Thursday, October 06, 2011
Blech
Not since the death of Tim Russert have I witnessed so dumb and demoralizing a spectacle of disproportionate mourning across the notional left as the one occasioned by the death of celebrity CEO Steve Jobs, yet another American circus barker who marketed himself as an epic-scaled "creative genius" by marketing crap to people who fancied buying that crap marked them as smaller-scaled "creation geniuses" themselves. The thoughts of all people of good will go out of course to the friends and family who mourn the loss of a loved one in their lives, but the ubiquitous genuflections to the blah blah indispensable blah blah accomplishments of this guy are, in my opinion, completely crazy.
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I know, right? Everyone is acting like their favorite puppy died. To me he's a random stranger. 100,000 other people died on the same day, and I think that's tragic -- but I can compartmentalize that away and not be constantly in a state of shock because I didn't know any of those people. The main difference is he was a billionaire and could have afforded cryonics easily. Could have bought and financed his own bigger and better version of cryonics if he wanted.
People keep saying he made their lives better. Maybe by competing with Microsoft he forced them to clean up their act a little (though their quality is still abysmal imho). I don't see why Apple couldn't have contributed more to open source though. They certainly reaped the rewards of open source when they made Macos X from a BSD codebase.
And speak of logoization... Apple has been king of selling product based of stylistic logoizing rather than competing on actual performance.
That people fall for the cryonics scam is incomparably more tragic than the fact that people are mortal. But I agree with you that Apple has been primarily a marketing phenomenon, and as such I don't think it makes any kind of sense to praise what they are up to. The suffusion of public discourse by the norms and forms of marketing and promotion is literally destroying the world.
> . . .so dumb and demoralizing a spectacle of disproportionate
> mourning. . . [for] yet another American circus barker who marketed
> himself as an epic-scaled "creative genius". . .
Yes, I caught a bit of CNN on the way home last night. There
was a revolving caption at the bottom of the screen, one facet
of which was "Steve Jobs dead. . . developer of personal computer,
computer mouse".
I wonder what Douglas Engelbart would say about that. ;->
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
(Yes, yes, the Mac was the first consumer-priced machine with
a mouse and the kind of bit-mapped display to make it useful;
Xerox already had 'em but they were extremely expensive,
and Windows came later.)
> . . .by marketing crap to people who fancied buying that crap
> marked them as smaller-scaled "creation geniuses" themselves.
I've never understood this myself, but Apple makes it work --
the company makes its customers feel superior while at the
same time giving them the shaft. Despite Apple's
early ads for computers "for the rest of us", they've
gotten fat making gadgets for the very well-heeled, and
maybe **those** customers are getting just what they deserve. ;->
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/04/why_not_buy_an_iphone_5/
(I don't have a cell phone at all, or a for that matter a
solid-state portable music player, let alone a "fondleslab",
as The Register calls pad computers, so I'm probably not
in a position to judge. But a non-user-replaceable battery,
just so you'll be guaranteed have to make a choice --
on the manufacturer's schedule -- between throwing it away
and buying the latest one or paying big bucks to have it
factory-repaired, doesn't sound too attractive to me.)
I don't have any of those "must-have" gizmos either. Far from thinking this means we are not in a position to judge I suspect this indicates we have already judged -- and judged wisely.
> > . . .he was a billionaire and could have afforded cryonics easily.
>
> That people fall for the cryonics scam is incomparably more tragic
> than the fact that people are mortal.
It seems that at least in the time following his cancer
diagnosis, Jobs had made some effort to come to terms with
human mortality. No doubt he was what the >Hists would call
a "deathist".
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-stanford-commencement-address_n_997301.html
---------------------
"When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: 'If you
live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly
be right.' It made an impression on me. . .
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool
I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride,
all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall
away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know
to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You
are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. . .
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't
want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we
all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be,
because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.
It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make
way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not
too long from now, you will gradually become the old and
be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's
life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the
results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of
others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most
important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary."
I find cryonics to be neither a scam nor tragic. One of us is wrong.
Is that what you "find," indeed? You are going to die, Luke. Everybody dies, and so will you. You are not going to be uploaded into Holodek Heaven, you are not going to be migrated into a shiny angelic robot body, you are not going to be gifted with an immortality pill, you are not going to wake up from the dead by Robot God Sooper Dad after being mummified, frozen, vitrified, or otherwise hamburgerized. It's not that "one of us" is wrong, it's that everybody is right when they face the fact of their mortality, and you few futurological fanboys who do not are too flabbergastingly wrong to respect and too tragically in denial to be fully alive even before you die. This post isn't about fanboy Robot Cultists but about fanboy celebrity CEO cultists -- and though no doubt there is a non-negligible overlap in those sub(cult)ures indulging more nonsense about cryonics seems to me a distraction, so do please keep to the point or, you know, get lost.
Macs are a must for scientists, who have neither time nor stamina to endlessly reboot Windows or to have half of their stuff disappear each time they install a new application or extension.
Also, paying attention to efficiency and aesthetics is nothing to sneeze at. Neither is having a counterweight to the cynically sloppy systems of the Microsoft monolith, although I agree that Apple is not a hero by a long shot.
> Macs are a must for scientists, who have neither time nor stamina
> to endlessly reboot Windows or to have half of their stuff disappear
> each time they install a new application or extension.
I saw this on your blog post from the other day ("Kalos Kagathos"),
and was tempted to reply there, but since I didn't think it appropriate
to ignite the billion-and-first PC vs. Mac flame war, I refrained. ;->
If by "endlessly reboot Windows" you're referring to reliability
problems, then I have to reply that since the NT kernel reached
the consumer market with Windows XP (and one might indeed ask why the
heck it took so long), this really hasn't been a problem with
Windows **per se**. (If, on the other hand, you mean that
a reboot is all-too-likely to be required when you install new
software on Windows, then I cede you the argument).
Apple and Microsoft have two quite different aims (not that
Microsoft necessarily wanted things to be that way -- it's
just that they inherited the PC universe after IBM completely
lost control of it). Microsoft has to accommodate the fact
that their OS is used on a vast array of hardware (though
all using the Intel CPU) -- some cobbled together by OEMs,
and some (not many, granted, but I have a couple ;-> ) cobbled
together by individual users. Some of us value the 1) lower
price thus achieved and 2) the fact that we can buy a new
video card or sound card or what-have-you, plug it in, and
install a third-party driver into the Windows kernel. I'll
take that flexibility, even at the risk of getting a "blue screen"
not necessarily because of Windows (especially in these
days of the NT kernel), but possibly because of
one of those third-party drivers. In any case, I've certainly
never had "half my stuff disappear" on installing a new
application, with **any** version of Windows, even
the less-than-solid Win95-Win98-Win98SE-WinME lineage.
You can make an argument that Apple achieves higher
"quality" -- reliability, at least, and perhaps aesthetic
appeal for those to whom it matters -- by the tight control
and vertical integration (hardware + software) of
their products. They can, of course, also get away
thereby with charging more money. But they've shot themselves
in the foot this way, too -- the original Mac might well
have caught on in the business world despite being more
expensive and a couple of years later than the IBM PC, but no --
you couldn't add a hard disk drive to the original Mac
without voiding the warranty (the GCC Hyperdrive required
direct attachment to the 68000 chip via a "Killy clip" --
remember those?).
It's the tight-fisted control, the proprietariness, the "walled
garden" (and how different is that from the Apple II days? --
my God!) of the contemporary Apple (the "contemporary" Jobs)
that puts me off, as much as the silly product-worship of
some of the customers.
But hey, you can't argue with $$$$, can you? ;->
Gee, is "Dianamania" headed for the OED? ;->
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/07/steve_jobs_dianamania/
Pardon my digression into the topic, but I can't help but doubt anyone who thinks it no great tragedy has "faced" the matter of everyone's mortality. Their own, perhaps, but that is bound to be rather trivial by comparison as implied by the six-billion-to-one ratio. Personally I'd gladly take a bullet for a mere hundred thousand. What interests me about cryonics is not so much the opportunity for personal life extension (though I wouldn't refuse it), it is the vast untapped potential for human life extension in general.
Back on the matter of Jobs' character, I have heard rumor that he pulled some strings to get a new liver shortly before he died. I think that reveals a certain hypocrisy behind his pro-death statements, though I must say it makes me almost glad that he didn't endorse transhumanism. Someone else could probably have used that liver.
I have a love-hate attitude towards marketing, rhetoric, salesmanship, and pretty much anything else that can predispose humans to behave one way as opposed to another without engaging their rational faculties. It's fascinating to study from a distance, but seems the most corrupting sort of power imaginable.
But! People love being marketed to! They may not care so much for the consequences, but who really wants their rational faculties engaged in every decision?
Coming to terms with mortality doesn't make one "pro-death," it makes one sane. Your own death denialism exposes you as completely ridiculous, even without your indulgence in daydreams about magic bullets saving lives, just like the rest of the techno-immortalizing nonsense you robot cultists endlessly handwave about. Your flippancy on the topic of the contemporary suffusion of public discourse by the deceptive, fraudulent, hyperbolic norms and forms of marketing and promotion is just another sign of your superficiality, I fear. I have no patience for you anymore, you have quite a lot to learn. Go learn it, and if you expect to be instructed by me you'll have to pay for the privilege like the rest of my students do. By the way, rhetoric -- a subject I teach at the University level -- is not the same thing as "marketing." You needn't reply to this, the distraction is over.
Over at artinfo.com, Ben Davis has written the best critique I've read so far:
"Think Different: Why Steve Jobs Doesn't Deserve Your Tears"
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38814/think-different-why-steve-jobs-doesnt-deserve-your-tears/
So I went to dinner tonight with some friends in Manhattan,
and I succumbed to temptation on the way home and bought the
latest issue of Psych Today in the subway station.
There's a book notice on p.22 for _Brandwashed_, by
Martin Lindstrom
( http://www.amazon.com/Brandwashed-Tricks-Companies-Manipulate-Persuade/dp/0385531737/ )
that contains the following:
"Lindstrom. . . paint[s] a detailed picture of how marketers
know us better than we know ourselves. And it's not just our
wallets that have slipped under their control: one fMRI
study found [that] when Apple users view the company logo, their
brain activity mimics that of Christians seeing religious
symbols."
Holy crucifix, Batman!
Well, Jim, it looks like you're essentially saying "I agree with you but don't want to say so."
Macs run plenty of third-party apps. As for the money, it's the same travesty that makes McDonald's greasurgers cheap, but fresh local vegetables expensive: market share is everything, quality is nothing. Or, to put it another way, you get what you pay for.
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