Steve Jobs and the ‘Me’ Generation

For most of my adult life, I have been haunted by Steve Jobs.

It began in 1972, the year that he matriculated at Reed College. I was a junior. It was a challenging and confusing time. Reed had what was considered at the time a notoriously high attrition rate: Only 60 percent of freshmen graduated within four years. Drugs were plentiful. Social life seemed always on the verge of devolving into a perpetual Dionysian whorl. In one legendary episode, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had descended upon Reed and distributed vats of electric Kool-Aid acid on the college’s front lawn.

I didn’t know Jobs well. But Reed is a small place, so our paths crossed on several occasions. He dropped out after one semester, although he continued to eke out a bohemian existence in Portland, while continuing to audit classes at Reed for another 18 months.

I never liked Jobs. I didn’t much wonder why back then, but now the reasons seem obvious. His class seemed to be in a different mold from the previous two classes. The generational story is well known: The war in Vietnam was winding down, social activism was waning, and American youth were starting to turn inward.

The reasons for disillusionment were many. The civil-rights movement never regained its momentum after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968. The following year saw the beginnings of a group of would-be terrorists, the Weather Underground, that would hijack the antiwar movement. Finally, the Arcadian aspirations of Woodstock were snuffed out at the disastrous Altamont Speedway Festival, where the Rolling Stones had ill-advisedly hired the Hells Angels as their security detail. (What were they thinking?)

It was the beginning of a trend that the historian Christopher Lasch memorably described as the “culture of narcissism.”

This transformation hit home for me in the fall of 1972, when the student-sponsored public-affairs committee, of which I was a member, was told that Rennie Davis, a former member of Students for a Democratic Society and a defendant in the notorious Chicago Seven trial, would be passing through Portland. We leaped at the opportunity to invite him. But we were in for a rude disappointment. Davis had recently become a disciple of the guru Maharaj Ji. All he wanted to discuss were the ecstasies of Eastern spirituality, which my fellow committee members and I viewed as a form of escapism. For Davis, his experiences as a political activist were a closed chapter.

In retrospect, I was put off by Jobs for the same reason that Rennie Davis was such a letdown. Jobs had no interest in social justice. Public-spiritedness was not part of his makeup. Even then, for Jobs it was all about the Self.

Jobs had become captivated by the American guru Baba Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert, a Jewish kid from Newton, Mass., who had written the New Age classic Be Here Now. (In 1963, as a junior professor at Harvard, Alpert wrote The Psychedelic Experience with Timothy Leary. Shortly thereafter, Harvard dismissed Alpert for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate.)

In my dealings with Jobs back then, I sensed something unsavory. Hinduism and its complements, such as Zen Buddhism, were fundamentally about loss of the self and how to accept that loss. They focused on the way that egotism and self-love prevent the attainment of a greater sense of cosmic harmony.

But as anyone who knew Jobs could tell you, with him “loss of the self” was never a legitimate option. Instead, Jobs’s attraction to Eastern spirituality seemed to be motivated less by a search for cosmic oneness than a desire for self-aggrandizement — that is, a more powerful self. Although I was only dimly aware of it at the time, what I was witnessing in my fleeting encounters with Jobs was the transformation of the counterculture into the “me” generation.

Those ruminations came into focus recently upon viewing Alex Gibney’s outstanding documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. Although Gibney’s film is not unsympathetic to Jobs, it demonstrates that, in the time-honored American entrepreneurial mold, he was one of the greatest con men ever to walk the planet. To suggest that Jobs makes Bernie Madoff look like the corner grocer is only slightly hyperbolic.

To appreciate this fact, recall the public image that Apple, under Jobs’s tutelage, so fastidiously cultivated. Apple vs. IBM was presented as an updated version of the biblical tale of David vs. Goliath: the Counterculture against the Establishment. In persuading us to root for Apple, Jobs managed to convince us that we were supporting the underdog against the depredations of corporate America.

The first Macintosh was introduced in the celebrated 1984 Super Bowl commercial that sought to convince us that we were all prisoners of Big Brother, and that personal computing, in the form of the Macintosh, would set us free. During the late 1990s, there was Apple’s memorable “Think Different” ad campaign, featuring images of (among others) Einstein, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lennon. All had been 1960s icons — hence, their generational appeal — as well as individuals of integrity. Adding to the pathos, three of them had been martyred by assassins’ bullets.

But what did all of this have to do with personal computing? And was Jobs insinuating that he himself belonged to the same genius guild?

In retrospect, it was all a snow job. Jobs’s “genius” lay in getting us to think about one of the most impersonal contrivances of 20th-century engineering as a fraternal spirit, an object that was practically ensouled. (Think of the opening scene of Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs biopic, in which Jobs, surrounded by a chorus of naysayers at the 1984 Macintosh launch, adamantly insists that the computer must greet its users by saying “Hello.”)

It’s no secret that today many of us spend more time with what we euphemistically call our “devices” than with our loved ones. Jobs’s “genius” lay in his ability to reconfigure the utopian aspirations of the Aquarian Age in the guise of sleek and desirable articles of mass consumption. So successful was Jobs in this undertaking that he was able to deceive us into thinking that we weren’t even consuming: that by purchasing Apple products, we were realizing our innermost desires; that a micro-engineered circuit board encased in plastic was an extension of the Self.

Ultimately, the joke was on us, the benighted consumers. At the time of Jobs’s death in 2011, Apple Inc. was the second-highest-valued company in the world, worth an estimated $350 billion. Despite the efforts of intimates like Bill Gates to persuade Jobs to divert part of his immense fortune to humanitarian ends, nothing of the sort occurred. Instead, in defiance of the adage “You can’t take it with you,” Jobs went to his grave with an estimated personal worth of $8.3 billion. Apple itself was under federal investigation for violating antitrust laws by colluding with other Silicon Valley powerhouses in hiring practices. Apple’s Foxconn manufacturing facility in Shenzhen, China, was exposed for its sweatshop-labor practices, which were thought to have motivated a spate of employee suicides.

Perhaps this is the way that David vs. Goliath stories end in the age of neoliberalism.

Steve Jobs as an icon of the American entrepreneurial spirit? Think again.

Richard Wolin is a professor of history, political science, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author, most recently, of The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton University Press, 2012).