Twitteratis thought that the death of an American salesman was second only to that of the baby bump (some viewers thought that it was fake) of Beyoncé Knowles, spotted first at the MTV video music awards, for the future of the planet. [break]
The singer-performer elicited 8,868 tweets while the memory of the marketer extraordinaire was marked with a response rate of 6,049 per second.
Apparently, tweet figures are important enough for some people to closely monitor.
Befitting the contributions of the businessperson who played a seminal role in popularizing Desk Top Publication (DTP) and digital notepads, the print media gave more prominence to the peddler of high-tech apparatuses than the Grammy Award winner and popular entertainer.
Faboos prefer the future: Some of them dismissed the person of their past with irreverent posts: iDon’t Care, iRIP, and even a flippant iDies.
Personalities of the generation in passing were more reverential. From US President Barack Obama to the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, world leaders vied with each other in paying glowing tributes to one of the cult figures of technological business.
The co-founder of Apple paid the most moving homage. In simple English, “iWizard” Stephen Gary Wozniak claimed, “I do feel like I did when John Lennon was killed. Also JFK and Martin Luther King.”
At first reading, the association of Steve’s name with historic figures appears ludicrous. John Lennon (1940-1980), the legendary musician behind global anti-war and pro-peace anthems such as “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine” was murdered. John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), decorated war hero, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated.
Martin Luther King (1929-1968), clergyman, civil rights activist and Nobel laureate, too, fell to an assassin’s bullet. In comparison to the abrupt end of their lives, Steve died a slow death as he succumbed to a long and rare type of cancer.
The iMyth
A young Mac-enthusiast mentioned in a private mail, “Steve died a happy man who did everything he set out to do.” And thereby hangs the clue to the evolving tale.
Fulfilled lives don’t make for interesting stories. They have to be spiced up. Since nothing turns a common script into a melodrama as easily as a situation leading to the passing of a protagonist, the hero has to be shown fighting and then falling to the sword of a scheming and unseen enemy.
If the villain that claimed the life of a high-tech entrepreneur was a rare disease, then so be it. The myth-making must go on.
Dramatization is a necessary element of turning successful lives into legends. Birth, struggles and deaths are more important than contributions made in life for the manufacturing of myths.
Circumstances of Steve’s birth are not fascinating enough to create an alluring story. Disowned before being born by unwed biological parents, he was raised in a routine way in a working class family.
The story begins to get interesting only when he decides to drop out of college, take courses in calligraphy and has to trek to Hare Krishna temple every week for full meals. Travel to India in search of a certain Neem Karodi Baba comes as the high point of a humdrum life.
Then he meets the iWizard—the other Steve—and creates a market out of the longing of the bourgeois to look different.
The “Think Different” slogan was merely a ruse, Steve succeeded by feeding the vanity of a section of the middle-class that believes that a person is known by the gadgets he keeps. Nobility values lineage where the family name comes above all else. The proletariat runs after ideas in search of emancipation.
For the bourgeoisie, however, dignity rests upon individualism and distinction. The ‘i’ in iPod, iPhone, and iPad probably does not stand for the innovation, as popularly perceived.
Symbols are markers of belongingness to the group of desire. With an uncanny prescience, Steve identified the hunger of the bourgeoisie, a cohort most accurately defined as composed of people aspiring to be in a higher class than they currently belong.
He pandered to their preferences by peddling everyday products packaged and priced and posted to be sufficiently exclusive without being too intimidating or frighteningly out of reach.
Market rules
The tribute President Barack Obama paid at the death of a salesperson was no less effusive than many iAddicts or MacJunkies.
The first half-Black president in US history gushed that Steve was among the greatest American innovators who was “…brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.” But there is just that hint of restraint in the presidential tribute.
It stops short of telling that the celebrated marketer actually had any effect on really changing the world the way John Lennon, JFK or Martin Luther King did.
The story of three epoch-making apples—the one that Eve ate to procreate, the other that fell on Newton’s head to disclose the force of gravity, and the third that was bitten into by Steve Jobs to produce iTunes—is intended be a joke, a form of black humor.
Comparison of Steve Jobs with Thomas Alva Edison and even Leonardo da Vinci is unnecessarily adulatory.
However, Steve was a bigger business success than most inventors and innovators in history including Henry Ford, the legendary manufacturer of Model-T and marketers of cars in any color as long as it was black.
Henry Ford belonged to the era of assembly line production facilities, institutions with predictability of rules, lifetime employment guarantees, and organizations that were deemed too big to fail.
Steve prospered by correctly assessing that monkeys had an edge over dinosaurs and foxes were better placed in the game of survival than big cats of the forest.
Nerds love niche products and geeks take sneak pride in playing with toys made for the guys.
A pioneering contribution of Steve would perhaps be the popularization of the idea that obsession was a good thing as long as it was with an object that could be bought over the counter.
Reading from a prepared commencement address at the Stanford University, an institution with the reputation of being a bastion of conformist innovators, Steve had three advices for the graduating class: “You’ve got to find what you love,” “Stay Hungry,” and “Stay Foolish.”
Quest for love is eternal. Love for humanity is the common feature of all religions. Religions, however, are groups that require that individualism be relinquished and personal interests be surrendered for the good of the community.
It is much easier to identify objects of desire and learn to love them as badges of distinctive identity. They then become symbols of fulfillment. Once such a stage is reached, relationships become secondary.
Steve’s love, friendships and family life bear testimony to the dictum that the values one chooses affects the entire course of life.
The importance of foolishness, too, has illustrious antecedents in philosophy. “The only thing I know,” claimed the one who knew whatever there is to know about living and dying, is “that I know nothing.” It would require great efforts to match the “foolishness” of the founder of Western philosophy who could drink the cup of hemlock as if it were elixir. But the suggestion to “stay hungry”, in physical as well as metaphorical sense, runs contrary to the ideas of contentment.
Object fetish and sense gratification are important components of the culture of the pursuit of pleasure.
Steve may disappear into the well of memory, but the bitten apple would remain a testimony to the dictum that symbols are great forces in human history.
Perhaps reinforcement of existing beliefs, rather than revolution, is the greatest contribution of the marketing genius of our times who could get media-persons go gaga over bells and whistles of essentially utilitarian machines.
Listening to the lilting tunes of Jagjit Singh (1941-2011) in “Kagazki kasti, barishka pani” (paper boats, rainwater flows), it is difficult not to look at the Macintosh I used for almost 20 years until it crashed in 2004 and think of the aspirations Steve’s machine sparked in an entire generation.
Has he indeed become immortal as the ever-popular Nepali blog Mysansar claimed? Perhaps.
He may never make it to history books, but case studies about his business acumen are sure to become a part of any coursework in business studies.
In a civilization where market rules and money triumphs over everything else, that in itself is no mean achievement. May your memories continue to create excitement, iGuy!
Related story
Bob Marley’s kids celebrate late reggae icon’s 75th birthday
