This piece was originally published at Let's Give It Back To The Squares.
If you are an Apple product owner, I apologize in advance. I'm not talking about you personally... probably.
Maybe you've seen this cartoon before or maybe you haven't. If you have not, go read the whole thing before reading on through this diary.
For your consideration: Steve Jobs is the worst, most loathsome, most deranged and depraved person in America who isn't a public figure in the political process. Even if you include politicians, he still beats out Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and most of the Tea Party in terms of pernicious obnoxiousness. In fact, I think only outright war criminals like Bush and Cheney, or the folks behind the racial profiling law in Arizona or the forced rape bill currently fouling up Congress can make an honest claim to being more utterly detestable a human being than Jobs.
Since returning to Apple in the late 90s, Jobs' has reorganized his company to be about one thing only: maximizing profit through the wholesale brainwashing of the industrialized world through the aggressive application of possessive individualism. The promise Jobs offers is that all that being a good global citizen requires is to buy whatever mediocre, overpriced, over-designed, and under-functioning doodad Apple is offering up this month. But buying one Macbook, or iPhone, or iPad or iButtplug isn't enough to fulfill your civil obligations in the Apple Nation. You have to buy a new edition of the device every time an upgraded version is released.
At first, the rate at which Apple replaced its devices was more or less consistent with the rise of technology. But at some point after the first iPod really took off, Jobs reintroduced to the market place a concept we thought was buried: PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE. Don't feel the need to upgrade your iPhone? Well fuck you, Consumer! That sexy design you fapped for is also designed to not be able to withstand normal use past a year or two. Don't feel like you need an iPod upgrade? Once you find out what a hassle getting the battery replaced is, you'll see Jobs' wisdom and just buy a new one.
As if designing his products to require replacement after an absurdly short service life wasn't bad enough, then there's Jobs' latest scam: shorting development cycles so products go out without hot new features, and then waiting a few months and releasing a version .s or .x or .fu that has the feature. It's gotten so insane that cycle between product releases is now measure in moths rather than years. And all to extract more money from witless faux-technoutopians who can't envision a life for themselves that doesn't involve capricious consumption.
If the damage of Jobs' scheme was simply limited to exploiting affluent consumers, he wouldn't be all that bad. Yes, there's something sleazy in exploiting the neoliberal consumer-habits an over-extended buying public was indoctrinated with during the boom years of the 1990s for obscene profits during the Great Recession, but it's what a lot of those swine deserve; a fool and their money, easily parted. What makes Jobs' business model so extraordinarily pernicious are the hundreds of thousands of tons of electronics waste dumped into the environment each year every time the consumer swine trade in their old iDildo for the latest model and by those of the rival companies that have adopted Jobs' business practices.
Do you know anything about e-waste? No? Well, I could explain how it's a huge ecological problem that's accelerating at an intestine shitting rate. Or how it's mostly only effecting the lower classes in developing countries, i.e. the people who are least responsible for the problem they now face; how it's poisoning their families or destroying their ability to live off the land. But I think to really give you a sense of this horror you need to take a look at this ...
pictured: your iPad 3G
That's right you swarthy hipster douchebag, that's where your old iPod you got rid of because you wanted one with video and couldn't find a buyer for on ebay, and your old iPhone you dropped in the toilet when you were assface drunk on SoCo and Shame wound up. Now they're being picked apart for what little material of value can be reclaimed, while the plastic is burned off to give people who make in a month what you spend at $1 PBR Night on a Friday all sorts of cancers that would be nasty business if they had access to western-level health care, which of course they don't.
But let's not get so stuck on the vapid decadence and hypocritical depravity of Design Hipsters that we forget who the real villain here is: Steve Jobs, a gaunt figure who looks like the combination of Andy Warhol and Colonel Klink, and who rumor has it may have had his life saved by a black market organ transplant. Yet black market liver or no, his health at this point is sketchy enough that it's a safe bet he will not live to see the full ramifications of the evil he's unleashed.
tl;dr Steve Jobs is high ranking member of the Kingdom of Terror. When the Revolution comes, he will be brought before a Drumhead Trial, and sentenced to exile in a Ghanaian e-waste dump where he will spend the remainder of his miserable life breathing in the molten fumes of his own tacky products.
full disclosure: the author uses a PC notebook which he has had for five years. He has no plans to get rid of it, even upon acquiring a new computer.