Some people have been irritated by the near adulation of Steve Jobs by Apple lovers. Since his death last week there have been an avalanche of blogs.
Paul Vallely says. “Think different is the Apple slogan. Ironically, there was a pretty undifferentiated consensus in the tributes being paid to him. Eulogies likened him to Edison and Einstein. He was ‘the Leonardo da Vinci’ of our time.
“More tellingly, his death was compared with that of Elvis Presley or John Lennon as marking the end of a cultural era. All this tells us more about ourselves than about the untimely-taken Mr Jobs,” says Vallely.
No saint, maybe, but a remarkable man as is revealed in a remarkable commencement address he gave at Standford University in 2005, which even PC lovers would enjoy reading. In the speech he tells three stories:
- His first story: “connecting the dots” – Birth to a single mother and adoption
- His second story: “about love and loss” – being dismissed from the company he founded
- His third story: “about death” – his experience of cancer
On the other hand Paul Vallely shines some light into the shadow side. He says, for example, “Capitalism, Marx argues, conceals the human relationships behind commodities. That is why there is not much mention in the Jobs tributes of the dark underbelly of the iPad, which is produced in factories where conditions are so unrelenting that last year 14 young workers killed themselves. Most of them jumped from the roof of the Foxconn factory in Taiwan manufacturing iPads – as well as kit for Dell and Sony”.
Source
- New Zealand Herald
- Image: Hark