Libertarians fail to realize that true libertarian-ism would take us back to the stone age.
I saw the above "e-mail" supposedly sent by Steve Jobs to himself before he died. I am not sure it is authentic or not - why would he send an e-mail to himself like this? People often attribute quotes to famous people, whether they said the thing or not.
Speaking of quotes, one that has been attributed to Sir Issac Newton was "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" which is a neat way of acknowledging that those who came before him contributed substantially to science which enabled him to expound refuter on the subject. Imagine if each scientist that ever lived had to start over from day one with all the basic research. We would still be in the stone age!
While that quote is instructive, it unintentionally (I believe) dismisses the necessary work done by ordinary people as well. In order to study the universe, one must have a full belly, which requires the work of farmers, merchants, bakers, cooks, servants, and all sort of "ordinary" people doing their jobs to maintain a civilization - to the point where we can naval-gaze about the meaning of life and how the universe works. A staving man isn't interested in the big-bang theory or how the atom is structured - he only cares about getting enough calories to keep his brain alive another day.
Civilization is indeed a luxury. And yet science is what also keeps us alive - by providing the technology to expand the human race without using up all our resources. Of course, there is an end-game to this technology. Moore's Law proposed that the density of transistors would double every two years or so. But eventually, you get down to an atomic level and the "law" hits a wall. Similarly, human beings can keep reproducing and expanding the population, but eventually something has to give - and human nature hits a wall, long before we actually run out of resources.
But I digress...
The point of Jobs' alleged e-mail is that nothing "he" did (I'll get to that, later!) could have happened without the careful orchestration of thousands, nay millions, nay billions of humans, over time, working together. You can't just cobble together an iPhone in your back yard. It takes not only thousands of components, but each component requires the work of hundreds, if not thousands of people to design and manufacture. Not only that, it requires decades of research - centuries, even - to develop. This stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum (well, maybe sputtering IC's does) but is the end result of years of advancement, one step at a time.
And a lot of "technology" that we see is a result of materials science. Once some type of material becomes available, people see uses for it. For example, steel tubing wasn't much of a thing back in the early 1800's. But by the end of the century, it was cheap and readily available, and suddenly, you could make bicycles from it - or even airplanes (and they still do, today). Aluminum was once so valuable as to cost more than gold. The very tip of the Washington Monument is made of aluminum - because mere gold or platinum wasn't considered good enough for the founder of our country. Today, we make beer cans from it - and airliners, the latter of which would never have existed until low-cost aluminum came into being.
So much is made of Musk "inventing" the electric car, when in fact, he merely purchased the company. And even the real inventors were just astute enough to see that if you took 1,000 laptop batteries and wired them together, it would make a keen electric car and solve the "battery problem" that plagued lead-acid battery cars for decades. A commodity appears on the scene, and people find new uses for it.
I take a piss on Steve Jobs a lot here, only because Apple sort of went off the rails decades ago and decided to sell status instead of electronics. "Electronic Jewelry" I call it - a piece of bling that insecure people flaunt in your face as if to show they are superior. But it isn't like they made the thing, or even understand the basics of how it works.
The original Apple II computer was a keen thing (designed by Wozniak, but Jobs took the credit) although even then, they had their own operating system and software that was incompatible with other computers (which back then, were mostly using CP/M operating systems). They wanted a closed-loop system and when the IBM PC came out - and presented open architecture, well, everyone flocked to that.
In response, they came up with this dorky "Mac" computer with an 8" built-in monochrome monitor and a sealed case. "A computer for the rest of us!" they called it - a computer for people who have no business using computers, we called it. It was a flop in the marketplace and the lost money and they fired Steve Jobs. People conveniently forget about that. The "Open Mac" movement was too little, too late, as the PC-AT had taken over the market. So they re-hired Jobs and bought out the first years' production of 1" hard drives.. and the iPod was born.
Again, a new technology comes into being (the tiny hard drive) and people see a novel use for it - not for a computer, but for a music storage thingy. And Apple was finally able to capitalize on its closed-ecosystem business model.
So yea, the Jobs "e-mail" - if it is authentic - is insightful, in that he clearly realizes he isn't "the guy" that people made him out to be - the mad inventor who created the GUI (which was Xerox's invention) or the PC or the iPod or the smart phone - or the iPad - or anything, for that matter. He was a lucky guy in the right place at the right time, just as Bill Gates was a lucky guy who was in the right place at the right time when IBM dropped a lucrative contract in his lap.
Maybe it is time we stopped worshiping these "tech giants" and hanging on their every word as if they had some insight into the future or how our society should be run. The sad thing about technology, today and in the past, is how it allowed wealth to rapidly concentrate in the hands of a few, paid for a little bit at a time, by the many. Whether it is steel mills, railroads, oil refineries, or computers or smart phones, the net result is the same - once we all get addicted to these things and pay for them, some clever and lucky fellow ends up with a shitload of money. And he didn't do it all by himself.
There is a mythology in America of the fiercely independent frontiersman, who carves out a living from the wilderness, making everything himself, including his log cabin and coonskin cap. Davy Crockett, when he was in the House of Representatives, used to wear his buckskin coat and coonskin cap to Congress on occasion, as the plebes ate up that shit - that he was some sort of country rustic.
But of course, he never made his own guns or his own axe, or his Bowie knife - or any of the plethora of tools that settlers used to carve out a life in the West. Those required industry and factories - or at the very least, a blacksmith. In other words, no one goes it alone in this world - we all rely on others to help us along the way.
Libertarians posit that they don't need government or others to exist. So-called "sovereign citizens" claim to be a country unto themselves. Both fail to realize that the lifestyle they enjoy is predicated upon billions of people who came before them or who are living today, to create the things they take for granted. You can't just "go back to nature" at this point in time - many have tried, and ended up starving to death, or being eaten by bears. Like it or not, we are a tool-making, technological species and we require tools - and tool-makers - to survive.
You can't carve an iPhone out of a rock, or make a Silver-a-do pickup truck out of sticks and logs (although Fred Flintstone certainly made this seem plausible, right?). You have to rely on civilization to get along. During one of the many previous recessions, a country-western song became popular, entitled "A Country Boy Will Survive" or something along those lines. In that song, the author posited that a "Country Boy" could hunt deer and fish in a stream and plant crops and he didn't need no city-folk to mess up his life. Again, it is this dream of rugged independence.
But the reality is, he doesn't have the tools or technology to forge steel, drill out a rifle barrel, or make his own gunpowder. He probably can't even make a fish hook, if it came down to it. Real independence - living off the land (oddly enough, a fantasy of the hippies in the 1960's as well) isn't easy to do.
It is one reason I thought that "Survivor" program (now in its 40th season or something?) would be cool. I naively thought it would be people making things out of rocks and sticks - catching fish in a bamboo wier or finding non-poisonous mushrooms to eat. Such was not the case. It turned out to be High School 2.0 with people forming cliques and "voting off the island" people they didn't like. And folks ate this shit up. I only saw the first episode and turned it off halfway through, in disgust.
But I get why they went that route. First, people are voyeurs and love to watch bitchy little fights like that, and root for one side or another. It is a reason why I tend not to hang out with people - the first topic of conversation is usually something along the lines about why they hate the one person who is not there, or explore their character defects. I'd rather be alone, quite frankly!
Second, no one would find it fascinating to see someone make a bicycle out of coconuts like on Gilligan's Island, even if it could be done (it couldn't). Third, the brain-dead gossip-hounds they hired for the show would all starve to death before they figured out how to catch a fish or open a coconut, "Cast Away" style.
No, the eventual "Survivor" turned out to be the most back-stabbing bitchiest queen on the island, and not surprisingly, a gay man won the first season. This is why I don't watch television anymore.
The reality of life is that if we are to "survive" we have to work together, not tear each other apart. We might not recognize the contributions of every member of society, and indeed, there is a small segment of society which, if not merely passive parasites, are actively evil and violent. But that doesn't mean that the guy whose job you don't understand isn't necessary to the survival of our society.
As I noted long ago, maybe a farmer is "indispensable" but he can't farm - effectively - without a tractor. So maybe his tractor mechanic is indispensable? Or the guy on the assembly line who made it? Or the Engineer who designed it? The banker who financed it? It is like one of those Russian dolls - you peel away one layer of the onion, only to find another. Or maybe more like a series of interlocking vines, where you can't take one away without affecting another.
I would like to think Steve Jobs actually wrote this e-mail. Why it is surfacing now, I do not know. Sadly, as I noted at the beginning of this essay, people like to take their agendas and tack a famous name to them, to bootstrap their impact. Jobs has been cited as saying a lot of things, that turned out to be false. This website claims the e-mail was released by his Widow and is part of an online repository of his "wisdom."
But in the end, it doesn't matter who said it - the message is more important than the author. As I noted before, if a PhD tells me the sun rises in the West and a moron tells me it rises in the East, the truth of the matter doesn't rely on the credentials of who said it. The message is independent of who sent it.
Nevertheless, this "e-mail" has an interesting message. And if Steve Jobs really sent it, then it illustrates that even he didn't believe all the hoopla attributed to him.
