The Reality Distortion Field of Steve Jobs
JAMES EDWIN MAHON
It was all a trap, set by a race of beings who could make a man believe he was seeing anything they wished him to see.
—Star Trek, “The Cage,” 1964
In the Star Trek universe, the Talosians are a humanoid race with extremely large heads and diminutive bodies who live on the planet Talos IV. They were once a technologically advanced race, but a nuclear holocaust killed off most of them and left their planet almost uninhabitable.
The few surviving Talosians moved underground and became dependent on their ability to create illusions, for themselves and for others. They became addicted to these illusions, and eventually they lost the ability to repair their own technology. They also began to capture travelers and to use the contents of their minds to create new illusions.
In 2236 the SS Columbia crashed on Talos IV. All were killed except a woman, Vina, who was badly injured. Although the Talosians did not know enough about human anatomy to restore her face and body to its original form, and she remained disfigured, they were able to give her the illusion that she was beautiful.
Eighteen years later the Talosians lure the USS Enterprise to their planet with a weak fake distress call from the SS Columbia. A search party led by Captain Christopher Pike beams down on to the planet’s surface. They are given the illusion of having found a group of survivors from the SS Columbia, including a beautiful young woman survivor, “Vina.” Using her as bait, the Talosians kidnap Pike and keep him in a cage underground to determine if he is a suitable specimen for breeding a race of human slaves with the actual Vina. However, Pike resists “Vina” in a number of illusory forms, and he is able to block the mind-reading power of the Talosians with his primitive human emotions.
Pike manages to escape, and reaches the surface. Threatened by the appearance of the Talosians, Pike, with two other crew members, and Vina, prepare to die rather than become slaves. The Talosians decide to let them go, although the humans are the Talosians’ last chance for survival. They refuse Pike’s offer of opening up diplomatic relations with the Federation in order to get help, telling him “Your race would eventually discover our power of illusion and destroy itself, too.”
Vina refuses to leave, because on the ship, away from Talos IV, she would appear as she is, horribly disfigured. Pike realizes that the Talosian illusion is necessary for Vina, and lets her stay. However, the Talosians give Vina the illusion that Pike stays behind to live with her, and they show Pike her illusion. The leader of the Talosians, ‘The Keeper’, tells Pike: “She has an illusion and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant” (“The Cage,” pilot episode of Star Trek, 1964).
Thirteen years later, Pike, now Fleet Captain, is involved in a terrible accident involving delta rays. He is paralyzed and disfigured, and remains confined under medical surveillance in an electric chair at Starbase 11. His former science officer, Spock, kidnaps him and illegally flies him back to Talos IV on the USS Enterprise, pursued by Captain Kirk in another vessel. In the course of a trial for court martial, Spock explains what happened to Pike on Talos IV years ago. With Pike’s agreement, and Kirk’s permission, Pike is beamed down to the planet’s surface. The Talosians, who have continued to maintain an illusion for Vina of her being beautiful, create the illusion for Pike (and Vina) of him being physically able and handsome again. Pike and Vina begin the rest of their life together on Talos IV (“The Menagerie,” Parts 1 and 2, episodes 16 and 17, Season One of Star Trek, 1966).
The Trouble with Tribble
It was an Apple Computer, Inc., software engineer working on the Macintosh computer, Guy L. “Bud” Tribble, who in 1981 said that Steve Jobs was able to create a “reality distortion field” like the Talosians from Star Trek (Steve Jobs, p. 117). That Tribble was a fan of the classic TV show is not surprising, given that one of the most famous episodes of the show is entitled “The Trouble with Tribbles.” He attributed this power to Jobs while trying to explain things to Andy Hertzfeld, a software engineer who came on board the Macintosh project to work with him. Tribble told Hertzfeld everything that the two of them had to do, and showed him the schedule for completing the Macintosh in about ten months’ time. Feeling overwhelmed, Hertzfeld said that they couldn’t get it done. As he tells the story:
HERTZFELD: If you know the schedule is off-based, why don’t you correct it?
TRIBBLE: Well, it’s Steve. Steve insists that we’re shipping in early 1982, and won’t accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field.
HERTZFELD: A what?
TRIBBLE: A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he is not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.
HERTZFELD: What else?
TRIBBLE: Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he’s really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it. (Revolution in the Valley, p. 24)
About this exchange Herzfeld later wrote:
The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently. Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed.
Reality Distortion Field
Steve Jobs had the ability to convince anyone of anything that he believed. He had the ability to distort your perception of reality, at least while he was in your presence, so that it conformed to his reality. Like the Talosians, he could create a reality distortion field around himself. Although other people might believe that something was impossible (such as finishing an incredibly difficult project in a short amount of time), once Steve got going on them, their perception of reality became distorted, so that they came to believe that the impossible was indeed possible, like he did. As Deb Coleman, one of the early Macintosh team members and a long time Jobs insider, once said: “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible” (Steve Jobs, p. 119). At least, you didn’t believe it was impossible after Jobs was done talking with you—even if you knew that he was exercising his reality distorting power over you.
Jobs’s ability to distort people’s perception of reality and make them believe what he believed was not limited to employees at Apple. In his keynote presentation speeches at Macworld Expos, Apple Expos, and Worldwide Developers Conferences, colloquially referred to as “Stevenotes,” he had the same effect on his audiences. He would get them to abandon all the cynicism that they had, and to believe with him. To quote tech journalist Andrea Dudrow, writing in 2000:
If you’ve ever been to a Macworld trade show, or any other event where Steve jobs has been booked to speak, you know all about the so-called Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. This field is created around the Apple CEO and is equal in size to the auditorium in which he is speaking. He says things like “insanely great” and “this is really exciting,” and you find yourself pumping your fist in the air, hissing “Yesss, yesss!” . . . And then the speech is over and you leave the auditorium and suddenly realize that you just got emotional over an ad for computers, that you were up out of your chair screaming and yelling about new software, that it was all because this guy, Steve Jobs, made it seem so darned great. (“Notes from the Epicenter”)
The effect of such talks on their audiences did linger, even in the face of contrary evidence. As Dudrow adds:
I remember sitting in a New York City bar late one night trying to shake off the effects of the Reality Distortion Field, listening to a publisher of a Mac-centric technology magazine complain about what a jerk Jobs was. . . . How could this possibly be the same Steve Jobs who I had so recently heard gushing about having the greatest job on the planet? The same Steve Jobs who had moved me to actually get out of my seat and cheer for a measly software revision (and me, a hardened, cynical journalist)?
So powerful was Steve Jobs’s ability to make his audience believe what he believed that it inspired a book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience, by Carmine Gallo. It also inspired Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, to draw a Dilbert cartoon in 2010, entitled “Dogbert the Pitchman.” In the cartoon, Dilbert constructs a machine that emits a reality distortion field. His talking pet dog, Dogbert, uses it on his audience, and tells them, “Our product is nothing but a block of wood, and yet you need three of them.”
What Steve Jobs’s reality-distorting ability amounted to was the ability to make a completely unreasonable demand, which was nevertheless completely reasonable to him, and to convince people that it was reasonable, or to make a ridiculous claim about a product, which he nevertheless believed, and to convince people that it was true. But was it morally wrong to do this?
The Ethics of Reality Distortion
Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, returned to the topic of Jobs’s reality distortion field in his blog in 2012, and wrote the following about the depiction of Jobs in Isaacson’s best-selling warts-and-all biography, Steve Jobs:
I’m fascinated by the discussion of how Jobs developed what became known as the Reality Distortion Field. . . . One way to look at Jobs’s life is that he was a liar and a con man with a gift for design. According to Isaacson’s reporting, Jobs had no love for truth. Jobs learned how to lie, cajole, manipulate, and charm until people believed whatever he wanted them to believe. By all accounts, Jobs’s mixture of cruel and unsavory skills caused people to produce seemingly impossible results. (“Reality Distortion Field”)
Did Steve Jobs do anything morally wrong in distorting people’s perception of reality? Adams, following Isaacson, says that Jobs was a liar. It’s certainly true that Jobs lied. For example, while Jobs was working for Atari, Inc., in 1976 he got Wozniak (who was employed at Hewlett-Packard at the time) to finish work on the video game Breakout. He lied to Wozniak that Atari had paid them only $750, and he gave him $375. In fact, Atari had paid Jobs $5,000 for the work that Wozniak had done in reducing the number of chips used in the circuit board (Steve Jobs, p. 53). Jobs also lied about the computer Apple released in 1983, the Apple Lisa, not being named after his biological daughter, Lisa, born to his ex-girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan (p. 93). And he lied to the authorities that he was not Lisa’s father because he was sterile (“The Trouble with Steve Jobs”). Many more examples of Jobs’s lies can be found in Walter Isaacson’s biography.
However, as bad as Jobs’s lies were, there is nothing remarkable about his ability to tell lies. Almost anyone can tell lies. Even Spock lies to Captain Kirk that he has received a subspace transmission from Captain Pike on Starbase 11 in “The Menagerie” episode of Star Trek. This is despite the fact that, as Dr. Leonard H. “Bones” McCoy says to Kirk, while they are trying to figure out what has happened, “The simple fact that he’s a Vulcan means that he is incapable of telling a lie!” (Kirk’s wise response is, “He’s also half-human.”)
Jobs’s ability to tell lies is not what people mean by his ability to distort people’s perception of reality. They mean that Jobs could transform their perception of reality, so that they came to believe what they previously did not believe, and to believe what he believed. However, here it’s important to distinguish between the power of the Talosians and the power of Steve Jobs.
The Talosians can create illusions, both for themselves and for others. The illusions they create for themselves are such that they know that the illusion is an illusion. The illusions they create for others can be such that others know that the illusion is an illusion (such as Vina’s illusion of being beautiful, and Pike’s illusion of being physically able and handsome). In the case of this first kind of illusion, the knowing illusions, those who have them have agreed to have them. They prefer them to reality. There’s nothing morally wrong with the Talosians creating these consensual illusions, either for themselves or for others.
However, the illusions the Talosians create for others can be such that those who have the illusion do not know that the illusion is an illusion (such as Pike’s illusion of having found survivors from the USS Columbia when he beams down on to the surface of Talos IV). In the case of the second kind of illusion, the unknowing illusions, those who have them have not agreed to have them. They are simply deceived.
Non-consensual deception is morally wrong, unless it can be shown to be morally justified. The most common moral justifications for non-consensual deception are benevolence (the deceived person will benefit from the deception), and self-defense or other-defense (the deceived person is attempting to harm [innocent] yourself, or is attempting to harm [innocent] other people). Mere self-interest can never be a moral justification for non-consensual deception. The Talosians deceived the crew of the USS Enterprise because they wished to breed a race of human slaves to help them survive. This purely self-interested justification is clearly not sufficient to justify their non-consensual deception of Pike and the rest of the crew, and so it was morally wrong.
There are three ways in which what Steve Jobs did differed from what the Talosians did. First, although the Talosians created illusions for themselves, they knew that they were illusions, and they could always distinguish between them and reality. They did not deceive themselves, in other words. Jobs, however, does seem to have believed at least some of the illusions that he created for himself. For example, after an early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in October 2003, he refused to have surgery to remove the tumor for nine whole months (Steve Jobs, p. 454). By that time, it had grown and spread, making it impossible to remove. At least sometimes, then, Jobs deceived himself.
Second, when the Talosians created illusions for others, either consensual illusions or non-consensual illusions, they knew that they were creating illusions. They knew that they were false. When they created non-consensual illusions for others, they knew that they were deceiving others. However, when Jobs created illusions for others, he seems to have believed at least some (or all?) of these illusions to be true—he did not believe them to be illusions, in other words. If he did not believe them to be illusions, then he was not intending to deceive people. Indeed, at least one way of understanding what Tribble, Herzfeld, and Dudrow are saying is that Jobs was not intentionally deceptive, at least in many cases. He got people to believe what he believed, even though they ‘knew’ that what he believed was wrong. If he was deceived himself, then he was not being intentionally deceptive, and what he was doing does not stand in need of the same moral justification.
Third, the Talosians always created illusions, either for themselves or for others, whether consensual or non-consensual. However, in many cases, the perceptions of ‘reality’ that Jobs ‘distorted’ were not, in fact, perceptions of reality at all. Rather, they were what other people believed was reality—beliefs about how difficult a task was, how long a job would take, whether something would work, as well as whether or not a product would be life-transforming. What Jobs was able to do was to convince other people to abandon their own beliefs, and instead to believe what he believed—that the task was not too difficult, that the job would not take that long, that the thing would work, and that the product was life-transforming. As a result of changing their beliefs, at least in some cases, people did what they previously believed could not be done. As Coleman put it, “You did the impossible,” which of course means that the ‘impossible’ was not, in fact, impossible.
Indeed, we can understand Jobs as having doing the opposite of what the Talosians did, at least in some cases. Rather than providing people with illusions, Jobs freed them from their illusions. He liberated them from their false beliefs. He ended their deception. We only have to think of the TV commercial that launched the Macintosh in 1984, which depicted people as brainwashed prisoners of “Big Brother” IBM, and the Macintosh as their liberation. Freeing people from their illusions does not stand in need of the same moral justification, if indeed it stands in need of any moral justification at all.
Scott Adams has said about Steve Jobs that
The biggest head-scratcher about Jobs’s career is how many times he transformed entire industries: computers, phones, music, animation, and more. And each success happened with a different mix of Apple employees. Do you believe all of that success was luck, or perhaps luck plus extraordinary business skill? Or is it possible something else was happening? I don’t believe in magic. But I can’t rule out the possibility that reality has a user interface. Perhaps the Reality Distortion Field was exactly what it looked like. (“Reality Distortion Field”)
Adams’s point is that Jobs had a grasp on reality—or that he transformed reality. Either way, he did not have illusions, at least about the future. In her online article from 2000, Andrea Dudrow wrote:
So what is it with Steve Jobs? Here’s a notoriously cranky guy in charge of a relatively small computer company, from which he was once ousted in a boardroom coup, and who subsequently burned through most of $100 million trying (and failing) to start a successful business (remember Next Computer?)—and yet he is revered by fans and critics alike. (“Notes from the Epicenter”)
But by the time of his death in 2011, Jobs, with the help of all of those he affected by his reality distortion field, had revolutionized not merely the personal computing industry (the Macintosh), but also the music industry (iTunes and the iPod), the phone industry (iPhone), digital books and magazines (the iPad), the digital content storage industry (iCloud), the animated film industry (Pixar), and the retail industry (the Apple Retail Store). Indeed, given that the World Wide Web was created on the NeXT Computer that Jobs designed after he was booted out of Apple in the mid-1980s, he may even take some credit for the existence of the web. By the time of his death in October 2011, the company that he founded, now simply known as Apple, Inc., was the most valuable company in the world, and he was the world’s greatest CEO.
None of those people who did what they did under Jobs would have been able to do the things that they did without his having made them believe that the ‘impossible’ was, in fact, possible. His use of his reality distortion field was necessary, to get them to change their beliefs. To get them to think different. And thinking different was necessary for them to do what they did.
The result is that all of us now live in Steve Jobs’s reality.