We lost Steve Jobs last week. When I wrote these ruminations a few months back, I couldn’t have anticipated the passing of this master innovator. I suspect that Jobs was very much aware of the mixed emotions around the array of technologies of enchantment that he introduced to us over the last decades. In the wake of his death, many of us will ask how long Apple will be able to keep this stream of wonder going without the pitch of that Steve of the uncanny savoir faire. Where did he learn to enchant like that? As it turns out, we have now come to find out that Jobs was a seeker himself, looking for, and sometimes finding clues and paths in Buddhism and other traditions of enlightenment. Did Zen give Jobs the way to entice us to see the future in those marvelous designs, those portals of digitized wisdom? After all, we are now legion who find ourselves stuck in the cycle of birth, death, and renewal that the master marketer Jobs so convincingly led us to believe was not only necessary but actually unavoidable. We who call ourselves lovers of all-things Mac have found ourselves enduring through the obsolescence of what we have in hand (“yeah, it’s an iPhone 3…”), suffering the increasing futility that is the “OS X” or the “iOS” performing the charms we come to rely on, and waiting for the end of our yearning in the form of the little death that comes with “the next release”–the new version that will free us from the all-too-worldly and usher in a new material nirvana, priced just so, glistening just right. It’s hard to think of a wizard of capitalism that was more effective than Jobs in beguiling so many in thinking that consuming new products with such regularity meant that we were on the path to the good, and not just mere fools for the cunning of the market. And yet the market is cunning, and it has lost one of its masters, not quite Zen yet extraordinary nonetheless.
So, let us be decent, let us be good and give Steve Jobs his due, his praise, and our thanks.
D. K. K. (a rather ambivalent owner of an iPad 2…)
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