Wired
How Steve Jobs Turned Technology — And Apple — Into Religion
* By Brett T. Robinson
* 08.08.13
(http://www.wired.com/opinion/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ipadrelease182.jpg)
photo: Bryan Derballa/WIRED
“Much ink has been spilled drafting the Steve Jobs encomium. But Jobs and
Apple are interesting for far more than technological prowess — they
provide an allegory for reading religion in the information age. They are
further
evidence that shifts in popular religion throughout history are
accompanied by changes in the media environment: when the dominant modes of
communication change, so do the frameworks for religious belief. Still, this
shift
would require a fitting mythology…
An ancient Egyptian myth helps illuminate the perennial relationship
between media forms and metaphysical belief systems. The Egyptian god Theuth
visits King Thamus to show him that writing “once learned, will make the
Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory.” Thamus replies by admonishing
Theuth that his affection for writing prevents him from acknowledging its
pitfalls. Writing does not improve memory but makes students more forgetful
because they stop internalizing information. Writing also exposes students to
ideas without requiring careful contemplation, meaning they will have “the
appearance of wisdom” without true knowledge.
The celebration of technological values in the Apple story requires a
similar response. The technological values promoted by Apple are part of the
Faustian bargain of technology, which both giveth and taketh away.
King Thamus’ anxieties about the new media of writing threatening wisdom
have been resurrected in digital form. But Jobs confronted the technology
paradox by imagining technology as a tool for expanding human consciousness
rather than as a means of escape from it. The tension between technology and
spirituality was not a zero-sum game for him.
The values promoted by Apple are part of the Faustian bargain of
technology, which both giveth and taketh away.
Jobs’ Zen master Kobun Chino told him that he “could keep in touch with
his spiritual side while running a business.” So in true Zen fashion, Jobs
avoided thinking of technology and spirituality in dualistic terms. But what
really set him apart was his ability to educate the public about personal
computing in both practical and mythic ways.
The iconography of the Apple computer company, the advertisements, and the
device screens of the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad are visual
expressions of Jobs’ imaginative marriage of spiritual science and modern
technology.
Apple Ads as Parables
Technology ads provide parables and proverbs for navigating the
complexities of the new technological order. They instruct the consumer on how
to
live the “good life” in the technological age.
Like all advertising, Apple’s ads perform a vital educational function in
consumer society. The advertisements are allegorical, rhetorical attempts
to domesticate foreign and abstract concepts, making them accessible and
attractive to everyday adherents.
In fact, they resemble medieval morality plays in their personification of
good (Mac) and evil (PC). As such, the ads contain a moral — or, more
explicitly, they propose a morality customized for the conditions of the age.
(http://www.wired.com/opinion)
Media technology has acquired a moral status because it has become part of
the natural order of things. Luddites, those who have sworn off new
technologies, are the new heretics and illiterates. Technology is an absolute.
There is no turning back or imagining a different social order. Challenge is
acceptable as long as it remains within the confines of the technological
order. Apple may challenge Microsoft. Samsung may challenge Apple. But the
order must not be challenged.
The impact of digital culture, then, is epistemic; it insinuates a moral
system based on its own internal logic.
The underlying message of the early Mac versus PC ads is not simply that
the Apple operating system is superior. The ads carry the implicit
_assertion_ (http://youtu.be/R706isyDrqI) that technology always means human
progress.
In addition, the _personification_ (http://youtu.be/DZSBWbnmGrE) of the
operating systems by actors reinforces the notion that computers are
extensions of the human person. In this sense, the ads are not dualistic at
all.
Good and evil, Mac and PC, man and machine are married in service of the
progress myth.
The religion of technology is practiced in the ritual use of technology
and the worship of the self that the technologies ultimately foster.
Enter the Paradox
In the Greek Narcissus myth, the young man is _captivated_
(http://youtu.be/Wc7fQEwI1Ls) by his reflection in a pool of water. Marshall
McLuhan
reminds us that Narcissus was not admiring himself but mistook the reflection
in the water for another person. The point of the myth for McLuhan is the
fact that “men at once become fascinated by an extension of themselves in any
material other than themselves.”
Eastern wisdom traditions _seem fitting antidotes_
(http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/meditation-mindfulness-silicon-valley/all/)
for correcting
the addiction and narcissism fostered by media technologies. The Wisdom 2.0
conference, for example, held annually in California invites participants
to learn techniques for living with “greater presence, meaning, and
mindfulness in the technology age.” But the wisdom traditions themselves have
been
subsumed by the logic of popular technology and consumerism. Participants
pay upward of $1,500 to learn mindfulness techniques from “the founders of
Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Zynga, and PayPal, along with wisdom teachers from
various traditions.”
‘Men at once become fascinated by an extension of themselves in any
material other than themselves.’
The top billing at the conference naturally belongs to the technology
gurus rather than the spiritual ones. And this confusion of technological
values with religious or spiritual ones is a product of a key rhetorical trait
shared by both: the paradox.
To the nonbeliever, the paradoxes of religion are absurd and irrational
diversions.
To the true believer, however, they are pathways to enlightenment.
Jobs’ affinity for paradox in his technological and spiritual thinking may
be partly attributed to his “inexhaustible interest” in the works of
William Blake, an eighteenth-century romantic poet and mystic who, like Jobs,
was a multimedia artist who reveled in religious satire. Blake’s The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell was a _combination_
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Marriage_of_Heaven_and_Hell)
of poems, prose, and
illustrations produced on a series of etched plates — an eighteenth-century
iPad, if
you will.
In a critique of the puritanical sentiment sweeping England in the late
eighteenth century, Blake presents a series of paradoxes aimed at subverting
conventional dualisms. In his Proverbs of Hell, he shared that “The road of
excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and “You never know what is enough
unless you know what is more than enough.” Blake used the poem and
illustrated plates to subvert traditional dualisms, to propose an alternative
cosmology in which good and evil were complementary forces for human
flourishing. Heaven represented restraint, while hell represented the creative
passions that give humans their joy and energy; the two worked together in
harmony
to facilitate a more enlightened state of being.
A key rhetorical trait shared by both technology and religion is the
paradox.
Steve Jobs resolved the paradoxes posed by technology in the same spirit.
Technology is a powerful medium for creative expression, but absent
restraint it has the potential to breed an enslaving addiction. Echoes of
Blake’s
paradoxical style can be heard in the advertising rhetoric of the Apple
computer company. Some of the best proverbs come from the company’s most
iconic campaigns:
* See why 1984 won’t be like “1984” (1984 Macintosh)
* While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius (1997 “
Think Different” campaign)
* Less is more (2003 PowerBook G4)
* Random is the new order (2005 iPod shuffle)
* Touching is believing (2007 iPhone)
* Small is huge (2009 Mac mini)
The iPhone 5 launch in September 2012 announced “The biggest thing to
happen to iPhone since iPhone” and “So much more than before. And so much
less, too.”
Jobs embraced elliptical thinking as a means of promoting technology
objects that pose their own paradoxes. In the Apple narrative, the seemingly
oppositional notions of assimilation/isolation and freedom/enslavement are
resolved by Apple’s invocation of enlightened paradox.
The paradox today is that new media technologies connect us to more people
in more places. (Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” has been invoked
more than once). But at the same time, mediating relationships from behind a
screen breeds a pervasive sense of isolation.
>From the farthest satellite to the nearest cellphone, the mystical body of
electricity connects us all.
In the Apple story, the brand cult began offline, with users meeting in
real, physical locations to swap programs and ideas. Now, the Apple community
is more diffuse, concentrated in online discussion groups and support
forums. However, Apple product launches and conferences remain sacred
pilgrimages where Apple fans can congregate, camp, and live together for days
at a
time to revel in the communal joy of witnessing the transcendent moment of
the new product launch.
The reverence once reserved for holy relics and liturgy has reemerged in
the technology subculture. The shared experience of living in a highly
technological era provides a universal ground for a pluralistic society. There
may be many different devices, but only one Internet.
Technology has become the new taken-for-granted order that requires our
fidelity. Obedience to the new order is expressed in the communication
rituals that take place every day in the use of computers, music players, and
smartphones — devices that bind individuals together. From the farthest
satellite to the nearest cellphone, the mystical body of electricity connects
us
all. Personal technology has become “the very atmosphere and medium”
through which we mediate our daily lives.
But the paradox this media technology presents is the absence of presence.
The age of electric media is the age of discarnate man — persons
communicating without bodies. From the disembodied voice on the telephone to
the
faceless email message, electronic communication trades human presence _for
efficiency_ (http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/clive-thompson-2104/) .
In order for such a form to become popular, it would take a visionary like
Jobs with both technical and humanistic sensibilities; someone to assure
the technological faithful that this dramatic change in human relations was
a good thing.
The question that remains is whether this mode of perception brings us any
closer to recognizing the transcendent hidden at the heart of that which
is not digitized or downloaded.
Adapted and excerpted from _Appletopia_
(https://www.baylorpress.com/Book/382/Appletopia.html) by Brett T. Robinson.
Copyright 2013 by Baylor
University Press. Reprinted by arrangement with Baylor University Press. All
rights reserved.
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