“My job is not to go easy on people. My job is to make them better.”

Steve Jobs

 

So there was this guy on my friend’s friends list today, and he’s like one of those hippy anti-Apple brigade types, carrying on like it’s all just some evil capitalist corporation or whatever; and he was on this thread where a bunch of them were going on about how the Chinese workers who make the iPads are tortured and treated like battery chickens, and how they kill themselves, and bla bla bla, and he asks this question. He says that if Steve Jobs changed the way the world communicates, then did the guy who made the car radio change the way we drive? You know, basically doing that whole “Steve is not important to our civilisation” thing. Completely ridiculous.

And it got me thinking. I’d been thinking all day, really. In fact, since Steve Jobs died yesterday, I haven’t stopped thinking about Steve Jobs. Reading all those quotes everyone’s been posting on facebook – those amazingly profound things He has said throughout His career – you realise what a Visionary™ this man really was. And He was more than that. He was a Teacher™. I mean, you forget that. But He didn’t just give us all this Cool Shit™, and let our dreams come true on these machines, and enable us to download movies on demand and stuff. He taught us. He taught us how to Be. He changed our lives by teaching us how to change it. And He gave us the machines to do that on.

I don’t know about the guy who changed the way we drive, because I just catch trains. But on those trains, I leave the cruel reality of strangers sitting all around me – we all leave one another, together – through the little screens that take us to the place we were before, when we were in our homes on a slightly bigger version of the machine. All day at work, I can keep going back there, too. My boss can ban us browsing important facebook status updates on our work computers – like “here’s an upload of an aspirational lunch I’m valid enough to afford”, or “I’m loving my life, as evidenced in this photo where I’m smiling with my many friends, and feel free to tell my ex you saw this status update”, and so forth – but we have our iPhones. And we can go back to that place on them, and what can the boss say? They’re just phones, right? We’re not even talking on them, right? That’s the genius of the iPhone! And I don’t even have to literally speak to anyone anymore. It’s fucking amazing.

And the China stuff, I mean, seriously, what were the Chinese even doing before we gave them the industrial revolution and let us make our Cool Shit™? Does anyone even know? I don’t. They were no doubt sitting around their little huts, starving to death, bored out of their minds, and now they have something to do, stuff to make – cool stuff like iMachines – and in return we give them enough to go buy some wheat or soup or something. And that might seem pretty shitty to us, but in China, wheat and soup are like AMAZING. They’re lucky to have that experience. And we came along and basically gave it to them, in return for letting them know the value of being a worker, and to make something as Cool™ and Important To Our World™ as a fucking iPhone! And none of that would have been possible without Steve Jobs.

Before Steve, our lives were often having to be spent OFF THE MACHINES! I mean, really, breathe for a second and grasp that. We sat on those trains and actually had to deal with those people around us; we actually had to sit with our own thoughts, with nothing to stimulate us but our own minds. People were having to resort to reading books – big motherfuckers made of paper – and they were like hundreds of pages long, and it took you days and days to even get to the end of them, like a status update that only reveals itself, one character at a time, over the space of weeks. Imagine that. That is beyond painful. But that’s what we did, until Steve made our world mobile. Then, we could have our world with us on the train. Before, going anywhere meant not knowing if my status update had garnered some scathing attack that required me to instantly defend myself – and being completely unable to defend myself, because I was on a fucking train with no way of being online. Shit was happening to my identity, and I was just sitting there, helpless, on the train. That is a vivid anxiety nobody can deny.

I had to go to nightclubs in the hope of getting shagged. I had to go outside. All the time. Getting shagged had a maximum possibility of three nights out of the week where I got to go through excruciating effort that potentially only amounted to the failure of me not getting shagged. Who here has not walked that long walk of shame home, seedy and deflated at 3am, where you inevitably turn the key in your door alone, your effort amounting to absolutely nothing? Excuse me for being glad I don’t have to do that, anymore! Now, I can pick up on the train! I could even not have laid eyes on them in the flesh – which I wouldn’t, because I only watch the screen – and before you know it, there we are, making those emoticon smileys with the tongue poking out (we all know what that means, thank you). The anti-Apple dudes go on about how it’s disconnecting us from humanity, bla, bla, bla, but it’s bringing us together. It’s bringing us together in places we have never come together, before. Before, I’d be sitting there reading a fucking book, knowing that I wouldn’t learn what happened to Dumbeldorf until God knows when. And now, I’m getting together!

I have to be honest, I have seriously thought about unfriending lots of people who I’ve had to sit and endure today, as they go on and on with the usual propaganda they mask their envy or whatever it is in. And they think we’re the ones in the cult?! They seriously just don’t get it. They go on and on about how Steve’s evil and how Apple are just about taking everyone’s money, and how the other machines are better because they’re open-source or whatever. Like they know what we, the people, actually want? Why on earth would I need to install shit from wherever on my phone? Who the hell wants to actually know how to install something? I press a button on my iPhone, and it installs things for me. And it has everything I could possibly need. Apple have got the biggest app store in the world, there is nothing your life could need that isn’t on there. I challenge you to think of something you want to do that there isn’t an app to do for you. You won’t.

And yes, yes, I have to synch it to my Macbook pro and can’t just plug it in anywhere. But so what? When am I not on my Macbook Pro? I like that it synchs. Synching is a good thing. It knows it’s me. If I plugged my phone into a PC or whatever, it wouldn’t know it was me. It’s like it wouldn’t really be mine. My iTunes comes up, and it connects to me, and it loads everything on my iPhone to my iTunes, and there it is, I can do whatever I want with it. How can anyone in their right mind argue with that? Why would I want something that doesn’t synch?

Oh, but I have to pay for my songs just for the device! I can’t take my songs to anywhere else! Well, boo hoo! Hello, I pay to have them put onto it, right there and then. And I don’t want to put music into it from somewhere else. Why would I be somewhere else? And why would I be buying songs there? I don’t have anything else to get them from or put them on. I just want to pay for them and own them – to have them right there with me in my life, the minute I realise I want to own them. If I can have that capability if I pay, I’ll pay. Who wouldn’t?!

And Steve made that. He gave us somewhere where we already were to go buy songs – whatever songs we like. He deserves every cent of His however many billions. He gave us something to listen to our songs on, even if we’re running on a treadmill, or even when we’re defending ourselves on the train, on the way to work. Music is life. It’s our dreams. Steve Jobs gave us those dreams. How can you compare that to a radio being put in cars? That’s just stupid.

I also read this article by some bitter journalist who no doubt gets kickbacks from Bill Gates, and he was saying that on the same day, some doctor or scientist or whatever died, and this guy made some breakthrough in cancer treatment, and how ironic that this man had probably prolonged Jobs’ life, bla bla bla, how the world had lost someone who had given us a hope in life itself against this most terrible disease, and yet how wrong it is that we don’t know his name, or talk about him, like we do Steve or whatever. But still, that guy’s only really affected a small portion of people. Steve Jobs may even have been one of those people, but then look at what Steve Jobs did with that time to the whole fucking world! He changed us. Life was different before Apple. That is no exaggeration. What were you doing before Apple? No doubt something completely different.

They say it’s like some kind of cult, and that Jobs was just a good marketer who basically built a corporation like an evangelist builds a church. But they just don’t understand. There’s like this pathetic world left behind, where people for whatever reason decide to resist this new world. But this new world is better, and most of them who carry on about it are in this world anyway. If you’re forced to be in something, you might as well enjoy it. Maybe you’ll realise how much better this world is, and then eventually you won’t even have to try to enjoy it any more – you just will! I don’t know, I just feel sorry for these people, really. I think they’re the ones in the cult. They’re hoodwinked by the evil media, and the evil media just don’t get it. The media have clearly got it out for Him, everybody knows that. And now they’ve spawned all these ridiculous people who go around trolling on about how sad it is that the world is mourning the death of a ruthless CEO and whatever, and it’s like “God, who told you that? The meeeeedia, by any chance?”

I was reading this article on CNet the other day, and they totally had it in for Him, it was so transparent – going on about how Apple are suing all their competitors to destroy the competitive market or whatever – completely ignoring that if anything it just shows how much Steve cared for the world, that He would go to all that trouble to keep it free of inferior technology and imperfection. That should be a matter of law, after all. The world has changed, and we can’t let the legal system fall behind. I feel relieved to know that the courts are helping Steve help us be the best we can be. And quite frankly, do you know how long it would have taken Steve to decide what shape the screen should be? Why can’t these companies think of their of own shapes? Why should they ride His Vision™ for free? But no, no, the Android sheep believe everything these so-called journalists are saying, and so then they go around spouting off these slogans like they’re the words of some great sage or something. They’re basically brainwashed.

I see them sometimes on the train, sitting there with their Androids or whatever. They always look miserable. And you just see this thing they’re sitting there scratching away at, and you just know it would have the touch intuitiveness of a fucking magna doodle, and you know they’d bark at you about how it’s better than your iPhone; but there it is, just looking so god damned ugly. I mean, really, those poor people – so naive, completely unable to grasp it. Steve Jobs understood what these people do not. He understood that we do not want these complex machines that look ugly. We want simplicity and beauty. My iPhone is beautiful. How can you not want that in your life? It’s art. Steve Jobs is an Artist™ too, don’t forget. How can you have anything against art? These people who don’t understand Apple are basically lefties, aren’t they? But Lefties love art, don’t they? How could they try to destroy the very thing they supposedly love?

And now, He’s gone. I think part of this incredible global grief is that we’re realising that, if anything, we took Him for granted. We actually underestimated this guy. We never took the time to remember just how great what He was doing for us was. His machines are so great, they make us forget how great they are, because its like you can’t imagine any other life anyway. Have you ever been without your machines because of some reason? You freak the fuck out. You know you do. And this is like losing the machine. Except it’s the biggest machine of them all. It’s Steve. It’s the man who created this whole damned world. And I’m supposed to believe I’m in some kind of cult for realising this?

In the end, those people will dwindle. They’ll realise. And the ones who won’t realise will die out with the generations. Steve is gone, but he has already built His world, and it’s here to stay. We are a part of it. The market share will rise and rise, and they will finally be the world’s richest company. And that is a good thing. We should be glad that in the middle of all this chaos of recent years – of wars, of terrorism, of the world’s economy collapsing, of fears that the world will heat up and destroy us – that a company like this could rise to take it all. That says something good about human beings. That says something good about us. We put Him there. He gave us a new way of living, and in return we put Him there, to a place that was rightfully His. He will look down from the clouds, and He will see His world finally become all, and it won’t matter that He died, because He’ll still see it. And we’ll all be here, connected to each other. He died building this for us. He did not give up. He basically died for us. Did the guy who gave the cancer patients a few more years or whatever do that? No.

I bite the Apple because I choose to. You made us better people, Steve. iMiss you.