So, What’s New?

By David Simmons

The same week that Steve Jobs died, I watched for the first time Inside Job, the Oscar-winning documentary on the systemic corruption that led to the 2008 meltdown. Jobs’ story and that of the organized criminals who control most of the world’s economy seem to stand in stark contrast, yet both are stories of innovation.

The word “innovation”, derived from the Latin verb novare, “to make new”, has a positive connotation. Yet the financial sector has helped perpetuate the global cycle of violence, misery and injustice through highly innovative means such as complex derivatives, bundling of bad loans into so-called assets that later turn toxic, and “creative bookkeeping” – all assisted by politicians too crooked or too stupid to protect the common man and woman from the resulting thievery and concentration of wealth among a tiny minority.

And then there’s Jobs, whose technological marvels redirected the evolution of computing, the driver or facilitator of almost everything modern man does. And yet he too – or at least his Apple Inc – was an integral part of the inside job.

Let’s first debunk the theory embraced by the anti-Apple crusaders that Jobs was not an innovator, since his most successful products were not true inventions but merely cannily marketed versions of existing tools. The same charge could be made against every so-called inventor since the wheel, the spear, the stone hammer, the first fire-maker and the first story-teller (who gave birth to “intellectual property”).

“Invention” is another Latin word derived from a phrase with the sense “bring into being”; throughout history, innovations have been brought about by building on the work of forebears, who built on the work of their forebears.

In fact, such now-commonplace tools as graphical interfaces and computer mice, and the very concept of the personal computer, were either invented or popularized by Apple. The iPod may indeed be “only” a better Walkman, but the operative word is “better”, as the Mercedes S-Class is better than Karl Benz’s 1885 Motorwagen of which it is a direct descendant.

Still, there is a very dark side to the Apple story. The saga of Foxconn and other exploitative enterprises in Asia is well known. Apple’s wealth, now greater than the economies of some entire countries, is built on the backs of what amounts to slave labour, at least by the – admittedly fast-deteriorating – standards of the developed nations that benefit from it. The Jobs cult excuses him of responsibility for this, saying he was at the top of a huge organization, too far away from the sweat and tears of Shenzhen to do anything about it, if he even knew. Such an excuse offered by Signor Francesco Schettino of the late Costa Concordia will likely not take him into calm seas.

But what about the tear stains on the otherwise gleaming aluminum case of the iMac on which I write these words, or the other two Apple devices in my home? For unlike the Jon Corzines and Jamie Dimons and Bernie Madoffs of the financial “industry” (did Al Capone ever call himself an “industrialist”? Probably), Jobs did not simply steal his vast wealth from old ladies’ pension plans; we “consumers” willingly gave it to him.

There is no point fretting about this. Humans are animals, and though we like to think we have evolved far from the jungle, we still prey on those less fortunate than us, and are preyed on by those above us. We will do anything to prolong the survival and enhance the quality of life of ourselves and our families; the migrant workers diving to their deaths off the roof of Foxconn are collateral damage in this process.

So we are trapped in a system of situational ethics, or malleable morality. The ruling elite no longer even pretends to subscribe to the kind of moral code most ordinary working people do, and this trickles down through society, robbing younger generations of their hope for future progress, or even of enjoying the perks their parents did, in a more enlightened and egalitarian age.

Fewer and fewer seem to bother swimming against this tide. I see this every day in my workplace; the newspaper industry, at least in my experience, used to be far more joyful because everyone from the senior editors to the copy runners took pride in their part of the “daily miracle” of publishing the paper. Where I work now, the few of us who still care about quality journalism are frustrated by the majority who don’t.

But then, like most of my colleagues, I’m not an innovator. I’m a consumer of innovations, and their victim – part of the 99%.

Given the legacy of modern innovators, maybe that’s just as well. For as a wise king wrote three or four millennia ago, “There is nothing new under the sun.”