The Ironic Shadow Cast by Steve Jobs' Death

The irony of Steve Jobs dying on the same day as the major Occupy Wall Street protest and march in New York City can’t be overstated, even though it has been completely overlooked by both mainstream and alternative media.  News stories celebrating Steve Jobs as the creator of a technological revolution trumped even local coverage of thousands of OWS supporters marching in the streets.  Of course, Steve Jobs' death and the occupation of Wall Street are unrelated events, yet together they represent the fundamental tension currently at play in American society today:  the crisis in our understanding of who we are as individuals and who we are as part of society. 

The underlying idea behind the OWS protest is that economic inequality, produced by the belief in the individual as able to function separately from the human collective, is misguided, unethical and unsustainable.  The cultural battle being fought at OWS seeks to reprioritize collective needs over individual desires by arguing to end the exploitation of the lower and middle classes by a small elite.  It is this exploitation that has produced economic pain in the form of lack of jobs and loss of economic resources for all but the top 1%.  It is this “failure” of capitalism to produce happiness and security for the majority, as well as its ability to camouflage the relationship between the 99% and the 1%, that calls attention to irreparable problems with the system, itself. 

As a result, the cultural and economic systems of capitalism are rejected by OWS as destructive, immoral, and unsustainable.  By occupying public space with physical bodies (as opposed to purchasing it with economic resources), the movement seeks to make human-ness undeniable, seeks to bring human-ness to the economic realm, which has come to be regarded as strictly quantitative. 

The capitalist political and economic system is reliant upon a specific cultural understanding of the self.  The capitalist individual has self-awareness, often described as rationality.  In other words, humans can individually interpret and understand the world around them using their individual cognitive powers.  The capitalist identifies the individual self with the inner self, creating a belief in an identity that is disconnected from others, a self that is only knowable internally to itself, and a self that is capable of perceiving the world separately from other selves.  It is this capitalist identity that perceives techno-industrial development as contingent upon the efforts of solitary minds.  Although these enlightenment ideals have been refuted from the very beginning and continually by great minds such as Durkheim, Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler and Herder to name just a few, they are nevertheless embedded in the American founding myth, and continue to be the referential for our understanding of economic reward and distribution in our society.

Steve Jobs life and the response to his death are emblematic of just this phenomenon.  Certainly, Steve Jobs was a great man, however, just as certainly he didn’t develop the technology we love so much as an individual.  Centuries of collective knowledge were necessary for iMacs and iPads to arise.  This knowledge was disseminated through education and culture, it is knowledge to which we are collective contributors and of which we are collective owners.  The use of technology by the masses was also necessary for its development.  This use created the collective history that was necessary for the technological revolution we all contributed to to occur.  The technological revolution is a part of the history of all humans – not the personal history of one man.  The 1% has always rested on the 99%. 

And it’s this compulsion to assign credit to one individual for society’s collective gains that is at the core of the issue OWS is seeking to highlight.  The ironic dark side to this compulsion is the infamously poor labor conditions endured by the workers who make Steve Jobs’ products, and the cheap labor that allows me to type this commentary.  The dark side is also the increased productivity that has led to a race to the bottom in terms of salaries and labor standards globally.  And the dark side is the exploitation of our attention via the widespread use of powerful moving images that mimic our imaginations and connect us socially to material objects.  These changes have created an extreme form of capitalism, whereby corporations no longer profit from our physical labor, but rather profit from our affective labor and make money via investment markets as opposed to the creation of tangible products.

But just as ironically, without the technological revolution Steve Jobs is symbolic of, OWS could not exist.  Interestingly, there has never been a period of techno-communication change that has not also resulted in change to social organization.  Print technology allowed the mass dissemination of books, the concurrent development of human ability to read aloud, our awareness of an inner mind, and the development of a way of understanding human relationship to the world based on rationality, problem solving and individualism.  It was concurrent with this technological and this cognitive change that capitalism became the dominant social order.

But now new technology has brought awareness back to the “we”, a self that perceives global interconnectedness, a self that has reconceived time and space as nonlinear and as proximate, a self that is essentially connected.  At the same time as Steve Jobs symbolizes the cult of individuality, rational self-interest, and entrepreneurial spirit, the technological revolution he helped innovate, perceives humans as fundamentally collective, irrational in our caring for others, diverse, able to work peacefully, and as connected equally to each other. 

From latter viewpoint, Steve Jobs can best be understood as a receptor in a complicated string of communication, the person to communicate ideas that were contributed to by all humankind.  This viewpoint perceives that capitalism simply got it wrong:  in reality the 1% couldn't have created anything without all of us.  We are each a particular kind of hub in a string of communication, each with our own necessary and unique function.  This is the fundamental call to humanity and equality that the protestors are staking claim to in the OWS protest. 

But the way Steve Jobs’ death trumped OWS coverage is indicative of how hard the job it will be to wake America and the world up.  Those of us who see a brighter future for humankind, one in which global sustenance is prioritized over individual gain, need to be diligent in critiquing the underlying false ideology of individualism, itself.  We need to reject the idea that Steve Jobs was an individual hero, while still celebrating his existence; and we need to critique the business practices that have made technology available to the masses, while shamelessly use technology as a tool with which to create social change.