Koby’s Kaos

A New Yorker cartoon, years back, showed a hometown crowd celebrating a worker for his artistry in assembling a small part of a medieval cathedral. I giggled big time but no one in my family nor most of my friends understood. They tend to see great buildings and monuments as analogs for the designer, the Pharaoh of the moment, or maybe the money bags behind it.

I see the little guys, chiseling sandstone, lying on their backs molding plaster curves, or passing rivets between stories of girders—let along the guys who figured out how to harness steam to shovels or water lines to levels.

I had to admire Steve Jobs for his style, passion and come from nowhere (and come from behind) pluck, but I’m also enthralled by the designers of Smalltalk and the sound tech puzzling out a standing bass wave in a church.

One of the first things I saw, even as a student was that geeks got no respect. This was as true in my working class high school as anywhere else. I was told that there was a cheer at Caltech, given when the other team scored that went “That’s all right. That’s okay; you’re going to work for us someday!” You have to admire when bunches of really smart people elect to stay naïve as long as they can.

I was pretty arty by the time I first worked at Tektronix, having substantial failures as a playwright and director to point to. But the job brought me right back to geek world and their rather specialized problems. I recognized geniuses around me, but ones whom had not enjoyed the social cache I’d gotten as a campus writer and poet after I’d left Physics. Some introspective types had trouble being understood by their bench mates.

So as a training designer I served as an explainer and translator, not only to my direct customer students, but to other engineers. This was in the days after tech companies had quickly grown too big for that “small startup pulling together” information flow and had not yet started team work training for people whom had never been chosen to be on a team (except last).

Like poets, artists and physicists, good engineers may in their passion, totally miss social clues. But unlike their intellectual brethren, they have lousy person PR. Yes, there are many exceptions, but there are still more who aren’t.

We need more engineers. We need more technicians. (For that matter, we need more skilled plumbers, carpenters, electricians, arborists, and welders—but that’s a related rant.) We’re not going to get them into the math and science classes when we also treat the students as pariahs.

What we need are trade skill classes in the arts academies, and arts training in the tech schools. We need to stop judging people by their jobs or defining ourselves by our paycheck. We need hopeful cyberpunk novels (ooops, that’s another related rant). Have you hugged a hardware engineer today?

Come on people, if we try, we can change this!

Right. Sure. I’m booking a seat on the next Flying Pig too.

Five hundred years from now when someone, or some thing, sums up our civilization, the teacher may simply gloss over ordinary heroes, and step directly from Columbus to his logical successor, Steve Jobs. They are both personalities that made our future inevitable—we just don’t yet know what Steve’s future will become. Columbus was a megalomaniac, mystic and genius. Steve Jobs was, well, Steve Jobs. Columbus was known for sailing by “dead reckoning,” by reading sea, sky, and birds rather than relying on stars, compasses and maps. He tried for big things and sometimes succeeded. Opening up the New World was just one of his more successful failures.

For our times, Steve Jobs has launched a new New World. He had passion, creativity, a love of innovation, and an ability to make sense out of new possibility. When he was wrong, it may only have been that the technology fell short. But he learned from his mistakes, and when he was right, he became far more the CEO of a great technology company. He became a paradigm-crunching social movement.

Apple was far more than a logical extension of developing hardware—that was the role of IBM and is now continued by Intel and Microsoft. Over the last few decades, Apple discovered magic. Very personally led by Steve Jobs as its hands on visionary CEO, Apple created expensive, discretionary gadgets that somehow became the most necessary props to a knowledge charged society. It created a demand that technology could fulfill.

Perhaps radio, TV, and pop 45’s hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall, but social media was the engine of the lighting-quick Arab Spring. That social media weapon would not have evolved without iPhantasies and its clones. Facebook would still be a toy for the elites and I have no idea what the grass roots would be up to, other than a slow motion dunking of tea bags.

Okay, young people would still know how to spell, read, and do math in their heads, but then Columbus’ New World had collateral damage as well. Often brutal.

Steve Jobs’ vision was only mildly shown in the development of the Mac. Had his career ended then he would now be seen as a marketing genius who tended to overstep his capabilities. It was only after his return to Apple that a technological engine existed to support his quest for excellence, ease of use, and style. His products had a purpose. And in fulfilling that purpose they created a consumer vacuum that could only be filled by his next product.

Everything we do now, we seem to do through our always-new personal technology. Apps supervise business, hobbies, dreams and day-to-day necessities. Every industry has been touched. Every revolution inspired. In addition, every reaction strengthened. As a society we may not know much, but what little we suspect we shout from the rooftops with our thumbs and our finger gestures.

US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have already pronounced that Steve Jobs had changed the world. Tributes have been pouring in from friends, rivals, politicians, and everyone with a handheld. When Steve resigned as CEO in August, he wrote that he believed that “Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it.” The pack does live on, but the Alpha is gone.

We are still going somewhere, but yesterday’s maps, stars, and compasses will not be enough. Someone still needs to read the skies, the technology and the people, and point a course by “live” reckoning. I just don’t know when we’ll next find a practical leader out in front.