Hacker Cinema
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine
2015 · Film · documentary · 129 min
Directed by Alex Gibney
When Steve Jobs died the world wept. But what accounted for the grief of millions of people who didn’t know him? This evocative film navigates Jobs' path from a small house in the suburbs, to zen temples in Japan, to the CEO's office of the world's richest company, exploring how Jobs’ life and work shaped our relationship with the computer. The Man in the Machine is a provocative and sometimes startling re-evaluation of the legacy of an icon.
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2 comments on Hacker News
Apple also doesn't allow any browser technology other than their built-in WebKit so all browsers are internally the same on iOS.
They also doesn't support free VP9 video coded because they are part of competitive FFMPEG.
I didn't like Apple due to this gatekeeper/walled garden but I started to hate it more after watching "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine" documentary. Such a big company and still they did illegal option backdating, avoiding tax in Ireland, etc.
It needs more time for people to realize their mistake of supporting this company.
Who wants to be Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg anyway?
Of course we all do, but that's pure ego. Each one of them was brilliant, there is no discounting that, but you also can't ignore the role that luck played. You can't just be brilliant and you can't just be lucky, you really have to be both to have the kind of success they did. It's not surprising that they are anomalies, hoping to recreate their success is like hoping to find a winning lottery ticket.
We shouldn't put any of them on a pedestal anyway. The empires of each of them was built on locking people into their closed systems at any cost. Jobs did some remarkable things, Zuck seems like he's going to do positive things with his fortune, and Gates might eliminate the world of a lot of disease, but you only have to look at past cutthroat titans like Andrew Carnegie to know that redemptive actions like that leave behind at best an ambiguous legacy.
There was a great piece on Grantland this week talking about Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and Microserfs. It had this bit which I thought was really interesting:
"The moment reads two ways. Either it’s about Zuckerberg, for all his billions, being Just Like Us — a slave to the same digital toy to which we’ve subcontracted management of our memories, our personal interactions, and our sense of self-worth — or it’s about how Facebook, born of Zuckerberg’s sense of exclusion, has made us just like him. The notion that the tech visionaries whose inventions colonize our daily lives are actually uploading the virus of their personalities to the global unconscious is an idea that floats through The Social Network; it’s the engine that powers Alex Gibney’s forthcoming documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which stops just short of postulating that every iPhone includes a fragment of poor angry uncharitable emotionally stunted Steve’s immortal soul, like a sliver of wormwood from Mordor."
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-halt-catch-fire-microserfs-douglas-coupland/
If you want to be like Zuck, what is it about you that you are going to infect the world with?