Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine -- Film Review

Steve Jobs:  The Man in the Machine

Directed by Alex Gibney

This film is a prep for canonization.  It amounts to an infomercial for Apple Computer.  It reminds me of how the Republicans turned Abraham Lincoln into the cultural icon and mythical figure that he is today through many years of determined falsification, hyperbole, and selective inattention.  This film is the hagiolatry of Steve Jobs:  the Great Leader, the Conquering Hero, the Brilliant Innovator, the Romantic Maverick, the Benevolent Father to his Apple customers -- which he never was to his own children.  It portrays Steve Jobs the way he would like to be presented, I think.  The film was made by CNN, which might help explain why it was such a whitewash.  A corporate media titan would not want to antagonize a colleague and formidable corporate Goliath such as Apple. 

I can't really say much about Steve Jobs based on this film.  The film simply does not delve into his character in sufficient depth.  There are suggestions and provocative hints, there are interesting details and incidents, but I don't get a clear enough picture to comment on him specifically.  One crucial circumstance that the film did note is that Steve Jobs was put up for adoption by his biological mother and raised by the Jobs family.  But the film did not explore the significance of this on Jobs' character, nor the influence of his adoptive parents.  I surmised from the film that Jobs was an only child, but this is not correct.  He had an adopted sister several years younger.  The film yields almost nothing about his family and upbringing. 

The film opened with the worldwide outpouring of grief and public mourning that occurred upon his death, and  rightly asked the source of this collective sense of loss and sadness.  Although the film did ask this question, it did not provide a satisfactory answer.  I remember the night Steve Jobs died.  I was with my young girlfriend at the time and I was surprised and taken aback at the intensity of her grief over the loss of Steve Jobs.  She was crying and upset all through the night and it went on for some days.  She loved her iphone, and she often urged me to get one, which I never did.  But she didn't know diddly about Steve Jobs.  He was little more than a name and a face to her.  Why was she so upset as if she had lost a family member?

I think that this mass grief that Steve Jobs inspired had a number of sources.  For one thing Steve Jobs died in the prime of his life and this created a sense of untimeliness that everyone could share.  But more importantly, I think, is the fact that Steve Jobs' ambition for Apple products was they be of a sort that people would not only use, but love.  He cared about the aesthetics of his products, he cared about how they felt in the hands, he wanted them to be intuitive, easy to use, he imagined all the different uses a person might have for his device and built it in.  He had great empathy for his customers.  It was a salesman's empathy.  Jobs wanted to seduce people with his products, but people responded to his understanding of their needs, their wants, their own limitations, and his desire to accommodate them and enable them to achieve things and do things that they might not have dreamed of before, with a personal attachment.  Furthermore, Steve Jobs put himself out there as the public face of his products.  He was good looking and physically attractive.  He had great personal charisma, which is very unusual in nerds.  People associated him with these products that he produced which they loved -- really loved.  And that love carried over to him.  People used his products every day -- all day long, in fact.  They began to live their lives through his products.  The iphone, the ipod, the imac became daily companions for millions of people.  Necessities.  And Steve Jobs was right there too.  His face, his name, were consciously and indelibly identified with the devices he sold.  By design and by craft. 

This is why he gave the finger to IBM in that telling photograph as a young man -- another question the film asks, but does not adequately answer.  IBM is a sterile, regimented corporation.  It is The Organization Man writ large.  It prescribed how its employees were to dress right down to their socks and underwear.  Their products are effective and useful, but devoid of aesthetics and personal touches.  No one knows who the CEO of IBM is.  Steve Jobs represented the revolt of aesthetics and empathy against mere utility and impersonality.  And people warmed to it, and to him.  But this does not reach the depths of who he was as a person. 

Steve Jobs liked to think of himself as making the world a better place through the devices he created and sold.  I don't know that Apple's products have made the world a better place.  Jobs wanted them to unleash creativity.   That they probably have done.  But creativity in and of itself does not improve the conditions of life.  It can, but it can also make things worse.  Creativity is a capability, a potential, and Apple products are tools, implements that facilitate achieving whatever ends to which they are applied.   It all depends on what one does with this new found capability. 

The guy who invented the bow and arrow made it possible to kill buffalo, and elk, and fish with much greater ease and safety.  Maybe that helped feed a lot more people and lay up food stores that enabled a people to survive a long winter.  But on the other hand the bow and arrow made warfare more lethal and more effective.  So did it improve the world or not?  Has harnessing nuclear energy made the world a better place?  Many people switch on their lights and their computers with electricity produced in nuclear power plants.  But we also have Fukushima, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, etc.  Is the world better because we can split the atom?  It's arguable.  Has the industrial revolution made the world a better place?   The carbon dioxide we're emitting from it is heating up the earth and may kill us all within a few generations.  Would anybody care to go back to the 18th century and spin your own thread, weave your own cloth, and sew your own clothes?  Isn't it better to have slave labor in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and China do all that?  Industrialization and technology are problematic in terms of their impact on humanity and the world.  It all depends on what you look at. 

What makes the world definitively better are things like the eradication of diseases such as polio, smallpox, malaria, etc.  Improvements in medical care, surgery, infection control, antibiotics, etc.  Constitutional government guaranteeing civil rights.  The improvement of public sanitation.  The availability of clean water.  Refrigeration.  Electricity.  Social security.  Universal health care.  Head Start.  Social tolerance.  Social inclusion.  The elimination of poverty.  The availability of universal education.  Steve Jobs never did anything to advance any of those causes.  He terminated all philanthropic activities at Apple.  He had no social vision beyond getting his products into the hands of as many people as possible.  He didn't care what they did with them, or what social ramifications resulted from it. 

One thing the film revealed that got my attention was the extent to which Silicon Valley corporations are in cahoots with local law enforcement agencies up and down the Peninsula, and how police departments are at the behest of these companies to serve the role of occasional muscle to intimidate, harass, or squelch people or are seen as threatening or disruptive.  There was an incident reported where a new incarnation of the iphone 4 was negligently left in a nightclub by one of Job's irresponsible lieutenants and ended up in the hands of an online publication called Gizmodo, which published an article about it, infuriating Jobs.  At Jobs' behest the San Mateo County police and prosecutor went after the journalist. 

It goes to show that this "disruption" ethos, which one hears proudly brandished by some Silicon Valley executives, reflects the arrogance, aggression, recklessness and shortsightedness of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.  They like disruption as long as they are the ones doing the disrupting.  As long as it is YOUR life that is being disrupted, and not THEIRS, disruption is good.  It's cool to screw other people up.  It's cool to violate the rules and make a mess out of things if you can make a lot of money at it.  It's the triumph of arrogance over social responsibility.  Godzilla tramples Gotham.  That's the mentality of the Silicon Valley.  But when disruption goes against a Silicon Valley corporation in the form of a journalist writing an unfavorable story or an employee or group or employees demanding better treatment, they respond with the heavy handed thuggishness that the film depicts.  Steve Jobs resorted to this as he needed to, but the film only reveals the surface of the ugly, voracious predation that is becoming increasingly out of control in the Silicon Valley, with local government agencies and officials acting less as regulators and overseers of Silicon Valley corporations and more like the road they drive on.  We are living in a technocracy in the Bay Area today, and Silicon Valley corporations are running the show around here.  The film, to its credit, obliquely noted this trend.

This film is like a scrapbook, a compendium of highlights.  It is a tantalizing overview, but with no real analysis or attempt at understanding or interpretation.  The only identifiable theme is the greatness and achievements of Steve Jobs.  Psychologically it is very superficial, very unsatisfying.  I am waiting for something a lot better about the character of Steve Jobs.