Jobs, 56

We are contemporaries, although of very different worlds.

The saddest news this week was that Steve Jobs died. He was a builder of small things and weaver of grand themes.

Some of us try very hard to think out of the box; Steve’s mind was completely unbridled. At a time when computers were imagined as instruments of stolid hierarchies, large and expensive tools that only governments and corporations can afford to have, Steve imagined the computer as personal, a weapon of immense computing power at the hands of ordinary consumers.

Some of us tried very hard to be revolutionaries, challenging systems and structures. Steve Jobs altered the very foundations of systems and structures: the manner everyday life was lived. He was the real revolutionary of our generation.

The revolution in personal computing flattened organizations, eliminated distance as a cost factor, enabled social networks to form unmediated by self-appointed authorities, reinvented the way information was produced and shared, leveled the asymmetry in knowledge, opened the door to e-governance, melted away national boundaries and permanently changed the terrain for media.

The information revolution made possible by personal computing is breathtaking in scope. At this moment, we cannot yet define its boundaries. We can only begin to explore its possibilities.

First, we were all wired. Then we were all unwired. The effective measure of freedom today is mobility.

It is hard to imagine that the information revolution personal computing brought about emanated from a small workshop in a garage, where Jobs and his gang saw a technology-driven future no one else imagined. Revolutions, indeed, begin in quiet places.

Back in the eighties, a colleague recommended to me a book called Computers and Socialism. I never read it. From the title itself, I knew the premise was wrong. Its focus was therefore wrong: improving the state’s ability to allocate resources.

Personal computers could only be born from the womb of consumer society and not from the bureaucratic labyrinth of a centrally-planned economy. Personal computing can only be valuable in the hands of an economically free individual: one who uses information to make choices.

Information is power. By enabling every citizen to access information independently, personal computing disseminated power to the grassroots. No longer will they be awed by tyrants and pretentious political personalities. Citizens are free to inform themselves and make judgments about those who rule them. They can undertake collective action from the comforts of their own homes.

All the dramatic events associated with the Arab Spring were made possible by social networking. In some Nordic countries, citizen access to broadband is now legally defined as a right.

In China, thousands of techies are employed by the state to censor communications on the internet. That is a futile project. Every barrier to the free flow of information will soon enough be circumvented.

Steve Jobs, to be sure, will be the first to deny authorship of the Information Revolution that now sweeps modern civilization. Humility is the twin of genius.

But he imagined personal computing ahead of anyone else. He first made it possible, with floppy disks and what, only a few years hence, we all consider to be ridiculously small memory capacity.

True, the first human being who learned to master fire, to create this form of energy at whim and tame it at will, did not imagine rockets and modern steel mills. He simply imagined a skill with unimaginable potential.

When Jobs produced his first device, it was understood as a toy rather than a tool. Today it is an indispensable tool — and still in part a toy. That is the joy of it: conflating work and leisure until the two could not be told apart. That is the theme of our utopia.

The same can be said of a hammer until it is wielded by a sculptor producing art out of the nondescript. Or a paintbrush until it is wielded by Picasso.

Whoever, in this day and age, sees computers as a toy but not a tool must be seriously debilitated, no matter the title they hold.

Governments and corporations were quick to harness computing power to gather information on their citizens and their consumers for purposes of keeping power and enlarging profit. That is understandable.

Citizens and consumers, however, now use computing power to gather information on their governments and the corporations they deal with for purposes of enlarging freedom and upgrading choice. The playing field is even.

Computing power, however, is not a neutral asset. The more it becomes affordable, enabled and small, the more people it enables.

Over the last three decades, computing power became affordable, enabled and smaller at an incredible pace. If the prices of cars shrunk as fast as the prices of computing power, the President’s Porsche will now cost less than $5.

Unfortunately, there are too many things with inelastic costs in cars. Fortunately, there are so many things with elastic costs in computers. The decline in the cost of computing is the single most important force shaping today’s civilization.

That decline encouraged the computerization of more and more processes. There are computers embedded in most things we use. Soon, as nanotechnology progresses, we will have computers embedded in us.

For ages, people worshipped visionaries who claim to foretell the future. Steve Jobs is a visionary who foretold the present.

He is the god of small things.