CARRIE-ANN BIONDI
You guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. But now, are you becoming The Man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man!
—Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, April 20th, 2010
The name “Steve Jobs” has become synonymous with success. Apple products such as the wildly popular iPod and iPhone as well as the iMac computer have made him a household name in America. His self-made wealth and brash public persona might lead many to think that he is the epitome of the “greedy capitalist” looking only to maximize the bottom line.
Most people are surprised to learn that Jobs became successful precisely because he did not embody that stereotype. In fact, he possessed counter-cultural qualities and repeatedly placed himself at tremendous financial risk. In a touching move to set the record straight, his son, Reed, took aside one of Jobs’s biographers to tell him that “his father was not a cold profit-seeking businessman but was motivated by a love of what he did and a pride in the products he was making” (Steve Jobs, p. 538). Jobs could have retired a multi-millionaire at age thirty, but he didn’t. He strove to develop the best possible Apple products until he was too ill with cancer to do so.
Moreover, and perhaps even more surprising to many, Jobs is no exception in this regard. Contrary to popular belief, what drives capitalism, in the sense of genuinely free enterprise, is the creative individualism of idiosyncratic entrepreneurs. They are not afraid to stand outside the mainstream and pursue their own vision. These qualities allow them to “see gaps” of opportunity in the world. The alleged paradox of Jobs’s counter-cultural attitude and capitalist success is only an apparent paradox.
The Alleged Paradox
In the popular imagination, the now infamous “one percent” at the top of the economic food chain is populated by conscienceless sharks like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987) or callous managers like Bill Lumbergh in Office Space (1999). Alternatives to these images have been few. On the one hand, we have the virtuously struggling small business owner, such as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). On the other hand, we tolerate the successful business owner so long as he redeems his capitalist ways by engaging in philanthropy or has his income taxed heavily for redistributionist purposes. In philosophy, the classic version of tolerating economic success so long as it benefits “the least well off,” is John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.
This makes nontraditional innovators like Jobs what Stephen Hicks calls “invisible” businesspeople. It’s not that Jobs as a person was invisible. It would be nearly impossible for one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires not to have his image splashed all over the media. What has largely been absent from both popular and academic representations of the businessperson is the kind of businessperson Jobs embodies: the entrepreneur. Unlike the Gekko and Lumbergh types, entrepreneurs are not focused on maximizing profit or crushing others. Unlike the Bailey types, entrepreneurs do what they love in pursuit of their own vision and don’t feel that they must be altruistic to justify what they do.
If it’s true that businesspeople can best achieve capitalist success by seeking their bliss rather than the bottom line, then whence the stereotype of the greedy capitalist? An answer to this question is found partly in experience. We all know someone who resembles the tight-fisted, penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol. But we can also look to the theory of human nature presented first in Plato’s Republic and then in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Their view of human nature influenced the nineteenth-century economic and political thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Plato, in his Republic, offers a famously long dialogue about the nature and value of justice. In it, Glaucon challenges Socrates to refute the popular view that people do (and should) act justly only because they are afraid of being punished if caught. Most people believe that pleonexia (“greed”) is at the heart of human nature. That is, all people “desire to outdo others,” and “what anyone’s nature naturally pursues as good” is to “get more and more” without end. Although Socrates develops a lengthy response, this view of human nature as greedy and competitive has persisted. It resurfaces in Hobbes’s seventeenth-century claim that “all mankind” has “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” Plato and Hobbes would agree that capitalists, like all people, seek power and possessions, but that they are better than most at acquiring what they seek.
Marx and Engels share this view of human nature, and layer on a historical analysis of material and social conditions that lead to the emergence of capitalism. According to their theory, stages of history necessarily unfold with the growth of population. This creates pressure to increase production and develop new technology. The current stage of history is one of class antagonism, in which the bourgeoisie or capitalists (the few property owners) oppress the proletariat (the many propertyless workers). Oppression occurs because capitalists create private property laws to own the means of production so that they can protect what they can extort. They then use their legally protected economic power to extract every ounce of productivity from propertyless workers through “wage slavery” in order to maximize profit. Workers become alienated from themselves, their products, and one another under such a system. No one sees his product as a craft that is part of himself, but rather as a thing that he makes only for the wage it brings. People then see themselves and others reduced to a “cash value,” trading their alienated goods for others’ alienated goods just to survive.
These thinkers’ influence extends to the present day, largely shaping the public’s assumption that business inherently treats people merely as expendable means in the endless pursuit of money. Such ideas are captured in Benjamin Barber’s popular view about business, which in part targets Jobs: “McWorld . . . forges global markets rooted in consumption and profit” (Jihad vs. McWorld, pp. 6–7) and mesmerizes people everywhere with “fast music, fast computers, and fast food—MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s” (p. 4). On Barber’s view, globalized capitalism leads to homogenization and hedonism in its pursuit of the bottom line.
For those who rebel against capitalism (as it is depicted by writers like Marx, Engels, and Barber), the alternative is to fight “The Man.” The Man is represented as a wealthy businessman in a suit and tie—a symbol of modernity’s market-oriented status quo, with its alienation, large bureaucracy, and uniformity. Theodore Roszak dubs this the “technocracy,” where a small group of “experts” efficiently manage as much of life as possible while excluding non-experts from the centers of power. The larger culture is controlled by being entertained with affordable consumer goods that distract them from what’s going on. Counter-cultural renegades “drop out” of this production-and-consumption cycle and live outside the system, seeing business success as co-optation, selling out, and the death of individuality.
This adversarial juxtaposition of business and counter-culture has immense traction, as can be seen in Jon Stewart’s half-joking challenge lobbed on The Daily Show at his friend Jobs. “You guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. But now, are you becoming The Man?” (Steve Jobs, p. 518). The incident concerned the 2010 controversy over which apps could be downloaded to the iPhone. Apple had decreed that pornography and controversial political cartoons could not be.
Given the socio-historical backdrop, we can see why “counter-cultural capitalism” is generally regarded as a contradiction.
Ways of Being Counter-Cultural
To understand why counter-culture and capitalism are not inherently enemies, we first need to unpack the idea of “counter-culture.” The obvious and basic sense of the phrase is for us to be in opposition to our culture. What it means to be counter-cultural thus depends on the content of the culture that we’re opposed to, which is also relative to a time period. Since cultures are not monolithic, we also need to specify the features of the culture that we refuse to accept.
Just as important as the content of a culture that one is countering is the way in which individuals can go against the norms of the larger culture. There are at least three different ways in which people can be counter-cultural: existential, emotional, and cognitive (thanks to David Kelley for suggesting this terminology). These three counter-cultural categories are often associated with specific time periods or societies. However, since these are ways of being that are independent of content, they can be manifested by anyone who counters any culture at any time.
Existential counter-culture is marked by rejection of the world as such and whatever rules and norms exist in that world. Since adults are those who create the rules and laws, the saying “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” became popular with the existential counter-culture crowd. Experimentation is exalted as a way to alter one’s perception of reality, to “drop out” of it for a while. This kind of counter-culture was popularized by the hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They embraced Timothy Leary’s advocacy of psychedelic drugs, the folk and rock music of artists such as Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, and the Beat poetry of Allen Ginsberg.
Those who are emotionally counter-cultural endorse the Romantic notion of passionate self-expression. Romanticism’s heyday occurred during the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century with literary figures such as William Wordsworth and Johann Goethe. Romantics rebel against the Enlightenment value of reason as well as the scientific method and the Industrial Revolution. They tend to exalt nature over civilization, and idealize the Bohemian image of the starving artist in a garret who must suffer for “living his truth.”
Cognitive counter-culture exists when we reflectively choose our own values distinct from (and often counter to) what others believe. A few traits are distinctive of this kind of counter-culture. These include independence of mind, using reason to reach autonomously held beliefs, integrity, and the courage to take risks and stand alone in our convictions. Unlike the first two kinds of counter-culture, this one is explicitly more intellectual and is not suspicious of technology or science.
A prominent example of this less-discussed form of counter-culture is “techno-geek,” which overlapped with and outlived hippie counter-culture. Techno-geeks devoured the crypto-libertarian science fiction of authors like Robert Heinlein, and they ushered in the computer revolution. They started out tinkering with circuit boards in garages and hacking into computer and phone systems, and later became computer engineering and programming titans in Silicon Valley. As we learn from Luke Dormehl’s Apple Revolution, these individuals comprised the large bulk of Jobs’s milieu, sharing with him the desire “to claim high-tech for the masses” (p. 7). They wanted to create personal computers as “a tool of liberation” (p. 21), so that people could live authentically as informed individuals.
The Entrepreneurial Spirit Solution
Within capitalism, some people may be driven toward business pursuits by purely monetary goals. They might sometimes even be financially successful in doing so. However, that is not what resides at the heart of satisfying and meaningful long-term business success.
Entrepreneurs manifest a variety of traits, including creativity, courage, initiative, perseverance, integrity, and resilience in the face of failure. Such individuals typically work long hours and many years without vacations, intent on solving puzzles and engaging with tasks they love that push them to the limits of their intellect and endurance (see the article by Stephen Hicks and the contributions to Be the Solution). These are characteristics that they share in common with those who are cognitively counter-cultural. The asset of greatest (personal and social) value is what Ayn Rand calls “the creative mind.” We need to develop our minds at least to some degree through conscious choice in order to be productive in the task of living. Creativity is the bedrock on which we can build more actualized forms of productivity through entrepreneurship. Breakthroughs are possible when we give our mind free rein to think beyond the constraints of what has been created before.
The creativity of those engaging in pursuits that liberate our potential for bringing value into the world is but a necessary precondition for offering something that others wish to trade for. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi underscores the point that successful entrepreneurship requires more than the personal creativity that often accompanies counter-cultural personalities. It also requires the right context and social conditions for the creative individual to succeed. Creativity exists when someone introduces a new idea or product into some specific domain (such as computers) and those who are somehow responsible for that domain allow the change to take hold.
Csikszentmihalyi observes that creativity is fostered best in societies that protect wealth-creation and allow space for innovation to exist and be recognized. Rand recognizes this in her moral defense of capitalism, arguing that it is a system that empowers individuals with the freedom to create and be rewarded for their efforts (“What Is Capitalism?”). Steve Jobs also sees the link between free markets and innovation: “If people copied or stole our software, we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected, there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started” (Apple Revolution, pp. 430–31).
The iCon
Steve Jobs became a multi-media business giant precisely because his counter-cultural attitude and charismatic personality came along in the socially liberating decades of late-twentieth-century America. Dreams could come true from good ideas and scraps of metal welded on a workbench in teenagers’ garages.
As a youth, it was clear that Jobs was outside the mainstream. He was anti-authoritarian and fiercely individualistic, feeling free to ignore rules that didn’t make sense to him, experiment with drugs, and drop out of Reed College. He was a fruitarian, fasted, and was devoted in his own way to Zen Buddhism (iCon, pp. 12–22). This is where his similarities to existential and emotional counter-culturalism end, however.
Jobs was no stereotypical non-conformist. He enthusiastically took his share of psychedelic drugs, but did not embrace “the hippie ethic of putting out the least possible effort” (p. 17). Beneath his hippie exterior was a passionate drive to create and to succeed. As he put it, he wanted to “put a ding in the universe” (Apple Revolution, p. 43). Jobs’s objective was not to counter capitalism, but to change the world. In order to do this, he drew on the best talent from the cognitive counter-cultural milieu he grew up in. Launching a series of brilliant advertising campaigns, he pitted Apple “underdog” techno-geeks against “Establishment” computer giants such as Bill Gates and IBM who represented conventional mediocrity and impersonality.
Seeing that Jobs was exceptionally driven to succeed at what he was passionate about, key figures in his life looked past his hippie exterior and recognized something special, something they had no idea at the time would change the world. According to Al Alcorn, Atari’s chief engineer who hired Jobs in 1974, Jobs came to the interview “dressed in rags basically, hippie stuff. . . . he was determined to have the job and there was some spark. I really saw the spark in that man, some inner energy, an attitude that he was going to get it done. And he had a vision, too” (p. 23). That vision, combined with the prescience to surround himself with uniquely talented and driven individuals like Steve Wozniak and John Lasseter, led Jobs to found Apple Computer and invest in Pixar. He guided them through financially and personally rocky times to triumph when their innovative products connected with consumers.
Any brief analysis of the positive traits that made Jobs a successful businessperson is bound to oversimplify and push aside other qualities. Being counter-cultural has an abrasive side unconcerned with what others think or with observing conventions that grease the wheels of social interaction. His charismatic personality was a double-edged sword that helped him to create possibilities but also alienate people. He was impatient, quick to judge, and sharp-tongued in ways that left hurt feelings in his wake. He was a demanding perfectionist who expected others to work as hard and care as much about his work as he did. Jobs succeeded when he pulled in the right people and offered a product that found his market’s pulse. He didn’t succeed when his sometimes childish temper and insistence that his idea was valuable even when there was not a large enough market to sustain it prevailed.
The benefits of Jobs’s brash personality far outweighed its disadvantages, however, particularly when tempered by time, experience, and parenthood. His strong inclination to march to the beat of his own drum as well as his knack for imagining himself into the role of a potential product user allowed him to unleash new ideas that the public discovered it wanted. Even Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons, who had snarkily railed in print against the iPad, changed his tune. Lyons admits that Jobs “has an uncanny ability to cook up gadgets that we didn’t know we needed, but then suddenly we can’t live without” (Steve Jobs, p. 496).
One could quote any number of things that Jobs said that reflect his counter-cultural attitude and creative entrepreneurship. For example, in a presentation about the iPad, he emphasized that it embodied “one of the themes of his life,” saying, “The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts” (p. 494). That intersection is where the next “gap” for innovation will exist, and Jobs wanted to be there to embrace it. When reflecting on his legacy, Jobs explains his drive to innovate:
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. . . . Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. . . . The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do—keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying. . . . What drove me? . . . It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me. (Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 570)
These are the words of someone who embraces the multi-faceted ways of being human without reducing our complexity. Indeed, he celebrates it. From Apple’s iconic logo that symbolizes taking a bite of knowledge to the “think different” advertising campaign, Jobs was all about empowering the individual. He summarizes Apple’s vision at the 1997 Macworld Expo:
I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer. . . . they are the creative spirits in this world. They are the people that are not just out to get a job done; they are out to change the world. . . . And we make tools for those kinds of people. (Dormehl, Apple Revolution, pp. 394–95)
Ultimately, though, it is what Jobs produced—both his character and tangible goods—that provides a testament to the inextricable connection between counter-culture and capitalism. The life and work of Steve Jobs reflect the truth in Robert Frost’s insightful lines: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
And what a difference Steve Jobs has made. The next time you download a song from iTunes, remember that this was made possible in no small measure by a person who jeopardized his first Silicon Valley job with Atari so as to journey to “see his guru” in India and got demoted from chairman of the board of and then resigned from Apple Computer—his own company—when his idiosyncratic ways clashed too much with others (iCon, pp. 23, 31, 115–129). Jobs was a person who could think outside the box so well that he could put a world of music and access to information in the palm of your hand.1
1 I am grateful to Kurt Keefner, Shawn Klein, and Joshua Zader, as well as all of the members of The Atlas Society’s monthly online seminar group, for their generous and valuable feedback on an earlier version of this essay, and to David Kelley for proposing the terminology of existential, emotional, and cognitive ways of being counter-cultural.