it is to take their money. Consumers are cyborgs and Jobs knew what buttons to push.
Steve Jobs fancied himself as an inventor and a genius carrying on the lineage of Newton and Einstein. He never was one. Writer Malcolm Gladwell refers to Jobs as a “tweaker,” someone who takes an existing technology and maximizes its potential. His greatest tweak was doing away with the Stylus pen and rebranding the interactive screen into a “touchscreen.” He thought it would make the experience of using his products more personal — and he was right. Sometimes people need to touch what they otherwise wouldn’t feel.
Steve Jobs didn’t make us lonelier, as Gibney suggests. He merely took our hands and made us touch our own wounds.
