Steve Jobs, the Ultimate End-User

This week, if you happen to be passing a newspaper kiosk, consider taking a look at the weekly magazine The Economist. Even if you don’t speak English, you will still grasp how spectacular the front cover is. Under the title “The Book of Jobs,” is Apple’s boss, as a divine figure, holding his now famous iPad as if it were the Tablets of Stone. Not to be left behind, Courrier International has a computerized mosaic representing, again, the face of Steve Jobs: “The man who changes our lives.” Even two years ago, shortly before the launch of the iPhone, the New York Magazine ran the title “iGod.”

For the fourth time — previously there was the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone — the creator of Apple plays the technology messiah who will change the world. And my god, does it work! A quick look on the Internet is enough: All the press on the planet simultaneously celebrated the birth of the divine iPad. This time, Apple has undoubtedly shattered the record for the most effective free advertising campaign in the world.

As for newspaper columnists, they’re losing their minds; David Carr of the New York Times: “I haven’t been this excited about buying something since I was eight years old and sent away for the tiny seahorses I saw advertised in the back of a comic book.” Steve Jobs has an extraordinary capacity to restore a sense of childlike wonder. “Jobs is not an engineer,” explained the writer Dan Lyons in an article in TimesOnline. “He can’t really design anything and he doesn’t know anything about circuits. But he is the ultimate end-user, the guy who is on our side.” “A productive narcissist,” adds the psychiatrist Michael Maccoby.

Yet, the question remains to ask ourselves about our own compulsive consumer behavior: Why are we so sensitive to this climate of expectation, fabricated by marketing experts — be it the iPad, the new Harry Potter or Avatar?

In “The Disenchantment of the World” (Gallimard), Marcel Gauchet characterized contemporary society as a movement toward the non-religious: “Religion’s decline is paid for by the difficulty of being-a-self.” Having written this work in 1985, he did not witness Jobs’ “rise to power.” “The death of God,” he wrote, “does not mean that man becomes God by reappropriating the conscious absolute self-disposition once attributed to God; on the contrary, it means that man is categorically obliged to renounce the dream of his own divinity. Only when the gods have disappeared does it become obvious that men are not gods.”

So let’s agree, though perhaps a misnomer, Steve Jobs is, at the very least, a god of technological innovation and marketing.