OPINION:The speed with which Steve the Saint stories morphed into Steve the Sinner stories is striking
THE GLOWING obituaries appeared moments after Steve Jobs’s death was announced on October 5th.
"Silicon Valley's radiant Sun King," eulogised the San Jose Mercury News. His name was floated for Timemagazine's person of the year, although the honour traditionally goes to the living. Even Gawker, the snarky media blog, adopted the sober tone of a state funeral.
“The scope of Jobs’s achievements is hard to put into words,” Gawker wrote in a respectful 1,200-word post simply titled “Steve Jobs Is Dead”.
That tone lasted 18 hours. By 2pm the following day, Gawker posted another item, “Steve Jobs Was Not God”. It argued: “If you like Apple products, fine. They are products. They do not have souls. They are not heroes, and neither is their creator, no matter how skilled he may have been.”
It wasn’t just Gawker. The waters quickly muddied after the first wave of obituaries passed. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, anyone with a beef against Jobs or Apple found a platform to sound off about an industrialist who doubled as a pop star.
The Jobs backlash began as quickly as the mythmaking had. Candlelight vigils were just starting to form outside Apple stores worldwide when bloggers began their assault.
“Was Steve Jobs a Good Man, or an Evil Corporate CEO and Wall Street Shill?” asked a contributor on the Occupy Wall Street website. Then, on the Forbes site, technology writer David Coursey wrote an article called “Steve Jobs Was a Jerk, You Shouldn’t Be”, in which he suggested that Jobs might have been “a borderline sociopath”.
There was a time when the gloves stayed put after the death of a legend. After John Lennon was murdered in 1980, news outlets generally painted him as a guitar-strumming prince of peace and were loath to dwell on old tabloidish tales of him as a skirt-chasing druggie who was mean to Paul McCartney.
But the speed with which Steve the Saint stories morphed into Steve the Sinner stories was striking, according to Kurt Andersen, the novelist and former New Yorkmagazine editor. "It's the speed of the news cycle writ large, in terms of legacy and existential worth," he said.
On Twitter, while Apple cultists wrote 140-character homages, non-believers passed along snipes about Steve the Tyrant, Steve the Evil Boss, Steve the Micromanaging Perfectionist.
As for the mainstream press, it cleared its throat, straightened its tie and dived into the fray. Five days after Jobs's death, UK news magazine the Weekpublished a roundup of "anti-Jobs" stories.
It included an essay titled "In Praise of Bad Steve" by a writer named DB Grady in the Atlantic("Apple wasn't built by a saint. It was built by an iron-fisted visionary"); a 2010 investigation published in the Daily Mailinto the "Chinese suicide sweatshop" where iPods are made; and an op-ed article in the New York Timesby monologist Mike Daisey, who pounded Apple for what he saw as Orwellian tactics ("There is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple's iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself").
Daisey is no stranger to the Jobs backlash. He produced and stars in an extemporaneous one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, that, by coincidence, opened in New York on October 17th, after touring for 14 months. The play blasts Apple and other tech firms for alleged harsh conditions in their factories.
The fortuitous timing of his show’s opening in New York prompted a deluge of hate mail and a couple of death threats, Daisey said, but he was unfazed.
“Are we seriously going to read one more time he was a genius?” he said. “By not sharing anything of his dark side, the complexities of his life, you’re sort of short- changing the true complexity and interestingness of the story.”
And, of course, there is the publication of Walter Isaacson's 630-page authorised biography, Steve Jobs. While the book is hardly a hatchet job, bloggers looking for a fresh angle skimmed it for juicy bits, like how Jobs, in the early days of Apple, stiffed an original employee, who was a close friend, on stock options.
But Isaacson, who worked with Jobs on the book for 2½ years, said it was not fair to Jobs, or the book, to cherry-pick the Bad Steve anecdotes.
"The way the book turns out, he developed a very loyal team who was very inspired by him, and he has a very loving family," Isaacson said. "In the end, you have to judge him on the outcome." – ( New York Timesservice)
