Ever sit at a funeral and think: “yeah, bless her. wouldn’t wish it on anybody. But she was a … “ ?

10. Steve Jobs did not ‘create’ the graphic arts. It was alive, and lived as an artform until around 1994, when the dawn of Apple meant an entire generation of typesetters, art directors, illustrators and offset press engineers were systematically put out of work. The design industry has been devolving ever since.

9. Steve Jobs did not invent the ‘windows’ interface. The idea was invented by a computer engineer at Xerox over a decade before Jobs saw it.

8. You are doing nothing on your computer that wasn’t arguably do-able 10 years ago. Yes, they keep innovating and releasing marginal improvements, but it’s all G-U-I (graphic user interface) and speed (RAM, processors, etc. ) the rest is smoke and touch screens.

7. You don’t actually use half the crap that comes on an Apple anyway.

6. Computers are tools. That’s all folks. The people who make then are not artists. They are not geniuses. They are computer making people. Is Henry Ford a saint?

5. Your computer is too expensive, and Apple leads the way. Why? Because they can. If you like the Reaganomically correct version of society, fine.

4. Your computer is made by impoverished children in China. OK, maybe not all of them are children. Most are poorly paid. We got onto the clothing industry for this, but clothes don’t beep and give you porn.

3. Apple computers, while faster, better and easier than PC’s, aren’t too big to fail. In fact, most Apple CPU’s are obsolete within a year or two due to predatory upgrading, and intentional software incompatibility.

2. Society isn’t better, it’s faster, louder and more expensive.

1. People are sitting on Wall Street right now using iphones, like I am using a Macbook, protesting corporate greed and corrupt banks. (At least I’m willing to admit my hypocrisy on this particular point).

Are we going to take flowers and become mournful looneys when Sir James Dyson croaks? He invented a new type of vacuum, and revolutionized his industry too. At least his new hand dryers give a great blow job in toilets from Paris to Tokyo (and dry hands in 30 seconds).

The best thing I can say about Apple and Steve Jobs is that they provided an alternative to the IBM clones that would have taken over otherwise, and for that choice, I can tip my hat. Slightly.

Martin Belk
Paris Oct 2011.

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Post Scripts:

corporania™ = the establishment, infrastructure, businesses and people who make up the current nameless, faceless, unaccountable financial world. (if you have a 401K you’re part of it).

Beats Jobs by a longshot: A VERY good address from 1972, by Jimmy Reid, at Glasgow University – on the plight of labor and those in poverty. Yes, people thought about these things before the internet. (Thanks Stewart Smith).

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/still-irresistible-a-workingclass-heros-finest-speech-2051285.html