Steve Jobs and Tech's God Complex

Why do we keep making Jobs biopics? Because we are still wrestling with his legend, and how we feel about who he was and what he built.
Film Title Steve Jobs
MICHAEL FASSBENDER portrays the pioneering founder of Apple in ?Steve Jobs?, directed by Academy Award? winner Danny Boyle and written by Academy Award? winner Aaron Sorkin. Set backstage in the minutes before three iconic product launches spanning Jobs? career?beginning with the Macintosh in 1984, and ending with the unveiling of the iMac in 1998?the film takes us behind the scenes of the digital revolution to paint an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at its epicenter.François Duhamel/Universal

Did God create the iMac? It's not a question I'd normally ask, but my mind was in an odd place as I staggered into the press screening for Steve Jobs, the latest biopic about the Apple founder, which opens tomorrow. Over the previous few hours, I'd watched both major preceding Jobs movies—Jobs, 2013's too-soon hagiography starring Ashton Kutcher; and Alex Gibney's recent documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. Both films presented Jobs as in touch with the divine, and my head was spinning with koan-like pronouncements and enigmatic half-smiles.

Jobs, which is not a very good movie, presents its subject as a mash-up of archetypes—Sammy Glick-like amoral hustler, Citizen Kane-ish destroyer of lives—but it really doubles down on Jobs as counter-cultural shaman. The young Jobs dismisses an egghead dean who dares to suggest he attend some classes ("The system can only produce the system." Burn!) then drops acid, caresses some grass, and is soon vibing to rhythms of the universe that only he can hear. Later, Jobs will experience a similar sense of wonder as he watches ASCII characters spill across Woz's homebrewed monitor. (Of course, because Jobs is played by Kutcher, that enlightenment is basically an extended "whoa," like Keanu Reeves finally finding the unicorn hidden in his Magic Eye poster.)

Gibney's documentary suggests that Jobs himself would have endorsed this interpretation. A Zen monk recounts the time Jobs told him he had achieved enlightenment; when the monk asked for proof, Jobs returned with an Apple motherboard. His daughter Lisa credits him with knowing "the equations most people didn't know—things led to their opposites." But in the end the film presents Jobs as akin to Anakin, attuned to mystical powers that ultimately destroyed his humanity. Chris-Ann Brennan, Jobs' ex-girfriend and Lisa's mother, likens him to a figure in a Ram Dass book: "When someone goes into a state of enlightenment but does it while still attached to their ego, they call that the golden chain. And that's what I feel happened to Steve. He went into magnificence and enlightenment but he, he just blew it."

Roll your eyes all you want, infidels, but I think there's something to it. Who hasn't felt a kind of awe as technology's indomitable march has held us aloft and batted us about like plastic bags in a breeze? Sure, humans may have created the individual products and services, but look at the last three decades—from the Apple II to Uber—and tell me you don't feel just a little bit in thrall to forces outside our control. You don't have to call it God; WIRED forefather Kevin Kelly referred to it as the technium, a "superorganism" that plays by its own rules. "It has its own force that it exerts," he writes. "That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it's also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself." Call Jobs the technium's Moses, then, the man most in touch with its mystical power, delivering its will unto humanity in tablets of stainless steel, plastic, and glass.

No God But Jobs

For Steve Jobs' first few minutes, it felt like screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Danny Boyle shared that interpretation. The movie starts with an old interview of 2001-era Arthur C. Clarke, predicting the rise of the personal computer. ("You'll take it as much for granted as we take the telephone," he says, with great portent.) 2001, of course, painted technological development as an evolutionary force, guided by creepy monoliths who tugged all of humanity behind them. Were the filmmakers suggesting that Jobs was the technium's handmaiden, inventing the Macintosh, iMac, iPod, and iPhone on quasi-divine orders?

Nah! Steve Jobs has its share of God talk, but it's played for laughs—as evidence of Jobs' self-aware self-regard. At one point, Michael Fassbender's Jobs pressures engineer Andy Hertzfeld (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) to fix a flawed demo. "You had three weeks," he says. "The universe was created in a third of that time." Hertzfeld snarks back: "Well, someday you'll have to tell us how you did it." Another time, Jobs likens himself to a deity as a way of justifying his own assholeishness in the pursuit of his art: "God sends his own son on a suicide mission, but we like him anyway because he made trees." (I snickered at this line, but now it strikes me as a little much. As Aaron Sorkin himself might say, if Steve Jobs had talked like Aaron Sorkin, he would have talked like Aaron Sorkin.)

Instead, Sorkin's film sees Jobs' machines not as an expression of the music of the spheres but as physical manifestations of the neuroses and pathologies of its all-too-human creator. Jobs has daddy issues and daughter issues, problems with authority and problems with intimacy. It hammers home the idea that Apple's philosophy of "end to end control" emerged from Jobs' own adoption trauma. Battling over how many ports to put into the Apple II, Seth Rogen's Wozniak finally throws up his hands. "Computers aren't supposed to have human flaws," he says. "I'm not going to build this one with yours."

This is another way of looking at technological progress as a whole—not as divinely-inspired evolutionary advancement but as a kind of enslavement, locking consumers inside the fallible psyches of its creators. It’s an argument that expresses itself in the familiar concerns that technology is making us more isolated, not more connected, in part because the people who invented it often seem so uncomfortable around other humans. Or the complaint that so many of today's apps tackle problems that are primarily of concern for 20-something wealthy San Franciscans. Or that megalomaniacal entrepreneurs are rewriting society for no higher purpose than to fuel their messianic egos or pad their retirement accounts, leaving the rest of us to live in the wreckage wrought by their fever dreams.

Unforgiven

Which perhaps is why we keep returning to Jobs, poking at his legend to figure out how we feel about him, what he represents, and what his work means. We’re trying to chart a course between these two interpretations of his legacy. It's why we've seen three major motion pictures about him in just the four years since his death. We are still wrestling with it, with him.

Most biopics tend to mythologize their subjects. Jobs came pre-mythologized—by himself as much anyone else—so maybe it's appropriate that Steve Jobs takes the opposite tack, demystifying the mystic and underscoring his very human failings. In this way, it's more like one of those postmodern Westerns—McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Unforgiven—deconstructing America's self-image by poking holes in the stories it tells about itself. Yeah, Jobs may have made good computers, this movie says, but that hardly matters, because—whatever Jobs might believe—machines are secondary to our work as humans, not extensions of it. "What you make isn't supposed to be the best part of you," Kate Winslet's Joanna Hoffman tells Jobs. "Your products are better than you are, brother," Woz spits. "I'm poorly made," Jobs confesses.

In that way, maybe Jobs is God-like after all. In God: A Biography, his literary analysis of the Old Testament, Jack Miles presents God as imperfect, self-contradictory, furious, and, most of all, lonely. He is, in other words, a reflection of our own deepest flaws and fears. "God is omnipresent, yes, but his omnipresence is merely another name for his solitude," Miles writes. "There seems effectively to be nobody for him to be with but the creature he has made in his own image." I never had an intimate, personal relationship with Jobs—or with God, for that matter—but from what I know of both of them, from what I've read and what I've seen of their works, it seems right on the money.