// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs
There’s a tech industry habit of second-guessing “what would Steve Jobs have done" ever since he passed away, and most of the things people attribute to him seem like guesses about a guy who was very hard to predict and often inconsistent. But recently, we have one of those very rare cases where we know exactly what Steve Jobs would not have done. Tim Cook and Apple’s leadership team have sold out the very American opportunity that made Steve Jobs’ life and accomplishments possible, while betraying his famously contemptuous attitude towards bullshit institutions.
Steve Jobs was, amongst many other things, the biological son of an unmarried Syrian immigrant who was in the United States on a student visa, and he grew up to be a person who had a really good sense of when to say “fuck you" to the man. Both of those aspects of Jobs were plainly disrespected by the pathetic display of fealty that Tim Cook put on display on behalf of Apple in the Oval Office a few weeks ago. Cook made a mealy-mouthed entreaty to Donald Trump, slathering him with compliments that were as numerous as they were false, and then used his sweaty palms to assemble a ghastly glass-and-gold trophy for a room full of press cameras. It is, quite literally, the most grim and embarrassing thing that's ever been done in Apple's name, and I was watching live when Tim Cook and Bono awkwardly butted index fingers while inflicting U2's worst album on everyone's iPods.
I’m not an uncritical Steve Jobs fan. I know, from having worked closely with people who worked directly for Jobs for many years, that he could be a mercurial, and brutish, boss. Too many of his greatest accomplishments came at significant personal cost to those who worked for him. But it’s inarguable that Jobs could see a future that many others could not, and virtually every single one of the people I know who had the chance to work for him directly have said that, even at their most critical, they inarguably felt that Jobs brought out the best of their talents and helped inspire them to do some of their best work.
But everybody knows that part of the Steve Jobs lore. What’s far less well-known is where Steve Jobs came from. As I noted fourteen years ago, “the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock". Jobs’ adoptive parents were able to take him in because he was born into that relatively unstable environment, with an uncertain future ahead of him. His upbringing and social context were all the things that the current authoritarian administration have violently targeted for attacks.
Steve Jobs was able to achieve many of the signature accomplishments in the history of American business because of the fundamental human rights and civil liberties that we extend to many of the most vulnerable and least-privileged people who come to our country.
Steve Jobs was also, plainly, a member of the 60s and 70s counterculture that defined the community and context where his work was born. The early personal computer scene was rife with psychedelic drug use (which was then criminalized, as was recreational marijuana use), and even some of Jobs’ ordinary cultural tastes such as being a fan of “hippie music” was considered so anti-social that artists were commonly monitored by federal agencies of the time.
This is the social context in which early personal computers were created, just one generation after IBM had sold its mainframe computers to the Nazis, when that company provided the numbers that would be inked onto the wrists of the prisoners held in concentration camps. And the anti-institutional, anti-war, anti-surveillance, and yes, often anti-government sentiment of those early hackers informed the ethos of everyone in that scene. That's why it was no surprise, when Jobs had the chance to make the first and most definitive global statement from Apple — the launch of the original Macintosh — that it would have a nod to Orwell’s 1984, and