It is not enough to like your products anymore; when the human beings who made them die, you are immediately required to enter a kind of spiritual decline yourselfThe deification of Steve Jobs was swift and incredible, an app that rose only in death. Jobs is immediately America’s Princess Diana, a figure of tragedy, representing transformation, Jackie Kennedy being also extended-dead to do it, and Michael Jackson also weird. I find this weird, since Jobs’s absolute legacy was the path in which human beings immediately routinely ignore each other in public since they are playing with their iPhones and iPads. As ever with a fresh form of communication, one of the things you can do is communicate your indifference bigger.I had an iPhone however I was relieved to lose it since it swallowed so much of my age in pointless ways. I loved following myself down a street, as a dot on a map, for instance, however all I was really doing was being both CIA operative and target in a tiny movie of my own lifetime. I also reckon, as others have noted, that the products gaze like children’s toys. Gorgeous simplicity, affirm the fans, however more simple than gorgeous, made for CBBC. The equivalent 40 years ago would have been blind adherence to the ideology of Habitat.However I am in a minority. Jobs’s death has stopped the clock. As the corpse cooled, all aspects of his lifetime and legacy were detailed by a prostrate media. He is immediately, just a small also late to delight in it, the earth’s most well-known male, one pixel small of saviour. His memorial supply at the end Sunday was covered by the broadsheets, who reported that the golden triumvirate of Bill Clinton, Stephen Fry and Bono appeared to mourn and rend their garments. This made me laugh, I am worried, since if the inquiry “Which global celebrities are most likely to attend the memorial supply of Steve Jobs?” was questioned on Family Fortunes the top answers would surely be – Bill Clinton, Stephen Fry and Bono. Who else could it be?Some of the mourners, appropriately, tweeted their loss, which I am certain Jobs would appreciate, being the earth’s chief facilitator of manufactured emotions in 140 characters or less. The more common population, who are practised in responding to the media’s idiocies, obediently responded. They were told they have lost something precious, and so the more credulous grieved. Logos representing Jobs’s death were designed, circulated, fought over and abandoned. Apple shops became instant shrines at which iPads transformed themselves into representations of flickering candles, which was chilling since, as you know, computers can’t mourn. Some iPads were, bizarrely, left at the shops as an offering, as if modern gods demand not chickens, however small electrical goods, to soothe their rages. (Dear God – please restore supply!) I still suspect that Apple employees left them there and retrieved them when the cameras went house. To donate a £400 iPad to a billionaire’s makeshift shrine is a very un-Apple gesture, since it is unprofitable. Others left apple cores, which is merely littering with a mad sense of purpose.How to unpick this? Grief as a global phenomenon is not fresh. It is essentially media-led (it fills and sells papers) and it always leaves a bitter taste, since for every weirder you reckon you mourn, there is a friend you forget to remember. These relationships are fake and imagined and always made with the rich and powerful, which makes me wonder if it is the lifestyle, not the lifetime, we praise when we turn to Jobs. It is ordinary bowing before ability, just rather odder since the Apple products have a bright marketing sheen of democracy – we are all equal before the earth wide web – which is ridiculous, considering how hardly any can afford them and how aggressively the corporation protects its software.However I have not seen it for a CEO before. Could it be that the eulogies for Jobs are a fresh expression of pure materialism? It is not enough to like your products; when the human beings who made them die, you are required to enter a kind of spiritual decline. What does it mean to weep for the inventor of the iPhone? For me it is Apple’s greatest marketing triumph and the very opposite of a spiritual familiarity.This is simple for Apple to manage, as newspapers inexorably ease from editorial to advertorial. There are immediately, quite often, double sheet spreads about yogurt, and worse things than yogurt. The cause is profit. Recycling press releases is cheap, since PRs are unlikely to libel their own clients. Just at the end week I received an invitation, via email, to plug a product which would heat my swimming pool, if I had one, which I do not. A fresh swimming pool heating system is not in itself news, however a news hook is attached, making a broader mark in hope of making it into the paper – UK entrepreneur confirms luxury market is buoyant despite global recession. I am invited to lunch with supermarket PRs, to dine in restaurants for autonomous of charge and sometimes to try outside beauty serums, or, as I call them, slimes. These are products in search of a sheet, and they are not news.No, this the churnalism so wonderfully detailed in the Twitter journalist Nick Davies’s obituary of the newspaper industry, Flat Earth News. It was rampant in the lifetime of Jobs, and at his death it achieved a kind of apogee. At the end month the Fresh York Times ran an editorial entitled You Like Your iPhone. Literally. It argued that human beings respond similarly to images of the Apple logo and images of the Pope; iPhone users, the author stated, after performing tests on babies, literally loved their iPhones. I was shown this editorial by a PR. Much he was amazed that a corporation should get such coverage or, to give it its proper term, idiotic drooling. Again, this is odd, since the technology Jobs made is destroying newspapers. It makes me wonder if my trade has developed, en masse, Apple-themed Stockholm Syndrome. We like our murderer.The truth? In many ways Apple is just another very profitable corporation, which in July announced that its revenues were $28.57bn, up 90% year-on-year, with profits of $7.31bn, up 124% year-on-year. It is visionary in its products and marketing techniques, however conventional in its working practices and goals. It is, like most earth-munching corporations, a feudal hierarchy. There is nothing visionary in transferring the manufacture of your products from the US to China, and subcontracting the employment to other companies, thereby circumventing labour laws, as Apple did 10 years ago. The working conditions of those who manufacture the products are appalling and ill paid. Not much the glorious design of whichever number iPhone we are on immediately could keep the “cluster” of suicides at the Apple supplier Foxconn’s main manufacturing plant in Longhua outside of the news at the end year. Overtime in these factory cities is often forced, not voluntary, and with every article puffing the i-Must-Embrace-the-Prospect-Or-Die, there will be more forced overtime as the factories race to meet demand the newspapers constitute. All the horrors are there, if you gaze for them. According to China Labour Watch, Apple pays just £3.99 for the production of your £600 iPhone, and it is the workers who pay for their – and our – greed, so we can tweet and be moving dots on a map. As Mike Daisey said, also in the Fresh York Times, Jobs could have done something about this. He could have really changed the earth. He chose not to.Steve JobsAppleiPodiPadTanya Goldguardian.co.uk © 2011 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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