Excerpt from “The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counter
Culture, and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World by Luke Dormehl – review”
A genial account of the rise of Apple fails to probe the
company's cultural significance
[…]
Slavoj Žižek, in Violence – his analysis of the brutality at the heart of
capitalism – identifies "liberal communists" as
"counter-cultural geeks who take over big corporations". He looks at
the role of the hackers – once subversive and anti-establishment – and how they
were co-opted into the capitalist system through a kind of corporate
doublespeak that allowed them to marry their liberal, egalitarian ideals to the
cold machine of the market economy. He doesn't mention Jobs by name, but the
description of the "liberal communist" fits the Apple founder neatly:
"Liberal communists do not want to be just machines for generating
profits. They want their lives to have a deeper meaning. They are against
old-fashioned religion, but for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation."
Jobs, remember, could fit his legs behind his head. The only book he downloaded
on to his iPad? Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.
Žižek identifies these "liberal communists" with
industrial barons of yesteryear such as Andrew Carnegie, who "employed a
private army brutally to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then
distributed large parts of his wealth to educational, artistic and humanitarian
causes". The "liberal communist" is more threatening than the
sharp-suited Goldman Sachs banker precisely because he is shape-shifting,
slippery, using the language and semiotics of the counter-culture while firmly upholding
the establishment, raking in billions with one hand while getting on
stage with Bono (who,
ridiculously, called Jobs "the Elvis of the kind of hardware-software
dialectic") to lament the world's poor.
[…]
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