I just watched Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, a probing documentary of the “bold, brilliant and at times ruthless iconoclast”. Interesting.
Here are the closing lines:
Why did so many strangers weep for Steve Jobs?
It’s too simple to say it was because he gave us products we love, without asking why we love them the way we do. It’s too simple even to conclude that we love them because they connect us to a wider world, and the people in our lives who are far away, because these machines isolate us too.
Perhaps the contradictory nature of our experience with these gadgets mirrors the contradiction in Jobs himself. He was an artist who sought perfection but who could never find peace. He had the focus of a monk, but none of the empathy. He offered us freedom, but only within a closed garden to which he held the key.
To reconcile these contradictions, I think we have to look to the other half of our relationship with Jobs, to ourselves (…) What is the full nature of my transaction with the maker of this magical and intimate machine?