Steve Jobs is Dead

A rant about Apple and planned obsolescence

Although Steve Jobs died in 2011, his company is doing quite well. As of yesterday, Apple is now the most valuable public company in the United States, with a market cap of $3.9 TRILLION. He apparently was still on my mind in 2016, when this was written. I guess you could call it a rant, back when rants were a popular thing. I’ve performed it live a few times, and it was also published on Medium, if anyone remembers that platform? The original San Francisco Apple store has moved locations, but it still retains an unnecessarily steep staircase.

So yeah, I’m in the scalding white Apple Store in downtown San Francisco, listening to a band I used to listen to in college because that was REAL music, man, navigating through the endless Mac-oid kids in their blue shirts and waxed mustaches and fresh outlooks. Nobody pays me any attention. It’s like a sci-fi movie where everyone dies at age 25.

Speaking of death, Steve Jobs has been dead for five years, and we’re still feasting upon his gift of collective narcissistic convenience. Who can resist gizmos that begin with the letter I? It’s all about me, me, me. All of my thoughts, dreams, memories, all of the skylines and selfies, parties and concerts, children and dogs and cats and plates of food, all running together into the perpetual newsfeed jizzfest of Me. Is that what you ate yesterday? Awesome! Is that your ugly baby? Like!

So thanks for all this, Steve. Are you sitting in hell right now, watching a screen buffering? Are you enjoying the current shit-stream of biographies, documentaries, films and other posthumous porn that’s all about you? Have we finally learned every scrap of trivia about America’s greatest salesman, the man who taught us all how to customize our world, and ignore the rest? You wonder, how can a guy who coveted Buddhist principles and took a lot of acid, grow up to be such a skinflint asshole? Did none of it sink in?

I’m looking around in vain for an Apple munchkin to offer some help, and—wow, Jesus Christ, there is one guy here who is actually older than me, and man, he looks REALLY old, what’s he doing here? And all the while I’m silently cursing the curse of all long-time Mac owners, because we’re idiots. Long-time suckers on the vine. I’ve been buying Steve Jobs’ bullshit since 1987. Back in those days you had to drive to Berkeley to a place called Krishna Copy, because they had the Bay Area’s only coveted laser printer. They weren’t big on customer service either. You’d walk in and a counter person would look up and declare, “What do you want?” And you’d rent a Mac and sit next to a hippie lady designing a chart about vitamin C, and she smelled like she was having a niacin flush. 

Thanks to Steve Jobs and the handy “user interface” he stole from Xerox, I’ve never bothered to learn anything about computers. I don’t know anything, except Mac. Which means I’ve spent the past 30 years upgrading all their stupid adapters and systems and devices. Do you agree? Click. You forgot this box, click. Every drawer in my house contains another useless dirty white cord, another dead phone or laptop, another dried-up Apple turd. Even a fucking light bulb lasts longer.

I’m here in the Apple Cult-atorium because, of course, another one of my cords just stopped working, and rather than buy one off the street that may or may not work, I’m back yet again, paying TOP DOLLAR to the corpse of America’s greatest salesman, for an exclusive “lightning” charger cord that costs maybe 25 cents to make, and I finally find it, of course it’s 19 fucking dollars, just to charge my dumb phone.

I start hunting around for a munchkin to ring me up, and as usual all of the Blue Shirts are chatting with each other, instead of helping customers, because this is the Future. We’re all supposed to be on the same Rain Man wavelength as the people who design this stuff, and enter the store and start mumbling to ourselves and fiddling with toys. Customer service is your grampa’s world. This the new retail, this is intuitive self-serve, baby, just hop right on that iPad mini with Liquid Retina display and immediately plunge into the World of You.

Hey, look! Some guy in the laptop section just designed a brilliant new app, right here in the store. He just got an angel investor. And now he’s scored a sweet apartment in the Mission for under 2 million, and he’s hiring staff, and they’re playing foosball! Oops, it just folded. And…he’s moving back in with his parents.

All the while, my seventh pair of Apple earbuds are blasting my college music into my skull, taking me back to a time before this current sweet, positive, convenient yay-tech computer era. A time when people on college campuses were sick of Vietnam and tired of disco and frustrated about the economy, and challenging the government—even if it only meant shouting things like “Reagan is a fucking actor, man!” 

The Blue Shirts continue their conversations about roommates and viral clips, and which games suck and which apps rock. The low chatter of monkeys in the trees of Technology Island. The Genius Bar is sans geniuses. The only Mac-oid who appears to be available is a cute blonde girl in a wheelchair, with mangled legs, and she smiles sweetly and asks if she can help me, and I stumble over to her, because what am I going to do, stand there and wave her over? That’s what Steve Jobs would do. 

She is so nice and innocent, and friendly, and somehow she’s working at Apple, and took the job even though they have the STEEPEST staircase in San Francisco. She rings up my charger cord, and I have to turn down the music and hear her say, in the nicest possible way, if I would like my receipt emailed to me.

I say yes, and thank her, and walk out of the Cult-atorium and out into the new day with my new cord. I change my iMusic to jazz and stroll down the I sidewalk in the I city, and it’s a nice day after all. I am alive, and Steve Jobs is dead.