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Not for Everybody
I hate to say one more thing about Steve Jobs. But last night, after I lost cell phone signal while driving through wildest Marin and could no longer listen to Pandora, I turned on the radio to an archived Fresh Air interview with Jobs from 1996.
And he had all these inspiring things to say about how at Apple, they believed that everybody should be able to use technology, and that what's more, math and science should be for everybody.
But he didn't really mean it, because the people who work in factories in China assembling Apple products don't get to learn about technology or science, because they're paid such low wages that they can't possibly have time to. This is not an accident; without exploiting people this way, Apple wouldn't be able to sell you the products that entertain you so (including the one I'm using to type this post) at such low prices.
Nor do the people who suffer ill health or early death because of environmental degradation caused by Apple's manufacturing processes (they have one of the worst environmental records in the tech industry) get the chance to enjoy the delights of math, science and technology.
So when Steve Jobs said that technology was for everybody, he didn't really mean everybody, and he knew it, and everyone he was speaking to knew it. "Everybody" means white people, upper-middle-class people, Westerners, people who have privilege. Everybody else just doesn't quite make the grade of being considered "people".
And that's one of the fundamental problems I have with working in the field that I hypothetically still work in: you have to listen to people saying all these grand things about access to technology, and you have to know that those grand things fall somewhere in between meaningless and mendacious because they're deeply predicated on the maintenance of social inequality. You have to know it without talking about it, because the price of talking about it falls somewhere in between hostility and banishment. You have to embrace hypocrisy.
And he had all these inspiring things to say about how at Apple, they believed that everybody should be able to use technology, and that what's more, math and science should be for everybody.
But he didn't really mean it, because the people who work in factories in China assembling Apple products don't get to learn about technology or science, because they're paid such low wages that they can't possibly have time to. This is not an accident; without exploiting people this way, Apple wouldn't be able to sell you the products that entertain you so (including the one I'm using to type this post) at such low prices.
Nor do the people who suffer ill health or early death because of environmental degradation caused by Apple's manufacturing processes (they have one of the worst environmental records in the tech industry) get the chance to enjoy the delights of math, science and technology.
So when Steve Jobs said that technology was for everybody, he didn't really mean everybody, and he knew it, and everyone he was speaking to knew it. "Everybody" means white people, upper-middle-class people, Westerners, people who have privilege. Everybody else just doesn't quite make the grade of being considered "people".
And that's one of the fundamental problems I have with working in the field that I hypothetically still work in: you have to listen to people saying all these grand things about access to technology, and you have to know that those grand things fall somewhere in between meaningless and mendacious because they're deeply predicated on the maintenance of social inequality. You have to know it without talking about it, because the price of talking about it falls somewhere in between hostility and banishment. You have to embrace hypocrisy.