Mx. Chara's new DreamWidth post: "Steve Jobs, supervillain"
Without Steve Jobs there would be no Elon Musk, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Maye Musk would have found some other racket for her failson to advertise. The other day I stumbled across a YouTube video by some computer-science chump reacting to Musk's faked-up "flying car" stunt (no actual flying, just a few seconds of temporary levitation achieved with compressed nitrogen with a stripped-down replica that was almost certainly non-functional as a car) and this doofus lamented, "How did we get from THIS [referring to a video clip of Steve Jobs announcing the ruinous advent of the iPhone] to THIS [referring to Musk?]" as if the evil of Elon Musk weren't a direct consequence of the evil of Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs didn't invent the "smart phone", and in any case thanks to the iPhone the "smart phone" is now one of the shittiest hunks of technology that's ever been forced upon the public, but that's not really the point. Steve Jobs didn't invent anything at all, not at any point in his career; he was a repackager, a slick confidence trickster grabbing onto existing ideas, appropriating the work of people with genuine ability (like Steve Wozniak), stamping his personal brand onto them and building himself into a veritable cult leader—and not merely in the eyes of the suckers who failed to realize that Jobs's Apple was a poisoned fruit. The #tech press enthusiastically slobbered over the Steve Jobs personality cult instead of ripping him to pieces, as they should have done, and in coöperating so shameless in Jobs's personal myth-making they set a fashion. Now EVERY sufficiently prominent criminal trying to make fast crooked money through high-tech grifting, especially Elon Musk, gets the Steve Jobs treatment, and it's considered high praise from high-tech journalism to be touted as "the next Steve Jobs", as if we're supposed to be grateful eternally for the flamboyant crapulence of the first Steve Jobs.
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