Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology — where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!
- 1984 (advertisement)
"He lives! He lives! He lives!", those hashtags accompanying the virtual coffin of Steve Jobs seemed to repeat, like a white lie. You could have memorial candles left outside Apple stores, but #iSAD, #Thankyousteve and whatever else was trending in those hours of grief on Twitter were the true keywords following the dead, joining the endless wake where the body of the Martyr was carried from hand to hand, reduced in millions of pixels, re-tweeted from fingertip to fingertip. And as the corpse of the mahatma – “great soul” – was driven through the immaterial crowd, everybody tried to stretch a finger and make contact with him. Everyone had something to say: “You’ll be missed”, typed a 14-yr-old Chinese boy. “Gracias”, typed a Mexican girl studying in Chicago. “Merci”, typed a DJ from Senegal.
Now please forgive me, digital comrades, but the sanctification of a billionaire remains the sanctification of a billionaire. Is it us who owe something to the merchants of brilliant intuitions, or are these merchants the ones who have to thank the populace for having trusted and made them a fortune? And what when Mr Zuckerberg will be gone? How many hundreds of millions of people will praise him for having made them find primary school classmates, but also for having made them spend hours like the lobotomized, in a capitalist-friendly slacktivism, forgetting the contact with solid-earth, with sweat, with physical commitment?
In 2003, when the industrialist and head of FIAT Gianni Agnelli had passed away, I watched thousands of his old workers mourning the death of their principal exploiter, waiting in the queue inside the mortuary chamber set up by the Agnelli family. Even the most humble of these workers was praising the industrialist’s fashion sense. That was probably the most symbolic of the disturbing examples of cultural patronization of the oppressed. Still, it was even more shocking to sit next to the young and the old camped a stone's throw from Wall Street, hearing those hashtags repeated once again, as a mantra: “Jobs was great, man!” or “Without him the IT world would be ruled by the monolopolist Gates”. A few feet away, people were laying flowers, half-eaten apples and even iPads displaying a candle app outside the Apple glass cube on Fifth Avenue. Not surprisingly, that form of worship was left respectfully untouched. You could have atheist protestors laughing about abrahimic faiths, but here they were painting ideological altarpieces to jeans-and-sneakers deities. Geek-retablos… And in this new form of religious devotion I saw completely destroyed the entire process of consumer-purchase-transaction, substituted with an abstract concept of gratitude towards the Christ-inventor – for his gifts so amazingly conceived and distributed.
He said: “Our time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.” [from the now biblical Stanford University speech]
True to himself, he choose not to reveal his illness to protect Apple’s stock market value. Unauthorized biographers wrote that he was a memorable tyrant, a curmudgeon that was making huge profits while giving little back to society, lacking any interest for the working conditions in his factories – such as the case of Foxxcon, in mainland China, a true forced-labour camp according to some reports. But I am not discussing here the implications of Apple’s corporation policy and public image – something that Richard Stallman called a “jail made cool”. Nor the coherency of a Pirate of Silicon Valley. What I would like to point out now is, instead of the total absence of detachment, reflection and composure of the self-defined “thinking multitudes” towards the figure of the Martyr-entrepreneur. Here is the triumph of the Bono-Gates-Geldolf philanthropy model, the placebo for direct action, the Left-made-cool. As teased out by an essay recently published by NYU Press, Commodity Activism, the most common way we participate in social activism is actually by buying something. And the branded commodity represented by Jobs was an immaculate linkage between material cultures and political subjectivities.
The religious-like devotion for Apple products, Jobs being a formidable pusher – a true “connection” between us and our addictions – this all gives an aura of mythology to the story of the tycoon – a fascinating update of the character so well depicted, one century ago, by Theodores Dreiser in his Trilogy of Desire. And this story, this devotional narrative, is now totally assimilated by those who should be more vaccinated from it. “Buy me”, was pleading Apple in its memorable Superbowl commercial, “and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984”. And we all remember the disbelief of people hypnotized by Big Brother, when the liberal athlete came running and hurled a hammer toward the screen where the dictator was speaking, destroying it in a flurry of light and smoke. Unfortunately, the Orwellian nightmare was realized a couple of decades later, when the inmates of turbo-capitalism hailed one of its principal architects with "Goodbye, Genius!".
Sic transit gloria mundi.
