SocraticGadfly: GOD IS DEAD. No, worse. STEVE JOBS RESIGNS!

August 24, 2011

GOD IS DEAD. No, worse. STEVE JOBS RESIGNS!

Doorknob, am I snarky today. Oh, I love the letter addressed to "the Apple community." If Walmart tried something like that, stereotypical white, Volvo-driving, latte-sipping, Meyer-lemon-squeezing librulz would shit bricks.

First, Apple's not liberal.
(C)ool does not equal liberal. If there's a single quality that Apple exhibits above all others, it's the way the company has managed to mint gold out of Steve Jobs' totalitarian control-freakery. Creative, yes. Liberal, not quite.
Got that? Cool does not equal liberal. That's true whether your cool is buying an iPhone that says, whenever it sends an email, "sent from my iPhone," or you drive a Volvo just because it's made in Sweden (don't forget, when Ikea started making "Swedish" furniture here in the U.S., it suddenly discovered the value of union-busting), or you make homemade lemonade from Meyer lemons (picked by illegal immigrants for a pittance, possibly).

Beyond not being liberal on outsourcing jobs to China, it's got more than half its $80 revenue overseas as it lobbies Congress for a "tax holiday."

And, I don't know if Apple is especially bad this way, but Silicon Valley in general is strongly antiunion.

Second, the claim that Apples are virus-free.

Not true. The iPhone, albeit only in jailbroken version, can get viruses. Mac computers, at least from OSX on, can be hacked as easily as PCs.

On computers, Macs simply don't have the vector of numbers to make it worthwhile to target them with viruses. On cellphones? Macs will become more and more a target. Ditto for iPads. So, stop being so smug.

You've bought a myth. The same type of "branding myth" that Barack Obama sold 32 months ago.

No, Apple isn't the Koch Bros. But, it "brands" itself, ever since Ridley Scott's "1984" commercial, as rebelling against convention. Even if that's true, that, no more than being "cool," is liberal. And, it's not that true.

And, it's actual products? Mac computers have their good points, and are less about "branding" and price than the modern gizmos. But, an iPhone? Overpriced dreck, IMO. As for "liberalness," the more open-source nature of the Android, in smartphones, is more "liberal" than Apple's top-down tight control.

Beyond that, has any CEO who doesn't have the first name Ben or Jerry inspired this much mindless adulation among political liberals? That's not just a sarcastic rhetorical question, it's a real one. Off the top of my head, I can't picture one.

Besides that, as the AP notes in its story on Jobs' resignation, let's not forget he was forced out of Apple at the end of his first stint there because ... sales were slumping. So, he hasn't always been a marketing genius. Or, the American public wasn't quite so much a sucker for "branding" 20 years ago. Or, a bit of both.

Even more seriously, Appleholics' messianic views of Jobs are no laughing matter. Apple, as I show here, is part of the dark side of the Internet, and is one of the "big three," with Google and Apple, in coming online infowars.

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