The modern cult of personality: a reflection on the death of Steve Jobs
MARK COHEN
It has been quite a spectacle to observe the world's media report the death of Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple, the US consumer electronics products company.
It is probably not a wild exaggeration to suggest that it appeared Apple and Jobs were intertwined like some real-life form of cyborg, rather like the characterisation in the later Star Trek television shows and movies.
Certainly, the great genius of the marketing of Apple, after its corporate near-death experience in 1985, was to build on its later successes from 1997 onward, and then to weave a narrative that suggested that its product, in fact, was Jobs himself, and that Apple's gadgets were just the corporeal manifestations of his musings.
On this footing, all that was allowed to appear in the narrative was evidence of the successes: the iPod followed by iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad. Failures, like the Apple Mac, The Cube, the iTunes Phone and AppleTV were banished from view.
As this narrative developed, the prominence of Jobs, with his brilliant marketing flourishes, was subtly but relentlessly pushed into the foreground. It was the cult of personality for capitalists, leading to the pushing up of Apple's share market worth to the point where it was briefly the most-valued company in the US.
Jobs, at the height of his powers became desperately ill with cancer. For all his creativity, and resources, he was not able to withstand its ravages and it claimed him in the US on October 4, 2011, when he died.
The clearest evidence of the cult of personality has been disclosed by the public reaction to Jobs's death.
While there have been some balanced obituaries published on the day of his death, such as by the BBC and The Guardian on their respective websites, where they reflected on his life fairly but nonetheless that he was a man and not a god, broadly speaking otherwise there has been little but expressions of unrestrained worship.
There has been little real insight into the business practices of Apple which must be taken to be a direct consequence of Jobs's management style and control. Nowhere has there been any reflection of just whether the production processes used in China by its contractor, FoxConn, and from which the iPad results, are justifiable. Unlike other large multinational companies (such as BP, Exxon and Nestle to name but three), Apple has not suffered bad public relations reactions to reports of suicides by workers making the iPad under apparently very poor working conditions.
Rather, the reaction has been like that from the tweeter @charliepick who noted:
@charliepick It is difficult to think of many people in history who've had the impact that Steve Jobs had on the world. Apple, Pixar, Design. RIP.
Well, is it really that difficult? Does it take much real thought to whistle up the likes of Albert Einstein, Alexander Fleming, Maire Curie, William Farrer, Howard Florey, or Australia's newest Nobel laureate, Brian Schmidt who have had such impact on the lives of people throughout the world?
It is the sort of sweeping and quite unthinking statement from the likes of @charliepick that has characterised the reaction today to the death of Steve Jobs.
Jobs was not infallible. Indeed, it was his adamantine disposition in 1985 about the Apple Mac, launched in 1984 with great fanfare but which was the Edsel of the computer world and a true product failure, that nearly drove Apple to insolvency. It was Jobs's successor as CEO of Apple, John Sculley, who righted the ship and saved it from corporate oblivion. None of that has been given an outing in the outpouring of emotion about Jobs on the day of his death.
Neither can Jobs be said to be a great philanthropist.
Jobs (at least in his later life from about 1995) was a very clever businessman, able to spot a market trend and to profit from it. He made a fortune out of developing the cast-off computer animated design business of George Lucas of Star Wars fame, which became Pixar, the producer of the Toy Story movies.
He then moved on to exploiting the rise of the internet and smartphone technology, for which the iPod can be seen to be the pre-cursor. All very clever stuff and worthy of high praise, but not a cult of personality that has been fostered around him, and now is asserted as the proper basis for his memory.
Indeed, Jobs was just as ruthless a businessman in his success as, say, Henry Ford. The exploitation of his business partner, Steve Wozniak, is quite inexplicable. The denial (for a time) of the existence of a daughter, Lisa, quite bizarre.
There must, therefore, be balance in the historical record that marks out Steve Jobs's greatness.
It is to be hoped that the silly expressions of emotion on his passing will be replaced by more nuanced and sober assessments, and the sooner the better, before there is a clamour for the beatification of the blessed Jobs of Silicon Valley.
It was, after all, the apple that was the cause of all the initial fuss, was it not?
Mark J Cohen is in practice at the NSW Bar in commercial law with a focus on insolvency.
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