The dark side of genius

The death of Steve Jobs from cancer perpetuated the legend of the man. The company he founded, Apple, was probably the best-known logo on earth. True to the man, they are at least three variants of the origin of the firm. But what is more interesting is that in using Apple, he transforms the old Judeo Christian myth. The Apple in Eden led to the fall from paradise. The Apple in Jobs was the beginning of a miniaturised paradise, creating a new idea of how obsessive knowledge could make impossible dreams come true.

How does one understand a man dismissed as a weird, long-haired jerk in his younger life? Jobs provided a hint of that in his observation that had Bill Gates popped acid, he might have been a different man. Present in the comment is the debt Jobs owes to the beat generation of the Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley grew out of three distinct cultures. It was a Stanford creation, but it got its research style from the dissenting imaginations of Berkeley, Marxist, Indian and Buddhist. The Silicon Valley brew had a touch of crime and felony to it. It was a place where the psychologically dysfunctional instead of engaging in crime went into innovation. It is this alchemy, this witch’s brew of radicalism, eccentricity, discipline and ambition that one has to acknowledge. The gap between felony and invention was a narrow one and invention was often put to criminal use. It is only within such an ecology that the conman, the hacker, the inventive genius could blend to create a great innovative space. By all emotional standards, Steven Wozniak was almost autistic in his obsession with technology and Jobs, a half conman, half visionary, whose visions fortunately came true. As Michael Malone, a veteran Jobs watcher observed, this was a mixed up site where today’s felony could be the next generation’s career path.
I am emphasising this because Indian myths of Jobs tend to misunderstand his genius. We see the power of invention in Silicon Valley, but we do not see the eccentricity, the criminality, the creativity of the other side of the fence that originally created Silicon Valley. We see our IITs feeding into it but do not realise our IITs are too well behaved, too managerial to contribute to that kind of originality. True Stanford technology and Hewlett Packard discipline were elements of Silicon Valley, but what we miss in the organised world of big business is this eccentric creativity.
Central to the creativity of such cultures were the meetings of Home Brew community. Home Brew was a market, a wild Panchayat for ideas where inventors, entrepreneurs met to dream and discuss a different world. It is out of such groups and their style of thinking and living that PC came both as a commitment to technology and democracy.
I want to emphasise these beginnings in alternative subcultures because our idea of innovation has become managerial. The marketing man is important but one has to begin with the technical genius and then one has to watch the miracle unfold between the two. Wozniak and Jobs provided just that. The technical genius of one complemented the marketing charisma of the other. Jobs almost willed a technology using lies, manipulation, fantasy and sheer obsessiveness to create his dreams. These were unliveable men who helped create some of the most liveable and loveable of technologies. When one watches an Apple product today, one can hardly imagine the first rudimentary constructs and the obsessiveness that was required to create a designer’s dream finish.
There is a third factor one notices in this world of entrepreneurship. It is the ability to tolerate eccentrics, jerks, failures, renegades and obsessives. Present in this space is the wisdom to realise that innovation appears out of the humus of a thousand failures.
We call the gap, the chain of being between a dream and a technological artifact an innovation chain. But innovation chains falsify narratives. They appear linear when they are the fuzzy history of failures and obsessions. It is this ability to survive failure and tinker again and again that creates genius. This is what creates originality. Yet there is so little place for it in India. The Indian genius seems to be in copying. Our pirates seem closer to Jobs than our scientists.
There is something here that we need to think about because our models of innovations are too antiseptic to understand that touch of evil that makes a Jobs or a Gates the geniuses they are. Yet Jobs’ life is also a story of betrayal. As a person Jobs was a cheat and a jerk, a man who manipulated Wozniak. The sheen of celebrity hides the warped nature of the individual. One has to ask somewhere what is the price of such a warped genius. We have to unravel the Apple myth to restate the Dostoevskian elements underlying it.
Eventually there is that obsession with fantasy that every inventor and marketing man needs. It is this jugalbandi between fact and fantasy that creates the Silicon Valleys of the mind. Bengaluru is no Silicon Valley. It is an extrusion, an outsourcing of its later chapters. We happily dub it a Silicon Valley to underline the fact that we are second hand partners in a dream hatched and constructed elsewhere. I think if we understand this our innovative style would be different and we would become a society of more interesting people. The sadness is our limited success blinds us to the real eccentricity of Wozniak and Jobs. It is a failure both of analysis and storytelling.

The writer is a social science nomad
(MCT)