This morning I read a post criticizing the Occupy Wall Street movement, which said,"No Hippie ever made a difference."
But one hippie actually changed the whole world. In fact that hippie produced the digital generation, which is now rising up all over the country. Steve Jobs has died of pancreatic cancer. His death has sparked worldwide mourning and celebrations the likes that haven't been seen since John Lennon was assassinated.
If you are reading this, Steve Jobs changed your life. Buried in his acc0mplishments is his work at NEXT, the educational computer project funded by Ross Perot. It was his work there that inspired CERN to create the world wide web with internet addresses. Many of us are grateful that Jobs had the foresight, creativity and brilliance to design a personal computer, which spared the likes of me from typing all my writings. The big established computer giants like IBM said there was no market for personal computers and that Americans really didn't need them. But when they got them, the society changed forever.
If you want a wonderful detailed account of Steve Jobs' life, the New York Times published about a five page obituary for him. But some things stood out for me. Steve Jobs attributed his dropping acid as one of the deepest influences on him and ranked the experience as one of the most wonderful in his own life. This may account for his encompassing vision of what we has doing. The other thing that always got to me about Jobs was his constant reference to one of the greatest products of the 60s counter-culture Steward Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, which he quoted in a speech when he recently was awarded a doctorate degree. Jobs grew up in the countercultural milieu of San Francisco Bay and after dropping out of Reed College first worked in his father's garage and developed the first home computer with his high school friend Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Jobs. And throw in a love affair with Joan Baez and you have the hippie roots of one of America's greatest inventors and entrepeneurs.
Life before Steve Jobs consisted of creating thousands of Fortran cards by hand and typing long papers in college. The explosion of social and cultural diversity through the internet consisted in those days of a collection of Nonesuch records with the music of other cultures. The psychedelic age was really not so colorful and exciting. Now is the time when a true encompassing vision can take root because of the technological innovations pushed by Steve Jobs. Marshall McCluhan's global culture is actually being created by the social networking technologies. This was envisioned but during those times the means for achieving it had not been realized.
As with most situations with a charisma leader, Apple made the move to institutionalize its business and brought in the former CEO of Pepsi. He fired Jobs and Jobs explained to the core Apple staff that he didn't have "the trousers" for the job, standing before them with his trademark jeans and barefoot.
Younger people on the morning talkshows linked Jobs to the IPad, the IPhone, ITunes but none mentioned that beige MacIntosh that liberated me and millions others. The original Mac users were and are fanatics about the elegance of the word processing software and the graphics package. After all these years, I still have seen better. Does anyone still remember the dot-matrix printers, which almost sounded like a typewriter?
As evidence of how liberating Macs were, the first magazine printed on a Mac in the mid-1980s was a journal of Lesbian Erotica. The editor reminisced about this last night and remembered the limited typefaces available on the publishing software at that time.
Like Thomas Alva Edison, Jobs also dabbled in films. After leaving Apple the first time, he invested money with George Lucas to develop Pixar and brought you such films like Toy Story.
Steve Jobs is being hailed today as a great innovator, a genius at marketing and the consummate capitalist. He was all that but his contribution to the world is that he launched a global revolution and the generation he most influenced is now beginning to exert itself. Whether they can push us forward still remains to be seen. But Jobs changed our reality and the world's through his genius.
So one person can really make a difference--even a hippie.
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Thank you for illuminating the proper characterization of Steve Jobs as a hippie. At a time when that word has acquired so much negativity (often used as an insult) from people too old or too young to understand the importance of the hippie movement in shaping our world, it is important to take every opportunity to correct the false view that "No Hippie ever made a difference." Jobs is far from alone, though he may be the most famous and successful example.
ReplyDeleteSee http://www.thank-a-hippie.com/people/hippie-heros/young-steve-jobs-lsd-dropped-acid-jobs-became-bhuddist/