The Spamlist!

Jeff A’s Comment: Jawesome.

One of the things I thought everybody knew about Steve Jobs, darling of the Left, was how gloriously conservative he was, in that peculiarly American way.

Sure, everyone admires what a ball-busting, ruthless boss he was at Apple, and how enthusiastically he embraced free-market principles. But looking at Twitter today it seems that some people forget what a old-fashioned family man he was, too: he abhorred pornography, for example, making it exceedingly difficult for app developers whose products contained even hints of nudity to make it onto his devices. He disliked bad language. He admired Ayn Rand. And he was fabulously snobbish about journalism, speaking of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in reverential language but privately scoffing at bloggers and user-generated content. As for “crowd-sourcing”, forget it: Jobs repeatedly scoffed at the wisdom of crowds. “You can’t just ask customers what they want then try to give that to them,” he once said. “By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

Jobs had his quirks. He was a vegetarian, and dabbled in voodoo alternative medicine that nearly killed him. But on the the other hand, he was a blood sports man: just a few years ago, he went on a shoot in Cambridgeshire, England.

The fatuous Silicon Valley philosophy of “changing the world” through technology is couched in language complementary to that of the Left, but it has nothing whatsoever in common with the Left’s political agenda. Jobs didn’t want to save the rainforests (he famously did nothing for charity, and scrapped Apple’s corporate philanthropy programmes when he returned to the company in 1997); he simply wanted everyone in the world to own his consumer electronics devices and to buy content with them to use and enjoy on his own closed platforms – preferably the sort of polished, family-friendly studio content he himself created at Pixar.

That’s what Steve Jobs meant by changing the world: all-encompassing global market domination. It’s something the liberal Twitter mobs like to forget. (Their selective blindness extends to other liberal darlings, of course: ignoring Twitter’s tax avoidance strategies while using it as the service of choice to make noise about, yes, tax avoidance, for example.) In that goal, Jobs was perhaps the most successful capitalist in history: one who successfully hookwinked the goons on the Left into gushing over his products and spending their publicly-funded wage packets and student loans on them while manufacturing everything as cheaply as possible in China, only paying lip service to environmental issues when shamed into it by Greenpeace, eschewing charity and laughing all the way to the bank. All the while extending the same brilliant marketing principles he deployed at Apple to his personal brand.

And that, more than anything else, is why I love and will miss Steve Jobs. RIP, dude: you made idiotic hypocrites out of society’s most obnoxious members without even really trying.