Steve Jobs - a genius and visionary of Wellesian caliber

[Le Chiffre]

RIP. One of the great people of our times, (1955-2011). As an Apple junkie for several years, I hope the company doesn't start to decline without his leadership and vision.



Several years ago a friend laminated this Apple ad for me. I still have it framed:

[Wellesnet]

Interesting Guardian article touches on Steve Jobs as a prime exemplar of Minimalism. Orson Welles would no doubt have applauded the skepticism over technological progress as well as material accumulation:

The empty promises of Marie Kondo and the craze for minimalism
From the ‘KonMari method’ to Apple’s barely-there design philosophy, we are forever being urged to declutter and simplify our lives. But does minimalism really make us any happier? By Kyle Chayka
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... minimalism

“Minimalism” is a lifestyle of living with less and being happy with, and more aware of, what you already own. Minimalist bloggers were men and women who had an epiphany that came from a personal crisis of consumerism. Buying more had failed to make them happier. In fact, it was entrapping them, and they needed to find a new relationship with their possessions – usually by throwing most of them out.

Presiding over them was Marie Kondo, a Japanese cleaning guru whose books were becoming international bestsellers. The principal commandment of Kondoism was to abandon anything that didn’t “spark joy”
What the bloggers collectively called minimalism amounted to a kind of enlightened simplicity, a moral message combined with a particularly austere visual style. The trend wasn’t as subtle as its name suggested; minimalism was a brand to identify with as much as a way of coping with mess.It was like a weight being released that went beyond the absence of clutter. Consumerism’s spell had been broken.

A pair of ebullient bloggers named Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, started calling themselves the Minimalists in 2010. In 2016, their documentary about minimalist practices across the country was picked up by Netflix. Most of the fans I talked to in Cincinnati cited the film as their conversion moment to minimalism.Although it was a new social attitude that took its name from what was originally an avant-garde art movement that started in 1960s New York, Millburn and Nicodemus had found fans as far away as India and Japan.

On one hand there was the facade of minimalism: its brand and visual appearance. On the other was the unhappiness at the root of it all, caused by a society that tells you more is always better. Every advertisement for a new thing implied that you should dislike what you already had.

In the 21st century, across the developed world, most of us do not need as much as we have. In the UK, one study found that children have on average 238 toys, but only play with 12 of them on a daily basis. We are addicted to accumulation. The minimalist lifestyle seems like a conscientious way of approaching the world now that we have realised that materialism, accelerating since the industrial revolution, is literally destroying the planet.

Yet it all seemed a little too convenient: just sort through your house or listen to a podcast, and happiness, satisfaction and peace of mind could all be yours. It was a blanket solution so vague that it could be applied to anyone and anything. On an economic level, it was a commandment to live safely within your means versus pursuing dreamy aspirations or taking a leap of faith – not a particularly inspiring doctrine.

Minimalism was an inevitable societal and cultural shift responding to the experience of living through the 2000s. Up through the 20th century, material accumulation and stability made sense as forms of security. If you owned your home and your land, no one could take it away from you. If you stuck with one company throughout your career, it was insurance against periods of future economic instability, when you hoped your employer would protect you.

Little of this feels true today. The percentage of workers who are freelance instead of salaried grows each year. House prices are prohibitive in any place with a strong labour market. Economic inequality is more severe than ever in the modern era. To make matters even worse, the greatest wealth now comes from the accumulation of invisible capital, not physical stuff: startup equity, stock shares and offshore bank accounts opened to avoid taxes. As the French economist Thomas Piketty points out, these immaterial possessions grow in value much faster than salaries do. That is, if you are lucky enough to have a salary in the first place. Meanwhile, crisis follows crisis and mobility now feels safer than being static, another reason that owning less looks more and more attractive.

Most of all, the minimalist attitude speaks to the feeling that all aspects of life have become relentlessly commodified. Buying unnecessary items on Amazon with credit cards is a fast and easy way to exert some feeling of control over our precarious surroundings. Brands sell us cars, televisions, smartphones and other products (often on loans that inflate their costs) as if they will solve our problems. Through books, podcasts and designed objects, the idea of minimalism itself has also been commodified.


The great recession of 2008 also seemed to usher in a larger minimalist moment. An aesthetic of necessity emerged as the economy came to a standstill. Shopping at thrift stores became cool. So did a certain style of rustic simplicity. Conspicuous consumption, the ostentation of the previous decades, was not just distasteful, it was unreachable. This faux blue-collar hipsterism preceded the turn to high-gloss consumer minimalism that happened once the economic recovery kicked in, preparing the ground for its popularity.

Dissatisfaction with materialism and the usual rewards of society is not new; the sense that the surrounding civilisation is excessive, and has thus lost some kind of original authenticity, which must be regained. The material world holds less meaning in these moments, and so accumulating more stuff loses its appeal.Unless you are wealthy or creative enough to afford a lot of space, there are two responses to living in New York: one is overstuffing a tiny space that eventually becomes unbearable, the other is living like a minimalist. Without basements, spare closets or extra rooms to stash stuff in, you are always Kondoing.

It is an abstract, almost nostalgic desire – a pull toward a different, simpler world. Perhaps the longing for less is the constant shadow of humanity’s self-doubt: what if we were better off without everything we have gained in modern society? If the trappings of civilisation leave us so dissatisfied, then maybe their absence is preferable and we should abandon them in order to seek some deeper truth. The longing for less is neither an illness nor a cure. Minimalism is just one way of thinking about what makes a good life.

For some of its devotees, minimalism is therapy. The spasm of getting rid of everything is like an exorcism of the past, clearing the way for a new future of pristine simplicity. It represents a decisive break. No longer will we depend on the accumulation of stuff to bring us happiness – we will instead be content with the things we have consciously decided to keep, the things that represent our ideal selves. By owning fewer things, we might be able to construct new identities through selective curation instead of succumbing to consumerism.

At least, that is the model popularized by Marie Kondo’s books, However, only by following Kondo’s disciplined tenets can the reader be fully successful. You decide what stays in your house, but she tells you exactly how it should be folded, stored and displayed – in other words, how you should relate to it. She has also been fully transformed into a brand: her company now sells luxury Kondo boxes to organise your stuff in, certification classes for would-be Kondo acolytes and a range of crystals, as well as a “therapeutic tuning fork”.Minimalism was already being commodified when Kondo emerged, but she was the crest of a larger 2010s wave of writers adopting the idea. Readers meanwhile, trade the orthodoxy of consumerism for the orthodoxy of tidiness.

Furthermore, the literature of the minimalist lifestyle is an exercise in banality. Each one offers more or less the same vision as the others: “I don’t need to own all this stuff,” Its aesthetic of fashionable austerity is like a brand logo. It is identifiable anywhere, and serves to remind us of the air of moral purity associated with simplicity. The KonMari Method and minimalist self-help as a whole works because it is a simple, almost one-step procedure, as memorable as a marketing slogan. a one-size-fits-all process that has a way of homogenising homes and erasing traces of personality or quirkiness, Minimalist cleanliness is the state of acceptable normalcy that everyone must adhere to, no matter how boring it looks.

The most famous proponent of minimalism – or at least minimalism as a lifehack – was probably Steve Jobs. In a famous photograph from 1982, Jobs sits on the floor of his living room. He was in his late 20s at the time, and Apple was making $1bn a year. He had just bought a large house in Los Gatos, California, but he kept it totally empty. Not for him, the usual displays of wealth or status. In the photo he looks content.

Yet the image of simplicity is deceptive. The house Jobs bought was huge for a young, single man with no use for that excess space. Wired magazine later discovered that the stereo setup resting in the corner would have cost $8,200. The lone lamp that illuminates the scene was made by Tiffany. It was a valuable antique, not a utilitarian tool.

Not only is simplicity often less simple than it looks, it can also be much less practical than it seems. People often conflate the phrase “form follows function” – the idea that the external appearance of an object or building should reflect the way that it works – with the self-conscious appearance of minimalism, as in Jobs’s house or the design of Apple’s iPhone. But Jobs echoes a slogan that could be glimpsed not long ago in one upscale New York shop front: “Fewer, better.” Possess the best things and only the best things, if only you can afford them. It was better to go without a couch than buy one that wasn’t perfect.

Minimalist design encourages us to forget everything a product relies on and imagine, in this case, that the internet consists of carefully shaped glass and steel alone. Apple devices have gradually simplified in appearance over time under designer Jony Ive, who joined the company in 1992, which is why they are so synonymous with minimalism. Apple devices have only a few visual qualities, and the company strives to make its phones thinner and removes ports – see headphone jacks – any chance it gets.

But this is an illusion of both simplicity and efficiency. The iPhone’s function depends on an enormous, complex, ugly superstructure of satellites and undersea cables that certainly are not designed in pristine whiteness. We might be able to hold the iPhone in our hands, but we should also be aware that the network of its consequences is vast: server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin. It is easy to feel like a minimalist when you can order food, summon a car or rent a room using a single brick of steel and silicon. But in reality, it is the opposite. We are taking advantage of a maximalist assemblage. Just because something looks simple does not mean it is; the aesthetics of simplicity cloak artifice, or even unsustainable excess.

"What's bad is not wealth but the accumulation of wealth" - Orson Welles