Rotten to the Core:

Steve Jobs and the 'Me' Generation

By Richard Wolin November 29, 2015

Brian Taylor for The Chronicle Review

For most of my adult life, I have been haunted by Steve
Jobs.
It began in 1972, the year that he matriculated at Reed
College. I was a junior. It was a challenging and confusing
time. Reed had what was considered at the time a
notoriously high attrition rate: Only 60 percent of freshmen
graduated within four years. Drugs were plentiful. Social
life seemed always on the verge of devolving into a
perpetual Dionysian whorl. In one legendary episode, Ken
Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had descended upon Reed
and distributed vats of electric Kool-Aid acid on the
colleges front lawn.

I didnt know Jobs well. But Reed is a small place, so our

paths crossed on several occasions. He dropped out after
one semester, although he continued to eke out a bohemian
existence in Portland, while continuing to audit classes at
Reed for another 18 months.
I never liked Jobs. I didnt much wonder why back then,
but now the reasons seem obvious. His class seemed to be
in a different mold from the previous two classes. The
generational story is well known: The war in Vietnam was
winding down, social activism was waning, and American
youth were starting to turn inward.
The reasons for disillusionment were many. The civil-rights
movement never regained its momentum after Martin
Luther King Jr.s assassination in April 1968. The
following year saw the beginnings of a group of would-be
terrorists, the Weather Underground, that would hijack the
antiwar movement. Finally, the Arcadian aspirations of
Woodstock were snuffed out at the disastrous Altamont
Speedway Festival, where the Rolling Stones had illadvisedly hired the Hells Angels as their security detail.
(What were they thinking?)
It was the beginning of a trend that the historian
Christopher Lasch memorably described as the "culture of
narcissism."
This transformation hit home for me in the fall of 1972,
when the student-sponsored public-affairs committee, of
which I was a member, was told that Rennie Davis, a
former member of Students for a Democratic Society and a
defendant in the notorious Chicago Seven trial, would be
passing through Portland. We leaped at the opportunity to
invite him. But we were in for a rude disappointment.
Davis had recently become a disciple of the guru Maharaj
Ji. All he wanted to discuss were the ecstasies of Eastern
spirituality, which my fellow committee members and I
viewed as a form of escapism. For Davis, his experiences
as a political activist were a closed chapter.

In retrospect, I was put off by Jobs for the same reason that
Rennie Davis was such a letdown. Jobs had no interest in
social justice. Public-spiritedness was not part of his
makeup. Even then, for Jobs it was all about the Self.
Jobs had become captivated by the American guru Baba
Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert, a Jewish kid from
Newton, Mass., who had written the New Age classic Be
Here Now. (In 1963, as a junior professor at Harvard,
Alpert wrote The Psychedelic Experience with Timothy
Leary. Shortly thereafter, Harvard dismissed Alpert for
allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate.)
Jobs had no interest in social justice. Public-spiritedness
was not part of his makeup. Even then, for Jobs it was all
about the Self.
In my dealings with Jobs back then, I sensed something
unsavory. Hinduism and its complements, such as Zen
Buddhism, were fundamentally about loss of the self and
how to accept that loss. They focused on the way that
egotism and self-love prevent the attainment of a greater
sense of cosmic harmony.
But as anyone who knew Jobs could tell you, with him
"loss of the self" was never a legitimate option. Instead,
Jobss attraction to Eastern spirituality seemed to be
motivated less by a search for cosmic oneness than a desire
for self-aggrandizement that is, a more powerful self.
Although I was only dimly aware of it at the time, what I
was witnessing in my fleeting encounters with Jobs was the
transformation of the counterculture into the "me"
generation.
Those ruminations came into focus recently upon viewing
Alex Gibneys outstanding documentary Steve Jobs: The
Man in the Machine. Although Gibneys film is not
unsympathetic to Jobs, it demonstrates that, in the timehonored American entrepreneurial mold, he was one of the
greatest con men ever to walk the planet. To suggest that
Jobs makes Bernie Madoff look like the corner grocer is

only slightly hyperbolic.

To appreciate this fact, recall the public image that Apple,
under Jobss tutelage, so fastidiously cultivated. Apple vs.
IBM was presented as an updated version of the biblical
tale of David vs. Goliath: the Counterculture against the
Establishment. In persuading us to root for Apple, Jobs
managed to convince us that we were supporting the
underdog against the depredations of corporate America.
The first Macintosh was introduced in the celebrated 1984
Super Bowl commercial that sought to convince us that we
were all prisoners of Big Brother, and that personal
computing, in the form of the Macintosh, would set us free.
During the late 1990s, there was Apples memorable
"Think Different" ad campaign, featuring images of
(among others) Einstein, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.,
and John Lennon. All had been 1960s icons hence, their
generational appeal as well as individuals of integrity.
Adding to the pathos, three of them had been martyred by
assassins bullets.
But what did all of this have to do with personal
computing? And was Jobs insinuating that he himself
belonged to the same genius guild?
It's no secret that today many of us spend more time with
what we euphemistically call our 'devices' than with our
loved ones.
In retrospect, it was all a snow job. Jobss "genius" lay in
getting us to think about one of the most impersonal
contrivances of 20th-century engineering as a fraternal
spirit, an object that was practically ensouled. (Think of the
opening scene of Danny Boyles Steve Jobs biopic, in
which Jobs, surrounded by a chorus of naysayers at the
1984 Macintosh launch, adamantly insists that the
computer must greet its users by saying "Hello.")
Its no secret that today many of us spend more time with
what we euphemistically call our "devices" than with our

loved ones. Jobss "genius" lay in his ability to reconfigure

the utopian aspirations of the Aquarian Age in the guise of
sleek and desirable articles of mass consumption. So
successful was Jobs in this undertaking that he was able to
deceive us into thinking that we werent even consuming:
that by purchasing Apple products, we were realizing our
innermost desires; that a micro-engineered circuit board
encased in plastic was an extension of the Self.
Ultimately, the joke was on us, the benighted consumers.
At the time of Jobss death in 2011, Apple Inc. was the
second-highest-valued company in the world, worth an
estimated $350 billion. Despite the efforts of intimates like
Bill Gates to persuade Jobs to divert part of his immense
fortune to humanitarian ends, nothing of the sort occurred.
Instead, in defiance of the adage "You cant take it with
you," Jobs went to his grave with an estimated personal
worth of $8.3 billion. Apple itself was under federal
investigation for violating antitrust laws by colluding with
other Silicon Valley powerhouses in hiring practices.
Apples Foxconn manufacturing facility in Shenzhen,
China, was exposed for its sweatshop-labor practices,
which were thought to have motivated a spate of employee
suicides.
Perhaps this is the way that David vs. Goliath stories end in
the age of neoliberalism.
Steve Jobs as an icon of the American entrepreneurial
spirit? Think again.
Richard Wolin is a professor of history, political science,
and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York. He is the author, most
recently, of The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals,
the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s
(Princeton University Press, 2012).