Ten years after his death, we republish the volume signed by Walter Isaacson with a preface by Massimo Sideri. “Now the theme is to understand his legacy”
According to an ancient myth, in Gordio, in the powerful kingdom between Lydia and Babylon in the eighth century BC, there was a knot that would be untied only by the new king of Asia. One version before the letter of the sword in the stone. It came Alexander the Great, drew his sword and cut the knot.
In fact, the great conqueror did not respect the rules: the knot had to be untied, not severed. But at the same time Alexander became the ruler of Asia.
The myths are cruel, but effective: the expression “Gordian knot” still survives today, synonymous with indestructible problem. And this myth lends itself perfectly to describing the life of Steve Jobs ten years after his death: Jobs severed the Gordian knot of the technology – of what it was believed could be done and of what was not possible to do – without looking anyone in the face, mistreating, judging and crushing those who, according to him, were not up to his dream (even friends). And he became king.
But this is now known. Hagiography has never protected the co-founder of Apple. On the contrary: everyone knows his weaknesses, his emotional detachment from people, his excesses beyond the limit of the civil, like the habit of occupying parking spaces for the disabled. Today, ten years after his death, the most interesting question is not who he was Steve the Great, but what is its legacy for modern society. And this is the biggest surprise that comes from rereading, ten years after its publication, the biography written by Walter Isaacson simply titled Steve Jobs: as if it had developed antibodies against aging, this book already shows that it already contains the investigating and detached eye of the historian alongside that of the chronicler. Steve Jobs it is one of those definitive works, destined to remain “the biography”, not one of many.
For those who have read it, the time has come to reread it: they will be surprised.
For those who have not read it, the time has come to do so: they will be satisfied.
The story of this biography and its author explain the metamorphosis of the printed word, almost as if it were a digital text that has undergone changes, enrichments, new links. Isaacson, a high-ranking journalist who was editor-in-chief of “Time”, but also the CEO and president of CNN, started from numerous talks with many of the aforementioned protagonists, including Jobs himself. It is the only “authorized” biography, but not in the sense of having been “approved”, even if it was Jobs himself, since 2004, who contacted Isaacson to ask him to work there. (As Jobs told Isaacson, “I don’t even want to read it, this is his book.”) The project only started in 2009. So Isaacson had two years to work on it.
But the quality of the biography doesn’t stop there.
The book is a manual to avoid the determinism that develops in adults (therefore it should be recommended to children, but even more so to all of us who fall into it with age). Testify that anything is possible: as long as you are the right person, at the right time and in the right place. It is the Time.news – in some ways unrepeatable for other characters who have made history but who have not had an Isaacson next to – of the algorithm itself of a Revolution. With foresight he does not linger on useless myths, on the contrary he destroys them, such as the one according to which Jobs would have chosen the logo thinking to the father of artificial intelligence Alan Turing who had committed suicide by poisoning an apple before biting it. “I wish I’d thought that,” Jobs told Isaacson. The truth is that the apples were those of Jobs’ radical diets and the orchards of the commune he frequented from a young age. And also the term Macintosh is a variant of the name of McIntosh apples, although it was not thought of by Jobs but by Jef Raskin, the man who in 1981 wanted to build a computer that could be closed like a briefcase: in the world the laptop.
Steve Jobs’s life seems to precede the era of the illusion of knowing everything online. An era in which to keep a magazine such as the “Whole Earth Catalog” or store a title (stay hungry, stay foolish), it could change your life. Perhaps for this reason, to those who have the years to remember it, reading leaves a curious sense of melancholy for a world very near and far. The same text today appears less focused on the Apple era and more on the journalistic report of that unrepeatable historical moment that changed not the digital world, but our lives. A small ancient world of technology when the Silicon Valley it could still have a human face.
It can have a strange cathartic effect to immerse oneself in the text: we were part of a cultural revolution perhaps without being fully aware of it.
Rereading his life with the detachment that only years can provide, it becomes clear how Jobs left a great lesson with his famous speech to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005: the dots that lead us to be what we are cannot be connected by looking ahead of us, to the future, but only by turning to the past. In the book there are the different Steve Jobs that could have been and that we would never have known (the future projection of the hippy traveling to India, like the graduate of Reed College, a path that never ended). These alternative lives appear and disappear in the reading, giving way to the Jobs we all know, the father of white technology, the only one capable of opposing Sony’s black domination.
Jobs, ten years later, becomes the metaphor of technological modernity: as in Viscount halved by Italo Calvino – where the protagonist leaves for the war against the Turks, he is hit by a cannon shot that separates the good half from the bad one, but only after the fortunate reunion is he able to return a complete person with all his contradictions but also the positives -, so the visionary and intelligent half Jobs could not have achieved anything without the hysterical and cruel half Jobs with those around him.
The truth is that Jobs was like the innovation that erases, crushes and regenerates in one act. A reincarnation of the Schumpeterian creature: the creative-destruction.
Isaacson does not forget the influence that several Italians have had on Jobs’ life. One for all is the designer and architect Mario Bellini, who had designed the first “personal computer”, theOlivetti P101. Jobs flirted with him for a long time. As Bellini himself told me in the Corriere della Sera: “Jobs came to see me twice. I had my studio in Corso Venezia and he came to try to convince me in every way to let me be carried away to design Apple products ».
Bellini did not accept.
The Mac it could have been “designed in California”, as we read under all Apple products, and signed Mario Bellini.
But another Italian should be remembered, to integrate this well-documented biography. The book describes how in 1971 from Intel the revolutionary came out 4004 microprocessor, the first CPU in a single chip. On that first microchip, which also changed the history of Apple, we read FF: Federico Faggin. Let’s not let him end up like Antonio Meucci.
The volume on newsstands with the “Corriere della Sera”
Ten years ago, on October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs died at the age of 56. On this occasion, the Corriere della Sera, in collaboration with Mondadori, sends to newsstands the famous biography of the Apple co-founder signed by Walter Isaacson, former editor in chief of “Time”, CEO and president of CNN. The volume Steve Jobs – translated by Paolo Canton, Laura Serra and Luca Vanni, with a new preface by Massimo Sideri, which we present here in an excerpt – comes out on 5 October and remains on newsstands for a month at the price of 12.90 euros, in addition to the cost of the newspaper. Through more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs, over the course of two years, and more than one hundred interviews with family, friends, rivals and colleagues, Isaacson offers a well-rounded portrait. The result “is a book about the life marked by ups and downs and the tormentedly charismatic personality of a creative entrepreneur, whose passion for perfection and whose fierce charisma have revolutionized six sectors of activity: personal computers, animated films, music, telephony, tablet PCs and electronic publishing “, writes Isaacson in the introduction to the book, published for the first time in 2011. Despite having personally collaborated in the drafting of the biography, Jobs did not impose any restrictions on the text nor did he pretend to read it before of the publication. “Jobs was neither a boss nor a model man; he was not the ideal person to emulate – continues Isaacson -. […] Its history therefore has both an instructive and a warning value, it is full of lessons on innovation, character, leadership and principles ».
October 3, 2021 (change October 3, 2021 | 19:43)
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