Steve Jobs

I think Steve Jobs was brilliant, creative, innovative, etc.  I'm grateful for the ways he enriched our everyday lives.  And yet.  I have a hard time articulating my discomfort with the global outpouring of grief without sounding downright curmudgeonly (or worse), but there has been something gnawing at me since I saw the various slide shows of the shrines springing up in his memory at Apple stores worldwide.  His death -- and our reaction to his death -- says as much about us as it does about him.  And I'm not sure that it's all good.  What does the death of Steve jobs say about our reliance -- not just in a practical sense, but in a spiritual sense -- on technology?  Andy Crouch has written an essay that says it better than I every could.  An excerpt:

Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.

That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—"cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence. And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms that deliver our disburdened lives.