[Peace-discuss] The Social Genius of Steve Jobs

[David Green]

http://daily-struggles.tumblr.com/post/11139208435/the-social-genius-behind-steve-jobs-by-arthur
 
In one of many recent articles on the late Steve Jobs, Dean 
Baker wrote (comparing Jobs and Alan Greenspan): “One made us rich, with a 
vast array of new products and new possibilities. The other made us poor with a 
long lasting downturn that could persist for more than a decade.” I want to 
enter a mild demurrer against the hagiographic depiction of Steve Jobs as the 
heroic entrepreneur, which one finds in nearly all the obituaries. My quarrel is 
not with Apple’s overseas labor practices, deplorable as those may have been. 
That is a separate issue. It is with the whole idea of the heroic individual 
entrepreneur who supposedly creates an industry ex nihilo and “makes us 
rich.”
To say this is to take nothing away from Steve Jobs, who was brilliant at 
what he did. But what he did was essentially to package the genius of tens of 
thousands of others, who worked not for extraordinary shares of immense profits 
or for rock-star celebrity but for love of the work itself. When the 
technologies are in place, it is inevitable that a Jobs will come along and find 
the key to commoditizing them, but creation of the technologies is a long, slow, 
and above all social process, which owes more to the actions of a far-sighted 
state and to basic research pursued in universities and private labs than to the 
genius of any entrepreneur.
Think of all the technologies that go into a Mac or iPhone: semiconductor 
physics, computer languages, ingenious algorithms, liquid-crystal displays, 
networking protocols, advanced modulation techniques, etc. etc. Steve Jobs was 
responsible for none of this, and the vast scope of the collective effort that 
goes into making each handy consumer device is a story that needs to be told by 
a historian of technology, not a hagiographer. Otherwise we risk confusing the 
achievement of the individual, remarkable as it may be, with the social 
achievement–the civilization–that makes it possible.
The singling out of the individual achievement is to my mind an essentially 
right-wing trope. It encourages the kind of thinking that leads people to argue 
that the tax system must preserve the profit incentive that is supposed to 
motivate these”job creators” and ”wealth creators.” But the fact is that 
emphasizing the economic incentives to individuals ignores the 
importance of providing other kinds of incentives to the kinds of people who are 
not motivated primarily by money (and I think that Jobs himself surely was one 
of those for whom money was a secondary consideration). No matter how much we 
enjoy our iPods and iPhones, we should be careful about attributing their 
existence to individual “genius” rather than to collective effort and the 
education and organization on which that effort depends.
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