The Dark Furie

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How easily we forget the past. This video from April this year is a look at the failings Apple has made in the corporate world, from the suicides of workers under outrageous conditions to Steve Jobs shutting down the philanthropy section of the business in 1997 (part of his much lauded but rarely detailed plan to save the company) and keeping it so tightly shut that iTunes bans applications that can make direct donations to charities.

So many of the retrospectives I've read over the past few days have talked only about what this man brought to the world, ignoring some of the dubious steps he took to do so. The man was far from a saint yet, before his corpse had even cooled, the world decided to deify him once they found out he was dead. In a rather extreme but no less valid example, it's like congratulating Hitler on the advances to genetic research and medicine that were a result of the freedom he gave his doctors in the concentration camps. Perhaps a more recent example would be talking about the way Bin Laden highlighted the need for extra airport security. These are extremes of course, but show how ridiculous it is for us to focus only on the good things in a person's life when they die as a way of showing respect for them. Surely marking their accomplishments while noticing their failings is the more honest tribute?

Even more damning is that many of the accomplishments being lauded on him by these articles aren't even true. I'm not talking about the advances that have been attributed to him but that must have come from other staff at Apple, by the way, but about the things people are now claiming he invented that are simply not true. The first testimonial I read declared that the iPhone was the first phone capable of browsing the web or sending e-mail, another has claimed that the iPod was the first ever touchscreen device in the world, and a third talked about additions coming to iOS this year that have been copied from other platforms but got it mixed up so that it seemed the other platforms were copying iOS. None of these things are accomplishments of this man and their inclusion cheapens what he actually did do in his life, just as much as hiding the cost of the advances he made cheapens them, both showing how little time the media has to actually bother researching the stories they put forward about him. Deifying him in this way is not honouring his memory, but allowing yourself to be fooled into forgetting the truth.

And the truth is that this was just a man with good qualities and flaws, a man who left work in order to finally be able to spend time with his family and who had a tragically short time to spend with them.