I bristle every time I hear the media call Steve Jobs a hippie. I watched the 60 Minutes interview with Walter Isaacson, and was appalled by the way Steve Kroft spit out "hippie" with undisguised disdain. What does the media know from hippie? Steve Jobs was several years younger than me, and I was too young to have run away to Haight-Ashbury and be a real hippie. What I became in the early seventies was a "freak." Hippies were long dead by then. A lot of the things we associate with hippies and the Sixties, were actually much more culturally predominant in the early Seventies. Long hair, hard rock, marijuana use, etc., were not culturally or geographically widespread until then. Don't believe me? Look at high school yearbooks, and try to find many young males with long hair before 1970. The media seems to dwell on the social unrest of 1968, but the real peak of anti-war protest occurred in Seventies. Kent State happened in 1970, but much less well known is the intense riot in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1971, when much of the business district along Central Ave. adjacent to the University of New Mexico campus was burned down.
Steve Jobs may have taken LSD, and appropriated some of the hippie ethos, but I really doubt if Mr. Jobs had any intention of renouncing his upper middleclass comforts and privileges. Actual hippies of the 60s were highly ambivalent about technology, if not downright hostile to it. One counter example would be Richard Brautigan's (an actual bonafide hippie) poem All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace:
I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. Of course if Steve Jobs were to have his way with these machines, they would have all been running Steve's heavy handed proprietary operating system! |
