
Decoding Steve Jobs, in Life and on Film - dnetesn
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/business/dealbook/decoding-steve-jobs-in-life-and-on-film.html?ref=business
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tptacek
All of this misses the point entirely. We don't mourn people as a sort of
achievement award for a life well spent. We mourn people we feel a connection
with, because of the pain we feel at losing the connection.

Jobs was a gifted promoter whose public speaking style tilted casual,
informal, and personable. He was effective in part because, at least on stage,
he made you like him.

Lots of people are likable, and when they die we don't mourn them, because we
never think about them. But Jobs forced people to think about him, because he
was the public face of a blockbuster series of products that people talked
about year-round. It's not that launching those products was so praiseworthy
that it "earned" him a mourning. It's that the combination of his on-stage
personality and the popularity of those products more or less forced us to.

That's not a bad thing, by the way. I think there's something human and
basically nourishing about thinking about strangers as people, and
constructing even a fabricated, artificial form of empathy for what they and
their loved ones are going through. That those emotions have no practical
connection to the world we live in is irrelevant.

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bitwize
I'm sad that he died, eapecially so young and by delaying treatment that could
have improved his prognosis. But one thing I'm beginning to appreciate is that
the reality distortion field is sort of fading away. Wozniak has stepped up
and talked more frankly about Jobs's real role inside Apple, especially during
the early days. And increasingly though he is still regarded as a Leonardo
among product managers, people are recognizing that Jobs was a control freak
and that technical people do not want to live in his locked down, curated
universe.

So we mourn, but we also feel free to acknowledge things after his death that
we stifled while he was still alive for fear of our hero losing his glamour
and being less of a guiding light.

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tptacek
And that's totally fine, and probably (given current SFBA ethos) healthy. But
"too many people were mourning for Jobs" is a weird reason to start that
evaluation, and it's the reason the filmmaker gave.

My only objection is to the idea that people need to earn mourning. I'm not
trying to defend Jobs beyond that. I didn't know him, or work for Apple.

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pekk
I follow your point about personal mourning, it doesn't have to be earned. But
this is tangled up with public recognition of the man's achievements on the
level of Einstein, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. So maybe the filmmaker
misstated a more reasonable point.

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codecamper
I think a big reason why Steve Jobs has had a couple movies made was because
the Mac has been used by creative professionals for many years. Apple almost
died in the middle 90s. Now Apple is the most valuable company on Earth. It's
an epic story. Plus, he was weird. Black turtle neck uniform? Ideologies
formed in the 60s and yet transforming the modern era? This is great stuff and
perfect for story telling.

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jasode
_> Mr. Gibney held out John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr. as somehow more
worthy than Jobs of the wave of grief that took place after they died. _

So all it boils down to is if the particular flaws of a person pushes a
critic's hotbuttons, he/she deserves less praise.

For example, if someone's hot button is "wife beater" or "pedophile", he will
dismiss John Lennon and Jimmy Page. If someone else's hot button is
"plagiarizer" or "adulterer", she will dismiss MLK and JFK.

As far as we can tell, Steve Jobs never raised a hand against his wife. But,
he did treat subordinates very callously. What to make of all this?

Society doesn't venerate people for the wife beating or employee mistreatment.
It's always the _other_ accomplishments that overshadow those flaws.

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larrys
"Steve Jobs never raised a hand against his wife. But, he did treat
subordinates very callously."

Part of it might be simply that people don't recognize mental pain as being as
bad as physical pain. [1] The truth is mental pain can last a great deal
longer and have much greater impact than physical pain but that is often not
the way the world sees things.

[1] Not that getting hit by a spouse doeesn't cause mental pain of course.

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draw_down
It's impossible to get an accurate measure of the man now, there is just too
much noise that comes along with the cementing of his status as a cultural
icon. It's impossible to escape interpretations of certain parts of his life.
Huge chunks have been forgotten, etc. Even while he was alive everyone had
their take on him, but now to try to contend with the books (widely-panned
authorized biography) and movies (also panned), forget it.

I would be interested to see more examination of his illness and how he
handled it, though. Seems like he completely blew it.

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inthewoods
Andrew Sorkin lost me with the comparison to MLK.

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melling
You might dismiss Sorkin but Wozniak's approval is significant:
[http://www.cnet.com/news/woz-aaron-sorkins-steve-jobs-
movie-...](http://www.cnet.com/news/woz-aaron-sorkins-steve-jobs-movie-gets-
it-right/#ftag=CAD590a51e)

Update

I guess I'm guilty of not realizing there are two different people named
Sorkin working on a Steve Jobs movie.

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andrewtbham
Am I the only one confused by the fact Andrew Sorkin just released a
documentary about Steve Jobs, but Aaron Sorkin is about to release a dramatic
movie about Steve Jobs. Their names are very similar.

~~~
jccalhoun
One of us is confused because I thought Andrew Sorkin was the guy who wrote
the article not the guy who made the documentary.

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andrewtbham
This article makes me think of pg's recent essay...

Why it's safe for founders to be nice
[http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html)

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atorralb
I can only think he was a piece of shit for prohibiting engineers to be
emploeyed in other tech companies

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MCRed
By the way, it's interesting how we hear about all the "evil" things that
Steve did-- often overblown for political reasons- but we never hear about the
far more heinous things done by others, for example, Bill Gates retarded the
entire tech industry by a decade with dishonest, and criminal behavior. Yet
he's seen as a "good guy" because he's got a really good personal PR agency
and has been spending 20 years rehabilitating his image.

Steve's real crime- - why so many people who never met him and don't really
actually know much about him, yet still hate him-- is that he didn't employ PR
to polish his image.

This is also why people think Amazon-- a horrific place that abuses workers
and has little technical innovation-- is a "tech company". That's what you buy
with effective PR.

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GCA10
Too funny! Both Apple and Microsoft have huge PR teams. Apple's is
relentlessly effective at creating product awe; Microsoft's not so much. Both
Jobs and Gates lived the lives they wanted and talked to the media as they saw
fit. The results speak for themselves.

If you look at billionaires' standing in the course of American history --
going back to John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford -- they always end up with a
tangled blend of admiration and loathing. In the end, PR has surprisingly
little impact. There's always plenty of achievement to satisfy the fans;
plenty of villainy to justify the critics.

