February 24 marks the 64th anniversary of Jobs's birth. We try to tell the story of Jobs's growth period from a different perspective to commemorate this contradictory and great man.
The author of this article, Atah, is reluctant to be a "bystander" apprentice in the history department and a proponent of rigorous methodology.
If the door of perception could be completely washed away, everything would be presented as it was, without any restrictions, because most people closed themselves off and saw things through the crevices of their caves.
— William Blake, "The Doors of Perception"
Those who go through the "door in the wall" and come back will be different from what they used to be. He'll be smarter, but he'll also be more hesitant... Be able to better understand the relationship between language and things.
— Aldous Huxley, "The Doors of Perception"
Both Blake and Huxley were favorite writers by Apple founder Steve Jobs.
One is an 18th-century English Romantic poet, and the other is the author of the "20th Century Psychedelic Bible." To this day, it's hard to tell whether Jobs's fascination with the poem "The Doors of Perception" led him to a book called The Doors of Perception, or whether Huxley's repeated references to Blake's poetry immersed Jobs in the transcendent worlds of language and fantasy that Blake had created.
But what we can be sure of is that these books, and the cultural circles that were keen to read them, had a profound impact on the young Jobs. In the analysis of the Italian medieval scholar Umberto Umberto Eco, this influence not only changed Jobs's lifestyle and style of doing things, but also shaped Apple's corporate culture and management style. Blake's poems and paintings show his "unconventional" views of Puritanism in Britain. These "unconventional" and even "anti-doctrinal" views and attitudes inspired Jobs to rebel against the "Puritanism" of his time, especially the DoS system that was as repressive as Puritanism in his eyes, allowing him to create a set of "luxurious" but intuitive graphical interfaces to explore the possibility of building a "pleasing" "Jesuit" organization.
As Huxley reminds us, all attempts in the name of "progress" and "resistance" tend to have high personal and social costs, and have the potential to breed irony.
When Jobs declared that he and the Apple would bring salvation to mortals, they also brought closure and imprisonment. When he shouts "Down with Big Brother," he becomes what he calls a "villain." He hated betrayal, lies, and the pain they caused, but he was also full of lies, choosing to constantly betray others and become the tyrant who encouraged betrayal, whistle-blowing, and surveillance. If he truly believed that the resurgence of IBM in the 1980s would bring a "20-year-old Middle Ages" to the computer industry, Apple in the late '70s and early '80s was in every way perfectly in line with his own definition and measurement of the "Middle Ages."
As Deleuze said, no one can avoid being a contradiction, and Jobs is no exception. Even if he tries to listen to his heart, the voice in his head is often swayed by irreconcilable forces, which tend him to lie, to hurt others, to contradict himself, to trample on the principles and spirits that he advocates, but to refuse to admit it.
If the misalignment of the times can better mobilize our historical imagination, overcome the "moral distance" between us and Jobs's circle, and "eat melons" from the perspective and thinking of our contemporaries, why not enjoy it?
Let's imagine Weibo was born in the 70s, to see what hot searchEs Jobs would mention in the early days of Apple.
The sky does not give birth to me, and the computer industry is as long as the night
Before the rise of Jobs and Apple, the favorite big manufacturer among young Americans was Hewlett-Packard, or HP HP. HP has a large number of employees, no matter what major you study as an undergraduate, there is a high probability that you will find a job here that matches your skills and training. Because of the clear division of labor and strict levels, HP can be regarded as a "super factory" with a strong bureaucratic atmosphere. Here, most employees are engaged in almost repetitive tasks every day: going to work, holding meetings, writing codes and/or writing reports, leaving work. Day after day, year after year.
From the perspective of treatment, the HP reputation of that year was very good. As long as the salary is high, as long as it does not cause a big problem and is absolutely loyal to the company, even if the business ability is generally unlikely to be fired, it can be called the "iron rice bowl of the United States".
But the problem is, not all young people are good at this mouthful.
In the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, more and more young "professionals" born into middle- and upper-class families began to hate repetitive work. They hate the endless reports and the endless meetings.
For these young people with small financial burdens, earning money is not the top priority of the job. In their view, work should be as fun as college. More importantly, work should have a sense of calling and grand historical significance. In other words, for them, a good job not only makes them physically and mentally happy, but also allows them to weave their own existence with a grander historical narrative. A job, especially in the Bay Area, should provide a sense of self-identity.
If we think that this spirit of theirs can be summed up by the expression "My badge represents who I am," it proves that you have misunderstood them. In their work ethics framework, they are loyal to their "beliefs" and "pursuits," not the company itself. If the company does not (again) provide a platform for them to pursue their "mission", many people choose to leave without hesitation.
Since the early 1970s, it has become easier to "leave without hesitation" from private companies due to changes in the economic environment.
At this stage of history, inflation has become the norm in the U.S. economy, and the rate of inflation has become more uncertain. This bewildering macroeconomic phenomenon has changed the expectations of many Wage setters about inflation. Like employees, they are more reluctant to sign long-term contracts, especially those that stipulate nominal wages. In the Bay Area of California, where guilds are rare, so-called "free hire" mechanisms are becoming more common. As a direct result, the economic, legal, and ethical costs of layoffs and voluntary employee departures have fallen dramatically. Under this system, "resignation in pursuit of 'mission' and 'dream'" became a rhetoric accepted by capitalist society. This set of rhetoric about dreams whitewashes many of the instabilities faced by employees in the free market, especially for those under great financial stress.
In the long run, this is an important historical shift. Salary, company culture, and family reasons are no longer the few reasons for job hopping that are accepted by HR in the United States. To this day, if you tell HR in an interview in the U.S. that you jumped from A to B for a raise, the HR interviewing you may be surprised by your "honesty", after all, such "rude" people are rare.
It is important to note that we cannot simply attribute this shift in work ethics to economic changes, especially in the labor market. Cultural change is also a very important factor.
Discussions about "dreams" and "missions" permeate every pore of the American leftist media. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the cultural center of white American society shifted from production to consumption. Society's demands on the individual are no longer "work, saving, altruism, and obedience," but "consumption, play, consumption, indebtedness." In an anti-religious and anti-war historical environment, the leftist media no longer demanded that young people seek their own identity from their relationships with higher powers (e.g., state, religion), but constantly encouraged them to overcome the limitations that society imposes on individuals and blindly optimistically believe that the world is dominated by themselves.
This is certainly a lie, but it allows Americans to continue to consume goods and images. Living in a world of advertising, American consumers are increasingly convinced that they can get "everything" in their lives — especially "freedom" — as long as they are willing to go into debt.
And Jobs was one of the fanatical propagators of this lie.
In selecting Apple's early employees, Jobs catered to interviewers' unrealistic fantasies about "mission" and "freedom."
Jobs often promised new employees — especially those who had jumped out of HP — that working at Apple was a very enjoyable experience, and in an interview with a Bloomberg reporter in the early 80s, Jobs said, "Working at Apple is like having a dry-wood love affair with your favorite goddess." When he finished, he chuckled softly.
When it comes to Jobs's selection criteria, many tech analysts in the 80s declared in magazines that Apple had almost strict requirements for the "IQ" and "professionalism" of employees. This narrative that emphasizes individual talent and exceptionalism makes the admitted Apple employees more convinced of their own particularity and the "sense of mission" they carry. One programmer who joined Apple in the early 80s recalled, "When I was accepted to Apple, I felt like I was the one who was chosen to change the world."
It's not hard to see why this programmer who graduated from the Ivy League Brown University thinks the same way. If consumption can give people the pleasure of dominating the world, what can bring more pleasure than designing what others desire?
In a number of interviews from the early 1980s, Jobs talked about how his employees, unlike the "technocrats" of other big factories, were a bunch of free and creative people. He told employees in several internal meetings, "If you wake up in the morning, stand in front of a mirror, and can't tell yourself clearly' what I want[to happen], then you should voluntarily quit your job."
Is this sentence very familiar?
We need to note that Jobs's words were more than just a threat.
As the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky reminded, sound has a very important role in social (domestication). In the face of a powerful speaker/boss like Jobs, it is difficult for employees to say "left ear in right ear out" to Jobs with a threatening tone. Jobs's voice will echo in your head and produce a conditioned reflex: Every morning when you look in the mirror, you think of Jobs's words, your work, and the "mission" you have chosen. Jobs's words make the company no longer the only place of social discipline, social discipline is extended to every corner of life, and constantly strengthen the imagination of employees on the relationship of "work - self-worth", making them more convinced that their work at Apple is meaningful, and losing this job, they will be lost.
A former Apple executive recalled that he told Jobs at the end, "I want to work at Apple, but I don't want to do anything repetitive, can you find me some interesting work?" Hearing this, Jobs was happy and assured him, "Apple is different from other companies, and no one here is doing something regular: that's not our style." Like tech magazines of the year, Jobs was keen to use the Apple Exceptionalism narrative. Just as Blake wants to convince readers that he lives in a Protestant v.s. Catholic binary (opposing) world, Jobs wants employees, the media, and consumers to believe that they live in an Apple v.s. non-Apple world. In this highly antagonistic world, Apple is special and free, while other companies— like IBM and HP — are repressive, bureaucratic, and murky. If employees don't work hard enough, if they are not careful, they will fall into the "meaningless" abyss of "non-Apple". This mode of cognition is undoubtedly barbaric and violent.
1984 : Big Brother is myself
Deleuze once joked that everyone has their own Glossary.
Unlike many Bay Area entrepreneurs of his time, Jobs's vocabulary was particularly violent. In an era of anti-war, pacifist, and respect for women as politically correct, few people talked about beatings and killings and reproductive humiliation as Jobs did.
The 1984 ad that made Apple famous was synonymous with Jobs's "vocabulary of violence." When talking about the award-winning Apple 1984 ad, everyone usually thinks of the narrative that Jobs wanted us to believe: IBM is the evil "big brother" who tries to control humanity, and Apple and the Macintosh (128k) computer they released are the "weapon" to liberate humanity and save the world. In Jobs's words, without Apple and Macintosh, the computer world would have fallen into a dark Middle Ages.
In the eyes of most computer historians, Apple's Macintosh 128k, released in January 1984, has played a pivotal role in computer history. Unlike IBM PCs that use the DOS command line, Apple's Macintosh is said to be the world's first personal computer to feature a graphical user interface.
To promote this "epochal" product, Jobs paid a lot of money to find Dery Scott, the director of the movie Blade Runner, and asked him to create a commercial for the Macintosh. 1984 This commercial mirrors the dystopian novel 1984 by British writer George Orwell. In this novel published in 1949, England in 1984 is controlled by an omniscient and omnipotent "Big Brother". Big Brother falsifies history through various technological means, monitors the behavior and thoughts of individuals, and brainwashes those who have different ideas through coercive means. The novel "1984" does not end with "everyone rejoicing", and the protagonist is almost weak in front of Big Brother.
Unlike the dystopian "1984," Apple's "1984" ad has a powerful protagonist and a utopian ending. In 1984, Big Brother is the perpetrator, and the protagonist does not have any ability to fight back. The reader's aversion to Big Brother and the powerful system behind it is based in part on sympathy for the mutilated protagonist. The 1984 ad was different, showing no scene of Big Brother violence at all.
In the ad, the "sportswear goddess" symbolizing Apple's computer broke free from the guards' control, ran, sprinted, and exerted force, smashing the giant screen showing the head of "Big Brother" with a hammer. Then, a blinding white light lit up, and text appeared on the screen:
"On January 24, Apple will release the Macintosh. That's when you'll know why 1984 wasn't the same as 1984."
Jobs and Scott were not the originators of the concept of "IBM Big Brother." Since the late 1960s, IBM, an industry leader, has been plagued by various "antitrust" cases because of its huge computer market share. Between 1969 and 1981, IBM was brought before various courts across the country by ZF. Both sides collected more pages of testimony than IBM computers sold. Because IBM was very rich and paid tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for the lawsuit, IBM naturally earned the nickname "Big Brother".
Let's go back to the "1984" ad. Jobs's public referral to IBM as Big Brother may not be an ill-gotten accusation. First, IBM has a lot of money, cattle to win the United States ZF, indeed has the strength of big brothers; second, IBM occupies a huge computer market, although it can not achieve monopoly for the time being, but can influence the mood of the market, set industry standards and define the limits of the industry.
IBM's ability to define industry standards is exactly what Jobs "fears" and dislikes, so much so that he needs to reintroduce the concept and "whip the corpse" three years after the antitrust case is closed. Speaking of IBM's "monopoly power," Jobs again used his violent vocabulary. In his description, IBM is the force that tries to "annex" everything, and Apple is the last "bunker," the "Rebels," the last resistance "Force."
We have to admit that this narrative with strong "anti-imperialist" and "anti-monopoly" connotations was undoubtedly very inflammatory at the time. But we should not fall into the trap set by the "Apple Specialism" narrative advocated by Jobs. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in his 1967 book The Society of the Landscape, reminds that in the age of consumerism, Marx's "Commodity Fetishism" evolved into new forms. In his view, product designers are trying to convince users and critics that their products and philosophies are unique and irreplaceable. (Successful) ads often add some mysterious aura to the products they want to market, giving consumers the powerful illusion that buying and consuming a product allows consumers to "get" some of the benefits of the product ( S'approprier ) . In brands: The Logos of the Global Economy, British sociologist Celia Lury extends Baudrillard's theory and argues that in order to make this illusion strong and enduring, 20th-century European and American advertising designers often added some endow it with a personality to the product. And these features are often a collection of abstract traits. What's more, the ad designer will try to make the viewer feel that the scene and "field of power" they are in is similar to the ones depicted in the ad.
Cigarette brand Marlboro began using this technique as early as 1954, launching the classic Marlboro Man series of advertisements.
It can be seen that rather than Apple's 1984 ad being groundbreaking, Jobs and the advertisers he hired followed the trend of the times and created a respectable advertisement at the right time with extraordinary techniques.
Apple's 1984 commercials were peddling more than just the upcoming Macintosh computers. It also attempts to peddle the notion that Apple's personal computer is a tool for rebels. By building the empathy of consumers and the "goddess of the rebels" in the advertising film and mobilizing the need for potential consumers for self-identification, Jobs and Apple tried to generate a positive imagination of Apple's personal computer: the personal computer can empower users and help the underdog in each industry to defeat the big brother in their industry, even if the latter's capital and control of the market are far beyond their imagination.
Even at this point, Jobs Apple is not unique.
More than ever before, American society after World War II believed in the energy and potential of great corporations and technology, especially their ability to "progress" society through scientific planning and reason. In the 1960s, however, this confidence in rational and scientific planning was shaken. Pollution is on the rise, nuclear power hasn't been made cheaper than politicians have promised, and an energy crisis seems like it could come at any moment. In the later stages of the Vietnam War, public confidence in all "elite decision-making" and rationality fell to a freezing point.
In this context of the times, romanticism and individualism were used as a medicine. More and more young people are beginning to consume the works of Byron, Emerson, and Black, as well as stories written with elements of romanticism provided by these artists: energetic (male) heroes fighting tradition and fate, listening to repressed voices in their hearts, following the looming "revelation" and "mission", and identifying this path as the only way to attain the "Authentic Self". These stories are often full of moral metaphors, trying to make the reader doubt reason and live a creative life, living outside the predictable rationality of others.
It is also in this cultural context that computers are redefined in popular culture as well as in the imagination of non-industry practitioners. Historian Fred Turner and sociologist Thomas Fred have commented that in the 1960s and 1970s, the relationship between counterculture and computers became increasingly intimate, and those who were skeptical of "reason" and the traditional institutions that promote reason—especially big government and big business—began to imagine computers as a medium for individuals to explore the infinite possibilities of the inner and outer worlds, rather than as weapons for predicting and controlling social relations and human nature. They prefer to use computers for non-scientific-related things, such as art and games. They acquire self-identity and social identity by shaping their relationship with machines.
It is in this context that jobs and Apple's professed spirit of underdog against the traditional corporate big brother has room for survival and prosperity. Ironically, Nixon and the Reagan administration — the big brother in the hearts of counterculture supporters — played a crucial role in spreading this narrative of "resistance" (or "rise of the weak."). Turner and Fred argue that without traditional big brothers providing space and media channels for these young people, these narratives may not be accepted by mainstream society so quickly.
After all the failures of the 1970s, the official culture of the United States urgently needed some new story to prove the superiority and economic vitality of the American system and to dispel the pessimism of ordinary people. Big media, big financial institutions, institutions of higher learning, and politicians controlled by conglomerates began to give young entrepreneurs a number of (free) opportunities to make their faces.
Reagan met with Jobs and other entrepreneurs at the White House. Jobs, who had always despised authority, did not refuse the request for this meeting, and appeared respectful and polite in front of Mr. President
In part, these tributes to small companies and self-makers from the bottom of society serve the grand narrative of the American Dream. A drug-taking, school dropout and self-taught "orphan" founded a public company in a garage, acquired millions of dollars in assets, and landed on the cover of Time Magazine: The government and the media are keen to use this story to deliver a simple but powerful message that American society is not getting worse, that the American dream is still there, and that everyone has a chance to succeed. The subtext of this narrative with "individualism" at its core is often that if you don't succeed, it's your lack of intellect, inner weakness, and incompetence that is the result of your lack of ability, not a problem with the social and economic structure.
This narrative logic culminated in the 1980s when Reagan was president, and it was in this time and space that Jobs's 1984 ad was conceived.
Did Jobs and Apple really practice and symbolize the spirit of "the underdog against evil Big Brother" that they preached?
In the long run, no. Jobs and Apple did not subvert the "elite big brothers", but joined their ranks: to predict and control rather than "liberate" or "defend freedom".
In the eyes of many antitrust experts, Jobs can be called a "fanatic" who has a contemptuous attitude towards the Sherman Antitrust Act in the United States. For a long time, Jobs asked other tech companies in Silicon Valley not to hire employees who had jumped ship from Apple. This has caused a lot of harm to many young programmers with a "mission". This is consistent with the statutory elements of some of the laws of the Antitrust Act. However, because the Antitrust Act was strict and the Justice Department often only prosecuted particularly serious cases, Jobs was not subject to any substantive charges or proceedings.
Even so, in the eyes of many Silicon Valley peers, many of Jobs's behaviors may be illegal, or have stepped on the red line of breaking the law. For example, the CEO of Palm Company once exposed Jobs's threat to himself. In the email, Jobs asked Palm to stop digging Apple's "corner", otherwise Apple would file a patent lawsuit against Palm.
Threats via email! There are only two possibilities for people like Jobs to leave evidence and handles on competitors. One possibility is that he believes that the other party is bound to bow his head and lose his voice under the power of "Big Brother Apple", so he is not worried about leaving evidence. Another possibility is that, as the author of Jobs describes, Jobs was accustomed to the Big Brother style, believing that he could "violate [everything] laws and distort reality", and did not feel that his actions would have any stake in the company. Either interpretation leads us to the same conclusion: Jobs was not what he called the "defender of freedom."
Until the Justice Department intervened in 2010, Jobs and other Silicon Valley giants had been trying to restrict employee job hopping through collusion. It's hard to be sure how long these conspiracies lasted, but we can be sure that Jobs's promise to employees that "you're free to choose a platform that suits your dreams" is most likely just a dead letter, and that the narrative of "Apple" or "meaningless abyss" may not be merely figurative.
As American historian Rebecca Solnit scoffed: "I want to shout at the 1984 ad with a hammer:' Don't smash that screen!" Apple is no different from other companies... If you think it's a terrible thing for a bunch of people staring at a screen, look at the world apple has created right now: billions of people are staring at the screen, whether they're walking, driving, or eating, and they're forever in another time and space."
We have to admit that Solnitt's taunts are "hindsight" and limited. Jobs's journey to Big Brother was far less easy (or automatic) than Thornet described. After the release of the 1984 commercial and the Macintosh 128k, although many people expressed a fanatical attitude toward them, there were not a few people who sang short, especially experts in the computer world. In an interview with The New York Times, Joseph Weizenbaum, a CS professor at MIT, said the idea of using personal computers to liberate humans was "hilarious" and that the logic behind it was "peddling revolvers on the eve of nuclear war and telling consumers that they could be used in self-defense."
Of course, not everyone is as pessimistic as Weitzenbaum, and many "forward-looking" experts recognize the value of Apple computers and believe that personal computers have a future, especially when it comes to commercial and political checks and balances. But they also have to admit that Apple's power is very meager considering the market structure and supply chain problems. In other words, they don't think Jobs and Apple have the power to monopolize the label "liberator." That is to say, the binary opposition of "Apple v.s. non-Apple/Big Brother" that Jobs peddled to consumers was an untenable fantasy in their eyes, even naïve. There are even a few business consultants who work for the financial giants assert that Apple will pay the price for its blind optimism in the coming years.
If you don't get it, you have to destroy it
Even if we limit the time period we use to analysis to the 80s, we can draw a similar conclusion that Jobs did not live up to the spirit portrayed in 1984. In the world of many Apple colleagues, Jobs is the big brother who covers the sky with one hand. Jobs's identification with the identity of "rebel" was highly selective. To a large extent, his choice was determined by his situation at Apple.
Only when Jobs can't get what he wants, when he can't be a big brother, will he want to "revolutionize other people's lives", put on the robe of the so-called "rebel" for himself, and raise the "pirate flag".
In the early 1980s, as the Lisa team continued to expand, it became increasingly difficult to manage this huge team. Apple's CEO and some senior leaders at the time believed that the young Jobs did not have enough management experience and ability to control this huge professional team like the "Navy", so he weakened Jobs's control of the Lisa project through a series of means.
In the eyes of some "tech critics" at the time, this was Jobs's first loss of power. According to Woz's recollection, Jobs was often embarrassed and angry after being "kicked out". His approach to the Lisa project also underwent a 180-degree shift. "In the beginning Jobs always said that only Lisa could 'save' Apple," Woz recalls. But then, Jobs couldn't wait to see the Lisa project fail, even if it didn't do his company any good. He went around telling outsiders that the people on the Lisa team, especially the programmers who had jumped from HP, were a bunch of "jerks who don't know anything, and use high budgets to create a mediocre product."
The concerns of the CEO and senior management at the time about Jobs's ability, especially his leadership and communication skills, were not unfounded. One person who left the Lisa team wrote at the time that Jobs would often break into meetings that weren't relevant to him, sit down and start biting his nails. Sometimes he would choose slippers and sit on his knees in a chair the whole time, and sometimes he would suddenly stand up and start "Ge You's paralysis". He would tell the people present by constantly changing postures: I am here, and I am the protagonist. Jobs's change of posture varies, but there are only two endings: being satisfied and watching everyone leave, or hysterically shouting, You guys are, and slamming the door.
Don Danman, an early Apple employee, and several colleagues said in an interview that Jobs would often interrupt them and talk about his views without letting them finish. In their eyes, Jobs was indeed a brilliant actor, but his daily communication skills were poor.
Jobs was notorious for his love of interrupting others. When Jobs was investigated in the options case in 2008, the SEC representative who wrote his confession kindly reminded him before the question began, "I sometimes interject when others are not finished answering questions, but I will try to control myself from doing so, and I hope you will." It can be seen that Jobs's love of interrupting others has become "public knowledge".
Don Danman's one-sided words with the SFC representatives are not enough to lead us to the conclusion that Jobs's daily communication skills are poor, because many employees and investors have described in their memoirs that Jobs's "highlight moments" in daily communication and his strong insight into the emotions of others. However, it should be noted that many people in this group deny the positive relationship between strong insight and good communication skills.
Jonathan, a former Apple chief design officer, has said he thinks Jobs feels that conventional social etiquette and communication patterns don't apply to him because he has the "freedom" to do so and the capital to hurt others. Jonathan observes that Jobs habitually hurts others when he is depressed, and gets his emotional catharsis through the pain of others. It is precisely because Jobs is a very sensitive person with a very sensitive heart, who can have a good insight into the emotions of others, and he can easily find the "soft underbelly" of other people's self-esteem and poke it fiercely.
Blood gushes out, and that's exactly the "catharsis" Jobs wanted.
A deceased business school professor said in the early 90s that Jobs had no respect for the etiquette and spirit that most of the American (modern) workplace entailed: teamwork, mutual respect, the ability to empathize, and so on. Don't think working with Jobs is a lucky thing. If someone like Jobs joins your company, you'll want to fire him by Wednesday.
Many programmers working at Apple in the '80s would agree with Jonathan and the Harvard professor. Many of Jobs's behaviors at the company were "violent" in their eyes — but none of this was intolerable, after all, Apple had never fired any employees during its expansion before the winter of 1981. In the early 1980s, an era of constant economic downturns, companies that promised both "iron rice bowls" and "mission fulfillment" were rare. Employees are really reluctant to get along with a tyrant boss, but they are even more reluctant to lose their jobs. In other words, not everyone is confident that their next boss will be more gentle and elegant, and that the next project will be more in line with their career development plan. In the words of one middle Eastern historian, "If you can't be sure if you can find a better substitute, the current tyrant is not so bad."
Even after Jobs took over the "small and lean" Macintosh team he thought was, he didn't abandon the "Big Brother" management style he was accustomed to. He always felt that the leadership had underestimated his management skills and crudely understood his experience as a betrayal, and trumpeted his conclusion.
In Jobs's view, the Macintosh team he led could reinvigorate Apple and return Apple to its golden age, the years he and Woz had worked in the garage. He even called the Macintosh project "The Metaphysical Garage" (roughly translated as "supernatural garage"). Jobs tried to convince the employees on the team that even if they were Apple employees, they had been abandoned by the people on the board. More importantly, Jobs wanted to convince these people that the people who could decide the future of the computer world were the small group of people who were abandoned, not those who worked Apple's main campus.
From this "garage" narrative, it is not difficult to see that Jobs is a "big brother" who advocates elitism. He wants to build a product that "decides the future" and use it to complete a corporate "coup" that will allow him to return to big brotherhood. At the heart of this narrative is a "result-oriented" logic, and the outcome (i.e., the realization of the "coup" and the success of the product) will justify everything that happens in the process (i.e., verbal violence and the way dictatorships are managed). And this important process of determining the future, in jobs's eyes, is in the hands of a very small number of people. Jobs felt that the simple establishment and the reduction of the number of decision makers were prerequisites for the birth of a good product, and it can be said that he wished that all the macintosh team employees were clones of themselves, able to reproduce and execute their ideas without any mistakes, and interpret the scripts and lines he had in his head with his mouth and body.
As Woz describes, Jobs wanted to send a very clear message to everyone: everything about Apple computers came from his brain, his ideas."
Many employees of the Macintosh team also have insight into this idea of big brother. Bob Belleville, the team's director of engineering, once recalled that some employees on the team, especially young employees, were keen to inquire about Jobs's likes and ideas, and often did things that violated their own design principles to please Jobs. Some will even deliberately satisfy Jobs's desire for control, stepping on Jobs when he insults his subordinates, as if this will make them better in this small team. In Belleville's eyes, Jobs's tacit attitude toward this behavior chilled many loyal followers.
As Bill Gates summed it up, Jobs had only two ways of communicating with his subordinates: seducing with sweet words, or comparing you to a piece of. In a diary memoir, a programmer on the Macintosh team named Andy Herzfeld said that Jobs repeatedly assured them that he would give them freedom and "protection" (Jobs's original words are protect and defend) and defend them in their conflicts with product managers. For young engineers and programmers, this kind of talk is extremely attractive. Having a boss who is willing to help support or come forward is bound to give them more room for maneuver and creative freedom in their battle of wits with product managers. But in fact, while Jobs did often help engineers in meetings and pressure product managers, he often betrayed his promises: His role was more like the last straw that crushed the camel.
In the process of Jobs's continuous centralization and becoming the big brother of the Macintosh team, the employees played an unshirkable "responsibility". It is precisely because employees blindly believe in Jobs's promises of freedom and "protection" that they will boldly use Jobs's name to confront their superiors, even threats. They take advantage of the product manager's fear of Big Brother power and verbal violence to squeeze the authority of product managers so that some product directors think they have lost control of the engineers. Arguably, the Macintosh team's management structure is becoming flatter and flatter.
In the early days of Jobs joining the Macintosh team, he would often choose to come to the company when everyone was about to leave work. Later, he would come to the company after dinner to process the documents. By spending less time on the campus, Jobs pulled himself out of the tension between engineers and product managers. To some extent, engineers have the "freedom" he promised, and product managers get the management rights they want. But it was a bad thing for those who wanted to cater to Jobs or expect him to "protect" or support him, so they chose to sneak back to the company to find Jobs after everyone left work on time. They know this time period is safe because many product managers leave work on time to pick up the kids (and then go home for dinner).
To some extent, Jobs's direct interaction with grassroots employees shows his "democratic" side. Grassroots employees have more opportunities to speak up, even if that doesn't mean they'll have more say. But on the other hand, this interaction is often filled with all kinds of whistle-blowing, snooping and denigration, exposing trivial things that happen in the office to Big Brother's eyes. Hertzfeld recalls that as more and more people began to "chat" with Jobs outside of work hours, employees began to suspect each other, because no one knew whether their whispers during the day would become "Go against you" at next week's morning meeting. As in the 1984 novel, the cost of choosing silence is high in this game; and this line of thinking allows Jobs to better spy on what is happening in every corner of the company, even if his physical body is not present.
Under this megatrend, some product managers feel very "broken" because they can't tell how many people have sued them behind their backs and how many "facts" have been distorted. Some product managers even privately threatened their subordinates to stop talking to Jobs in a "whisper." But these subordinates were not at all intimidated by this threat. One engineer said directly to the product manager who was pressuring, "If you don't want me to talk to Steve, you should talk to him, not me."
It can be seen that Big Brother Jobs is very keen to listen to employee complaints and whistleblowers, and what is the difference between this and the plot in "1984"?
Product managers have a hard time, and employees are not getting better because they don't get more "protection" and freedom. In the early days of the Macintosh project, only a handful of people stayed at the company after work, and they were all bachelors who had just graduated. It's not that no one wants to do things after work.
On the contrary, Hertzfeld recalls, many programmers and engineers with a "sense of mission" were more than willing to work on design after work and take the initiative to catch up on the project; they often got together outside the company to discuss work until someone proposed to order a takeaway supper. But since everyone began to be keen to wait for Jobs to come to the company after work, more and more people stayed in the company, so that the grass-roots employees who left work on time became an outlier. Everyone's dinner time is also getting later and later, from 6 o'clock to the last supper. Later, even the employees of the marketing department and the personnel department who did not need to work overtime began to stay in the company, going in and out, pretending to be very busy.
And Jobs naturally does not waste the "enthusiasm" of employees. He would patrol the office between processing documents and conversations, asking employees to show demos to him. In the face of energetic employees, Jobs often had great affection and "entitled" to "invite" employees to revise another draft before tomorrow morning. And that puts a lot of pressure on employees who are married and need to go home to eat and help their children with their homework, fearing that they won't be able to keep up with Jobs because they leave work on time, after all, Jobs is notoriously fickle. He often changed his mind several times a day; those who were not "staying" with Jobs on the same page could easily be squashed by Jobs.
What suffocated many employees was that Jobs would always unthinkingly make unrealistic deadlines. Many media outlets will glorify all of this as Jobs's dedication to efficiency, or emphasize that he is keen to tap the potential of employees. Ironically, they never found any examples related to the Macintosh team to support their arguments. They often say that Jobs gave Woz 4 days to develop a product, and it was this urgent gratitude that gave Woz the potential to miraculously complete the development of the game product in 4 days. But according to Hertzfield's recollection, this miracle rarely happened in the Macintosh team, because the PC project was much more complex than the ones That Woz completed in the 70s. Project delays are extremely common, Jobs himself often can't complete tasks in front of his own random deadlines, and the Macintosh 128k has many supply chain and software problems because of the rush.
Because Jobs was often arbitrary about setting deadlines and rarely allowed employees to bargain, 8 in the morning and 10 in the morning, overtime on Saturdays and Sundays became the norm in the project department. Many employees recall that Jobs defaulted to working more than 90 hours a week. "What is life?" I didn't even have time to sleep and have lunch," recalls a female employee who joined Apple in '81, "but I really didn't think about it at the time because Jobs didn't give us the space to think about it." Hertzfeld commented similarly that Jobs had no interest in discussions about work-life balance. When Jobs learned that work pressure had brought family conflicts to some product managers, he not only did not express sympathy and care, but sometimes even mocked them, complaining that they were really as "mediocre" as HP employees.
In the days that followed, Jobs became more and more keen to monitor his subordinates' every move in the company. In the semi-open office, he would often walk quietly behind his employees like a high school homeroom teacher until they could see his reflection on the screen. He'll stand there doing nothing and just staring at your screen. Without a word, it was like a silent active volcano. One employee recalled that one afternoon, Jobs stood behind him for twenty minutes, then slapped him on the shoulder while he was looking down, and then walked away without a word.
Larry Tesler, an HCI (human-computer interaction) expert who was poached by Jobs from Xerox, wrote in the late 1980s, "I can responsibly say that every employee of Apple has been intimidated and harassed by Jobs today." In Tesler's view, many Apple employees regard Jobs as a "terrorist" (Terriost) because he is keen to sabotage the dignity and inspiration of Sabotage employees like Godzilla trampling on the house, leaving them in an uneasy mood.
The TV set that was snatched away
Interestingly, most Apple employees hesitate and pause after discussing Jobs's "evil deeds" in interviews, and then begin to discuss Jobs's business ability and "charisma" (Extraordinary Personal Charm), and constantly explain how Jobs made himself better. Almost all of them end their statements in very positive language, almost without exception, as if the door to Macintosh's office is the "door on the wall" that Huxley describes: the person who passes through it will be smarter than ever.
Of course, they also seem very hesitant, especially when discussing Jobs's shortcomings.
For Apple employees, listing only Jobs's flaws without talking about his strengths is, in Jonathan's words, clearly "Unfaithful." At the same time, it is also "not politically correct" because it makes one appear to be very jealous or lacks the ability to summarize (more appropriately, failed to possess), which fits Jobs's definition of a mediocre person.
In the accepted portrayal of Jobs as a Charismatic leader, which has been accepted by the mainstream media, few people have discussed in non-academic settings what this strange concept has been given, or what advantages this quality has brought to Jobs.
The reasons behind this are not as complicated as we think. "Charisma" is a foreign word that few people used until Max Weber's sociological works were well known to British and American scholars. That said, the popularity of the term is a 20th-century phenomenon. Unfortunately, the group of American sociologists and political scientists who first used the term did not convey very well what this strongly religious abstract concept from the Greek language really meant, especially in public speech. They prefer to define and explain the term in terms of familiar success stories (e.g., Washington is a charismatic leader) rather than discussing why the word gives the listener a better understanding of the person being described and their praiseworthy deeds. Over time, charisma, an important sociological concept, became a polite phrase in the commercial exchange.
In the view of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one of the reasons why the word Charisma is misused in academic circles and in daily life is precisely because of his ambiguity: the word gives the reader/listener a lot of room for imagination and space for secondary analysis, and seems to describe and explain many things, but in fact does not clearly explain the causal relationship and the mechanism behind it. In other words, what needs to be explained is not explained, and the concepts and things that were still relatively clear are draped in a veil of mystery, making those who are labeled Charisma even more temperamental, as if his abilities are innate.
An important reason why Jobs is considered to be a "man of extraordinary personal charm" is that fruit fans often refer to Jobs as a "great inventor". The label "inventor" is often used to define those who are "charismatic." Before Jobs, Franklin, Edison, and Benz were often labeled "Great Inventor" and "charismatic person" by the media; the two labels were closely related and almost integrated. According to Weber, "Charismatic people are those who create new things, new standards, who dare to stand up to conventional wisdom... They will create a new 'obligation' and demand that their followers take it upon themselves."
In the eyes of fans, Jobs is in line with Weber's definition. As we mentioned before, because of advertising and grand narratives, consumers often have the "illusion" that buying and consuming a product allows them to "get" some of the advantages of the product: powerful, efficient, elegant and rebellious, etc.; they want to use Apple computers to fulfill their obligations, realize their dreams and "missions", do different things, and think differently ("Think different"). Jobs, as a product publisher, is easily seen as the source of these "advantages" and possibilities, because he and the product are often tied together.
An advertising planner who has worked at Apple for more than two decades has asserted that sound is one of the most important elements in launches and video ads. For those who are keen to watch Apple's launch, their first impressions of the product (First glimp) are almost always tied to Jobs's voice. This audio-visual apparatus tied Jobs's name to Apple's products. When they see the (old) Apple computer, their minds naturally come up with Jobs's name, as if he were the Creator.
Jobs rarely puts colleagues in physical contact with the product at the press conference, and will hold them tightly in his hands, which is also a way to bundle the product with himself once.
At the macintosh 128k launch, Jobs's face appeared directly on the demo of the product, just as a painter swore an oath of sovereignty by signing a painting. Macintosh employees reminisced fondly of Jobs's decision to have all team members' signatures appear inside the chassis as a way to flaunt the team's "artist identity" and distinctiveness. But those signatures will never be seen by the average person. Like the viewers in the 1984 commercial, they only see the big brother who appears on the screen: Jobs.
Next to Jobs is a bubble dialog that often appears in comics, containing a Macintosh 128k emoji. In the comics of the time, intermittent bubbles were generally inner thoughts. The message of this image is that the Macintosh 128k was conceived by Jobs, the "inventor", even if this idea does not hold.
One could argue that having Jobs speak for the Macintosh may not have meant it himself, or it could have been the intention of the board and other Macintosh team members. In other words, mistake Jobs for the inventor of the Macintosh as the responsibility of fans, not the effect Jobs tried to achieve. But it turns out that in the '70s and '80s, Jobs habitually took credit to himself and benefited from it.
Before founding Apple, Jobs had only one full-time job as a grassroots technician at a game company called Atari. The first big project he received was a game of table tennis. The game later proved to be a success and became one of the classics of the times. But Jobs did not develop the project. He outsourced the project to his good friend Woz. He concealed the fact that Woz was involved from his superiors and deceived Woz in distributing the remuneration for his labor. He asked Woz to use a minimum number of chips in the design, but did not tell him that the company would give him an additional reward for it. Jobs made thousands of dollars from the project, while Woz only got $350.
On this matter, the media often held different views on whether jobs and Jobs "took advantage" of Woz, because Woz was very interested and passionate about the game development project itself, and he forgave Jobs for deceiving himself and hiding the truth for months. But Woz's tolerance also made Jobs realize that he had the ability to take over the fruits of other people's labor, and to take all the credit without paying any price.
In an interview with Wired, Jobs declared that the essence of creativity is "connecting and integrating things."
In this framework of thinking, integrating the production materials and (social) resources that he owns, and making Woz work for himself at a very low cost (relative to returns), is the embodiment of his own creativity. And the reason he can do it is because "he has more experience with these things," and people who have that ability "don't have to do a lot of things" to "create" great things and put their names on the products. This logic of thinking explains why Jobs continued to put the titles "inventor" and "creator" on him, and deservedly accepted the reward.
Jobs took more than just wages from Atari. He also "stole" Atari's philosophy and corporate culture. As we mentioned earlier, Jobs always promised young people when hiring employees that Apple was the only place in Silicon Valley that could both make money and have fun. He has claimed that this idea stems from an extension of his hippie spirit, and this narrative has been embraced by many computer magazine editors. But in fact, Atari was the earliest proponent of this concept. Back in the early '70s, atari job ads had the slogan "Have fund and make money." It was precisely because Jobs was attracted by this slogan that he chose to go to Atari to apply for a job.
We can even say that the Apple particularism ("exceptionalism") advocated by Jobs also reflects Jobs's plagiarism of Atari. Jobs would emphasize to salespeople and consumers that Apple, its employees, and the products they developed were "incomparable" to other companies. And this narrative Atari was adopted as early as the early 1970s. Atari still had this "Jobs-like" confidence in ads in the mid-'70s: "There's no game company that compares to Atari, come and have fun with us."
After founding Apple and having his own team, Jobs didn't mind taking credit so much that sometimes we didn't even know the designer behind it.
When discussing Apple, it is natural to think of Apple's trademark. Most people will assume that Apple's logo is designed by Jobs, who claims to love design and calligraphy, but this is not the case. People even forget that the first person to design a logo for Apple — Ron Wayne — was one of Apple's founders. Because Jobs talked about his story with the Apple Orchard in many public places, and how much he disliked the original old-fashioned 19th-century printmaking style logo, everyone gradually assumed that Jobs was the designer of the "bitten" Apple logo. But the designer is Rob Janoff.
As we have seen, discrediting other people's products and designs and establishing a safe distance from "imperfect" designs was one of jobs's key ways to convince others that he had designed "transformative" products.
Within the team, Jobs shifted the cost of trial and error to his subordinates and took their good ideas for himself. Don Danman, who has worked on the Macintosh team for many years, has said that Jobs always tries to create a sense of "I know better than you what design is like" when communicating design solutions with colleagues, even if he is not very sure in his heart. He would often reject the A plan proposed by his subordinates and then let them try what he called the better plan B. If Plan B does satisfy him and other colleagues, he will stick to himself and claim the credit. If Jobs wasn't satisfied with Plan B, he would start gushing about Plan A and claim that the plan he had recently thought of was better than what you offered.
Later, Macintosh employees began to lose their minds about Jobs's liking to take credit, and instead used his inertia to reduce their workload.
Outside of the team, Jobs also liked to overwhelm others with details, giving the audience the illusion that he had the ultimate grasp of all the details of the product—and the connections between them.
But this is not the case. Jeff Ruskin once said in an internal letter that Jobs was so unaware of the overall progress with the Apple III and Lisa that he made a lot of unrealistic timelines. Jobs also didn't know much about raw material prices and markets, so much so that the solution he asked for made it impossible for the marketing department to communicate well with his partners. At the time, there were not a few people who supported Raskin's opinion.
In Jobs's eyes, Ruskin's thoughts were the diseaseless groans of mediocre people. After Jobs took charge of the Macintosh team, he repeatedly stated that the Macintosh team did not need to do any research on the existing market, and most of the work done by the marketing department was meaningless, because the goal of the project department should be to "show the market a product they needed". In the words of Walter Isaacson, author of Jobs, Jobs believed he "could control the market... And any possibility of deviating from this plan represents the failure of the project team members."
Once again, Jobs conveyed his value as a "creator" and a "changemaker" by belittling the labor value of others, even though the way he conceived of "creativity" revealed his recognition of the importance of team labor. His ambitions in pursuit of major credit are constantly expanding. Not only does he want to convince the public that he plays a vital role in the birth of a great product, but he also tries to convince consumers and analysts that he can create a market to change the rules.
In the eyes of some buyers who chose to order the Macintosh 128k in 1984, Jobs clearly overestimated his ability to shape the market. A professor who bought the Macintosh 128k from Apple on behalf of Drexel University said Jobs always tried to believe that his ability to shape the personal computer market allowed him to beat IBM Blue Giant. But in reality, the fighting takes place in places where the rules never change, like schools. In his eyes, the Macintosh marketing staff is indispensable, because they have matched the engineers and started a huge price war.
While Jobs was celebrating the success of the 1984 commercial, the competitor, IBM, knew what was to come. "The story doesn't go as Jobs imagined," one prominent analyst wrote at the time.
In the PC market in the 1980s, competition among companies was fierce (Cut-throat). After the macintosh was launched, the more positive feedback from the market made many companies realize that the concept of "graphical interactive interface" (GUI) has proved to have great market potential. When Jobs realized that other companies might adopt similar design concepts and threaten Apple's market position, he began to work hard to promote the cross-era nature of macintosh in the media, and declared his apple to be the inventor of graphical interfaces.
There's no doubt that Apple's Macintosh 128k was indeed the first mass-produced graphics-interactive pc, but Jobs and his team weren't the inventors. As Bill Gates jokingly put it, "Jobs and I both had a wealthy neighbor named Xerox, and when I broke into their house to steal the TV, I found that Jobs had already stolen it."
Many fruit fans who hate Bill Gates will decisively defend Jobs. They would say that Jobs had reached an agreement with Xerox very early on, so it was understandable that Jobs had received "inspiration" from Xerox. They would also insist that Jobs did not use a single line of Xerox GUI code and pay a high financial price for this "inspiration". But in fact, many Apple engineers said that before Jobs and Xerox reached an agreement, they learned about Xerox's graphical interface project through their friendship and came into contact with some rough demos. Using Jobs' visit to Xerox as an important time node — and ignoring the interactions of employees between companies — undoubtedly adds to the narrative of Jobs's inventors.
In the eyes of many engineers, communicating and learning with peers is the essence of the golden age of Jobs and Woz Apple I. Jobs, on the other hand, seems to have turned a deaf ear to the "golden age" he has repeatedly emphasized. His quest for the status of "inventor" led him to internalize the thinking of Big Brother in 1984, treating all the company's output as "confidential."
In many interviews, Jobs even portrayed himself and Apple as "victims" of peer plagiarism and "theft". Needless to say, this discussion of "plagiarism" and "being violated" serves the narrative of the "inventor", and the logic behind it is undoubtedly "Big Brother". 、
De-instructionalization
Unlike IBM's "personal computer," the Macintosh 128k package doesn't have a thick instruction manual.
Because the computer uses a graphical interface, most users no longer need to spend time learning complex code to operate the computer, so the manual is not necessary. The "manual" that comes with the Macintosh 128k has no text, but more photos of the Macintosh appearing in various scenes and the user's feelings.
This change can be described as de-"de-specification". And this trend is adopted by Apple and many mainstream manufacturers. Today, most Apple devices no longer carry instruction manuals that exceed two sides of the paper.
But does Apple device really have no "instruction manual"? The answer may be no.
Jobs may be the manual for Apple devices. He constantly tried to shape our perception and feelings about computers, trying to convince us that using Apple computers would allow us to "get" some of the advantages of this product: powerful, efficient, elegant and rebellious. He told us that people with Macs are "cooler", more creative, and more likely to change the future than people who use PCs. We have to admit that this narrative has a strong appeal, but it is not full of certainty. Graphical interfaces do bring convenience, but they also limit our imagination of the possibilities of human-computer interaction. For a long time, Mac computers, as Blake's poem describes, "closed themselves off, seeing things through the crevices of their caves." Personal computers do bring more possibilities to our lives, but they also give us a lot of control and shackles that were once unimaginable, even though Jobs once claimed that they liberated human nature. As Jobs had hoped, they became part of our consciousness and even broadened the margins of our consciousness, but have we really become more "free", more "searching for the voice of the heart, more "wise" to believe in this grand narrative?
In order to answer these questions, we must complete the "de-specification" that Jobs did not complete. We should no longer rely on Jobs's manual to tell us what a good computer looks like, what the ideal model of human-computer interaction looks like, and what good leadership should look like—even if it's a long and painful process. But I would like to believe that this metamorphosis will have a beautiful ending.
"Does it matter what kind of person Jobs is?", a friend of mine once asked me. From a pragmatism perspective, "the real Jobs" is far less important than "what kind of person you believe Jobs is."
Worshiping or spitting on an idol is more about how you see yourself than the idol itself. Jobs is still alive in our imagination as a public figure, but because of advertising and media, he is often reduced to a thin paper man, a comic-like totem, and a tool used as a self-proclaimed tool. He becomes a badge that makes the wearer feel like he's shining.
But isn't that light the one in the 1984 commercial?