Bay matters

I just finished reading the Steve Jobs bio, and found it compelling and certainly recommendable. In fact, if you’re a part of the modern digital world, it’s not going out of bounds to call this book essential reading. By being the life story of Jobs, it’s also necessarily the life story of Apple and the personal computer, and how those early, clunky home machines rapidly morphed into the current gizmoverse of tablets, smartphones and data clouds. It’s a mind-boggling tale of which we’re all a part.

Some things the book makes clear about Jobs. (1) Totally brilliant man. (2) Flaming asshole. Often. (3) A raging crybaby. Literally. Numerous spurts of crying when enraged or emotional. (4) Maybe the most influential and powerful acidhead ever. A serious devotee of the true psychedelic experience and a genuine product of the ’60s Bay Area. (5) For being as smart as he was, he completely blew it when it came to his cancer treatment. By being a stubborn adherent of freaky alternative fruitarian and vegan diets and fasting and all this other acidhead nutritional stuff (only acidheads, as far as I can tell, ever use the word “mucousless”), he refused to have the surgery he should have had immediately upon diagnosis of his peculiar form of pancreatic cancer. If he had gone for the surgery right away, instead of waiting months and wasting precious time, he would, I have little doubt, be alive today. Valuable lesson—the AMA, on occasion, does have its place.

But when you think about it—the iMac, the MacBook, iTunes, the Apple Stores, the iPhones, the iPads, all masterminded and shepherded into existence by this one man and his teams—wow. Extraordinary.

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Reading the Jobs book reminded me that I’ve lived through two bonafide cultural revolutions in my lifetime—The Psychedelic Revolution of the ’60s and the Computer Digital Gizmo Revolution that began in the ’80s and is ongoing.

What’s striking, upon reflection, is both of these revolts were centered in the same place on the planet—the San Francisco Bay Area. Indeed, as the Jobs story makes clear, the second revolution (featuring a major transformation of modern lifestyles due to computers, gizmos, data processing, etc.) was umbilically connected to the first (from which we get feminism, environmentalism, new ageism, racial egalitarianism, sexual explosionism, drugism, rehabism, and lots of blinky lights), and both had their Ground Zeroes, so to speak, in The City.

San Francisco, man. What a place.