the death of a god

A man died recently, you may not have heard.

His name was Ralph Steinman.

He was due to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

He died a week before Steve Jobs, & like Jobs he died as a result of pancreatic cancer.

But unlike Jobs, Steinman did not receive worldwide media coverage for days or weeks. Most of us probably didn't even realise he was dead. Or ever alive. When I looked up his story I had to Google search "Nobel Prize winner dead" cause I couldn't remember his bloody name. And when you Google "Ralph Steinman" the first link has a picture of Steve Jobs next to it.

Because Steinman was a scientist. Boring!

Jobs was a consumer god. He didn't make phones & computers. He made life better.

MP3 players were around for years before the iPod came out. Touch screen phones were around for years before the iPhone. And Tablet PCs (a term you may have never heard of) had been around & ignored for years before the iPad was born.

Jobs didn't invent these products, he simply made them better, charged more, & used his real genius to make Apple one of the largest companies in the world.

Steve Jobs' primary genius was not the products he created, but how he made those products desirable. His genius was in marketing. In making us long for his products.

You complete me.

Apple advertisements don't list features. They never say what the hardware is. Because when you purchase an Apple product, you aren't buying a piece of technology. You are attaining coolness. What's inside the plastic doesn't matter - it's what holding it says to your peers that matters. Or even what it says to yourself.

Which is why many people will run out to purchase the new iPhone 4S, even if they don't have any idea what the real difference is between it & the iPhone 4.

Of course, most companies want to do what Apple has done. This isn't some evil unique to Apple. It's just that they've done it so successfully.

They created the desire of the consumer. The product that frees us from our mundane lives.

Which is why Apple owners feel such a connection to Steve Jobs.

But here's my big problem with the death of Jobs the god.

When he was re-appointed as the head of Apple, he axed all of their philanthropic programs & never reinstated them, despite Apple making $14 billion in profit last year.

He chose not to sign the Giving Pledge, unlike Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates & Warren Buffett, under which the richest individuals commit to giving at least half their wealth to philanthropy.

He's not even on the list of individuals who have given $1 million or more, maintained by the Indiana University's  Center on Philanthropy.

How does someone worth billions of dollars not give a million away? I would have thought there'd be a line a mile long around his house of Girl Guides, Red Cross & school kids wanting to take a field trip to Detroit.

I have a problem with someone being ridiculously wealthy, & not using that wealth to help others. I will not celebrate the life of someone who either lacked empathy or was selfish. Or both.

I have no idea how the products he's made should outweigh his lack of care for the world's poor.

But some have jumped to his defence! Claiming he may have given money, just that he did it in anonymously.

He may well have. But if you care about poverty, then you should also care about raising awareness.

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I'll end this post with a quote from a writer defending Jobs' lack of charity:

"What a loss to humanity it would have been in Jobs had dedicated the last 25 years of his life to figuring out how to give his billions away, instead of doing what he does best. We'd still be waiting for a cell phone on which we could actually read e-mail and surf the web."

In the consumer world it is a tragedy when a rich businessman spends time working out how to give money to the needy.


Since Jobs' death, over 140 000 children under the age of 5 have died because us in the West are too selfish.

A tragedy indeed.