University of Vermont
Communications Dept.
What's Our Obsession with Steve Jobs All About?
As yet another movie about Jobs is released, sociology prof's new paper
takes a look at America's interest in the Apple CEO
* 10-08-2015
* _By Jon Reidel_ (mailto:[email protected])
The new movie about Steve Jobs is expected to draw huge crowds eager to
see yet another romanticized story about a well known business celebrity.
Thomas Streeter, professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, explores
why in his new paper, _“Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism, and the Desire
for Good Capitalism”_
(http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4062/1473) in the International
Journal of Communication. He writes that this
desire says “more about our culture than the man,” and that Jobs’ story fits
perfectly with the romantic individualist story that American culture can't
seem to get enough of.
We asked Streeter about the new movie, in theaters Oct. 9, and his paper,
which suggests that movies like these help us imagine capitalism as being
humane and having moral integrity as opposed to the speculative, predatory
kind that reared its greedy head in 2008.
UVM TODAY: You write that narratives about Steve Jobs focus on his mastery
of marketing, rock-star arrogance, and other genius-like traits. What do
you mean when you say that "tells us more about the culture than the man?”
Streeter: Jobs is an interesting character, but if we were choosing whose
story to tell based on the importance of their inventions or business
innovations, we’d be telling stories about many other people alongside Jobs.
Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie died two days after Steve Jobs. He was
central to the development of the software and concepts that made the internet
possible along with much of what makes your desktop computer, smartphone,
and tablet work. Douglas Engelbart, who died in 2013, reconceptualized what
computers could be used for back in the late 1960s, and invented the mouse
and the windowing interface (i.e., the foundations for both the mac and
windows computer interfaces). Either of them could be said to have invented
more important things than Steve Jobs. But where are all the major Hollywood
movies, documentaries, and best-selling biographies about Ritchie or
Engelbart and the dozens of other key inventors whose contributions were as or
more essential than Jobs?
There has to be another reason that the Steve Jobs story has been told
over and over again since the 1980s. And I think the reason is in our culture:
we love the story of Jobs because we love the story of the guy who bucked
convention, pursued his passions, and got rich doing so.
How does your article fit into some of the cultural themes you write about
and why do Americans seem so consumed with his story?
Culture is not just on our screens, but also in the circuitry and
institutions that make those screens work. I've long been interested in what I
call
the soft side of hard issues, the way that things we think of as fixed and
"hard" like technology or money or law are at times shaped by culture, by
habits of belief, fashion, and shifting values – by "soft" things. Markets,
property, and corporations are now infused with variants of romantic ways
of thinking, alongside more traditional ways of thinking. Capitalism has
gotten Byronic.
The current Steve Jobs craze, which took off in a big way after he stepped
down from Apple in 2011, seems to prove my point about Byronic capitalism.
Jobs' story nicely fits the romantic individualist story that American
culture is in love with. We love the story, and the case of Steve Jobs gives
us a chance to tell that story over and over.
There’s an institutional machinery devoted to producing stories
celebrating CEOs that you say is a response to populist criticisms of modern
corporations. Is Steve Jobs the creation of this "business celebrity system,"
as
you call it, or is he the uniquely talented individual he's portrayed by the
media?
For more than a century, American society has been arguing with itself
about big corporations. Are they good or bad? How should we think about them?
Corporations shower us with lovely stuff like cars and microwaves, and yet
they are global, faceless bureaucracies that generate pollution and create
unaccountable power and wealth inequalities. Sometimes the debate is
explicit; compare Bernie Sanders to any Republican candidate for President.
But
often it is implicit. When Thomas Edison was widely quoted as saying “genius
is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration” and when
Edison and Henry Ford invited photographers on their annual camping trips
so that their adventures would be portrayed in the newspapers, a narrative
was starting to be spun about the personalities of business leaders, which
when taken as a whole, associated giant corporations with a few interesting
great men, offering advice about capitalist success. The news coverage and
stories put a personal face on corporate capitalism, which, deliberate or
not, acted as a rejoinder to the criticisms of corporations then coming from
union organizers, activists and reformist politicians. Corporations are not
faceless bureaucracies that the stories implied, they are the product of
unique, colorful, bold men.
Ever since then, alongside the occasional waves of criticisms of
corporations, American media has offered a pretty steady diet of colorful
stories
about the lives of corporate chieftains, from Edwin Land to Jack Welch to
Richard Branson and more, stories that treat executives as celebrities. Those
stories don't just happen. Executives typically have publicists who
cultivate these stories the same way politicians craft personal narratives
about
themselves when running for office. So the stories about Jobs we keep
hearing are not fictional, but like all stories they are partial, and need to
be
understood as part of the tradition of business celebrity media coverage.
By dying young, Jobs has perhaps taken these stories to another level. But
they originated when he was alive, and was just another in a long line of cel
ebrity executives.
Part of Jobs’ appeal, according to you, is that he’s more like Ralph
Waldo Emerson than Edison or Ford in that he did things like drop out of
college and travel to India to explore Eastern religions. Is his life story
really unique or just an updated version of the same romantic story crafted by
the business celebrity system you write about?
The details of the stories about Jobs are generally true, but they are
framed in a particular way. One could tell the story differently: you could
say that the details of Jobs' life as a young man were mostly just
reflections of the culture. He dabbled in Eastern religions, just like
thousands of
other young Americans of his day. He treated the mother of his first child
badly, just like many other young men behaved badly in the confused wake of
the 1960s sexual revolution. He fiddled with home made microchip-powered
gadgets in the 1970s, just like thousands of other hobbyists across the
country. One could make the story about those trends, and how they shaped the
culture at large. But instead we hear about Jobs' behaviors as if they offer
some unique insight into his personality and success, and juxtaposed with
anecdotes about the rise of Apple computer as a major global corporation.
It's the way the story gets told – not its details – that put it in a
category with the tradition of the business celebrity.
You say that the romanticized rebel-hero version of Jobs makes it easier
for people to imagine capitalism as being humane and having moral integrity,
ignoring the human toll caused by an unforgiving global manufacturing
system. Why do we do that?
Reality is hard to grasp even in the best of circumstances. Most of us
know that “Steve Jobs made my iPhone” is at best an oversimplification, but
at least there's a "thing" there that you can hold in your hand, which is
more than you can say about mortgage-backed securities. Since Jobs died,
Republicans and Democrats have lectured us about what we should do to create
the next Steve Jobs and the next iPhone, but not what we should do to create
the next CEO of Morgan Stanley or the next version of credit default swaps.
The iPhone at least looks like something we'd want capitalism to be, where
hard working people take risks and invent useful things and are rewarded
for their efforts. Hard to say that about credit default swaps.
For me, the kicker is that your iPhone is actually just as abstract as
credit default swaps. Your iPhone wouldn't exist without all the young women
in southern China working for low wages who assembled it; without
international agreements and government policies that organize all that labor;
without the millions of lines of computer code written over decades by
programmers scattered all over the planet; without the work of many thousands
of
engineers tinkering and experimenting both inside and outside Apple; or without
complicated systems of international finance, shipping containers and so
forth. It's just plain weird to think that the policies of the Chinese
Communist Party are in a sense inside your iPhone. It's hard to talk about on
a
popular level. But I think we should.
If you could give people heading into the new Steve Jobs movie one piece
of advice in terms of how to view the film, maybe through a particular lens,
what would it be?
Remember that the movie is not about how to run a corporation any more
than Hamlet is about how to run a country. And then enjoy the performances,
which I hear are excellent.
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