6 October 2011Steve Jobs “emblem of transcendence”
In 2008, Esquire magazine published a definitive portrait of the spiritual aspect of the life of Steve Jobs. It explored the idea of Steve Jobs as an “emblem of transcendence”, a man in the process of transcending his mortality via the machines that he was creating…
Jobs has always been open in his desire for immortality; at the same time, he has always staked his immortality on the immortality of his machines. And machines always die. No matter how long they last, death always outlasts them. It takes the long view, and in the long view Apple is, in fact, Sony; in the landfill, the iPod is the Walkman. And so, although Jobs has changed three industries forever — personal computing with the Apple II, music with the iPod and iTunes, and movies with Pixar — and is on the verge of changing a fourth with the iPhone, his legacy is so large that it’s uncertain, his success so comprehensive that it precludes successors. He is the ghost in the Apple machine, and “without him,” says the engineer, “Apple goes on in some form but it’s a different company.” There is not another corporate executive in America or possibly in the world who has implanted the idea of himself so deeply in both his company’s and his country’s culture; not another corporate executive who may be said to exist as an idea at all. But the captivating thing about the idea of Steve Jobs is not its existence, or the difficulty one faces in defining it; the captivating thing is that it is not transmissible in human terms.
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