Steve Jobs: Shaman and Sorcerer

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Have you heard the one about computer operating systems and the Reformation? You probably have. Most people got the story from the Italian semiotician and academic superstar Umberto Eco. In his telling, from an article he published in 1994, it goes like this:

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

More on this interpretation in a moment, but I can't go any further without commenting that my friend Edward Mendelson — professor at Columbia, literary executor of W.H. Auden, and occasional character in the novels of Alexander McCall Smith — made the point six years before Eco did, and just as wittily and incisively:

In the 16th century the printed book helped make possible the split between Catholics and Protestants. In the 20th century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as farce. Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded. Each cult holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other. Each thinks that it is itself the one hope for salvation.

Each of these cults corresponds to one of the two antagonists in the age of Reformation. In the realm of the Apple Macintosh, as in Catholic Europe, worshipers peer devoutly into screens filled with “icons.” All is sound and imagery in Appledom. . . . A central corporate headquarters decrees the form of all rites and practices. Infallible doctrine issues from one executive officer whose selection occurs in a sealed boardroom. . . .

As in Protestant Europe, by contrast, where sects divided endlessly into smaller competing sects and no church dominated any other, all is different in the fragmented world of IBM. That realm is now a chaos of conflicting norms and standards that not even IBM can hope to control. . . . When IBM recently abandoned some of its original standards and decreed new ones, many of its rivals declared a puritan allegiance to IBM’s original faith, and denounced the company as a divisive innovator. Still, the IBM world is united by its distrust of icons and imagery. IBM’s screens are designed for language, not pictures. Graven images may be tolerated by the more luxurious cults, but the true IBM faith relies on the austerity of the word.

My first thought on re-reading Mendelson’s extended metaphor, which I went around quoting for several years after it first appeared, is: How much has changed! It is growing increasingly difficult to remember that IBM was once a colossus striding the earth, and that people spoke of almost any non-Apple computer as an “IBM machine.” In 1988, the major players were hardware manufacturers.

Six years later, when Eco develops the same conceit, there is one subtle but important shift: he doesn't speak of “IBM” but rather “MS-DOS” — not a maker of computers but an operating system. And this is the path the conflicts would take: not Apple versus IBM, but Mac (conceived more as an operating system, as a way of organizing and presenting data, than as a physical machine) versus Windows.

And of course the very name Windows indicates that the image-and-icon people — not as official servants of Apple, but rather as infiltrators in the camp of the Text — won the religious war. No longer are the world’s computers identified by a hyphenated acronym; instead, we have a plain English noun referring to an everyday object through which people see. Once upon a time only Macintoshes had “windows” on their screen; then the rival named itself after that metaphor. From that point on (or at least from the release of Windows 3.1, the first really successful version, in 1992) the days of the Reformation analogy were numbered. Indeed, by the time Eco produced his version of the analogy it was already obsolete.

So, yes: How much has changed! And yet, also: How much remains the same! When Mendelson wrote his review, the memory was still fresh of Steve Jobs being forced out by Apple’s board (in 1985) and replaced by John Sculley. Now that Jobs is back and has established himself as the most powerful CEO in America, these words ring truer than ever: “A central corporate headquarters decrees the form of all rites and practices. Infallible doctrine issues from one executive officer. . . .” Jobs’s absolute control over Apple has now become legendary: a source of comfort to some, of scandal to others, but of fascination to almost all students of the company and of American business.

This figure of singular authority, whose charisma — from the Greek kharis, meaning “favor” or “grace,” usually as bestowed by a divinity — is so strong that it has been labeled by friend and foe alike his Reality Distortion Field, continues to dictate “infallible doctrine,” indifferent to predictions of failure: first the iMac, then the iPod, then the iPhone, and now the iPad. Success has followed success, and now Apple Inc. is the world’s most valuable technology company. But with the iPad we may be seeing something new — at least, Steve Jobs seems to want us to think so. And here we may need to draw on other metaphors from the history of early modern religion.

Consider one of the most important books ever written on the subject, Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic. Thomas shows, convincingly and brilliantly, that to the average Christian “the medieval church appeared as a vast reservoir of magical power” that functioned on its own (religious) terms but was also “capable of being deployed for a variety of secular purposes.” But it was this power that Protestant preachers and theologians sought to undermine, and in this effort they were often successful: in England, for instance, they “severely eroded the ritual of the established church.” They did this by denying that anything magical, anything supernatural, happened in church, especially in the Mass. “Protestantism thus presented itself as a deliberate attempt to take the magical elements out of religion.” Magic dismissed, “the individual stood in a direct relationship to God” and “could no longer rely upon the intercession of intermediates, whether saints or clergy; neither could he trust in an imposing apparatus of ceremonial in the hope of prevailing upon God to grant his desires.”

Let’s see how far can we push this metaphor. Today’s computer user, faced with the firehose of information and images from the Internet, is often in that situation of terrifying solitude, confronted with awesome, inscrutable power and unable even to imagine how it could be managed. To this individual Steve Jobs comes bearing the iPad, an instrument which, he has said and Apple’s marketing people have also said, is uniquely “magical.”

Some people have said that the iPad ushers in a new era of “curated computing”; Steve Jobs prefers to see it as a thin, sleek restoration of the supernatural. Thus the device’s product page: “A magical and revolutionary product.” In a video on the site, Apple’s chief designer, Jonathan Ive, says “You know, it’s true: when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical. And that’s exactly what the iPad is.” He says “It’s true” as though he’s answering a question, or responding to something the interviewer has said, and I would be willing to bet a few dollars that the interviewer had just cited a famous statement by the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

To turn back the cultural clock, as it were, to take a set of technologies that Apple had already deployed in the iPhone and improve them, repackage and repurpose them in a way that functions with near-absolute smoothness: this is the goal of the iPad. It’s a device meant to mediate the web flawlessly, and to do so — and this is perhaps the most important thing — not primarily by altering what you see or hear but rather by giving you manual control. On the iPad you make things happen by moving your hands around, like a wizard, except you don't need either a mouse or a wand. You don't even need those funky gloves that Tom Cruise wore in Minority Report. You touch the Internet: you stroke it, swipe it, pinch it. And it responds precisely to your will. And only Apple can give you that.

The Apple-DOS wars may have been like religion-as-doctrine, but this isn't: this calls for more archaic imagery, for a picture of religion as “a vast reservoir of magical power.” Apple seems to be the only company playing this game. It has positioned itself as the sole technological conduit for that reservoir. If you don't believe me, pay attention on your next visit to Diagon Alley: it’s Ollivander’s for wands, Flourish & Blotts for books, the Apple Store for Internet devices. Simple as that.

Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College. He writes the Text Patterns blog.