& Chrisann Brennan: He didn’t know what real connection was. So he was a part of the technology that connected the world. Does that make sense? He made up another kind of connection.
& Lisa: He was a more extreme vegetarian than my mother and I and sharp-focused. One day, he spit out a mouthful of soup after hearing it contained butter. With him, one ate a variety of salads. He believed that great harvests came from arid sources. Pleasure from restraint. He knew the equations that most people didn’t know. Things led to their opposites.
& Alex Gibney: Is that enough? Is making and selling products, even if they’re good, even if they’re the best, enough to make the world a better place?
Andy Grignon: Apple’s a business. And we’ve somehow attached this emotion to a business, which is just there to make money for its shareholders, right? That’s all it is. Nothing more. You know, creating that association was probably one of Steve’s greatest accomplishments.
& Sherry Turkle: I remember the first set of people I interviewed about the iPhone. I’ve been interviewing people about their computers for, you know, decades. I’ve never seen this kind of connection before with an object. In the beginning, the impulse was to sit you down and to show you everything on their iPhone. As time’s gone on, there’s been less of that and more of what I call the «alone together phenomenon.» It has turned out to be an isolating technology.
& Sherry Turkle: It’s a dream machine, and you become fascinated by the world that you can find on these screens. And the face of that technology was Steve Jobs.
& Alex Gibney: I was one of those people who had to have an iPhone. I didn’t want to hear about other products, and I believed against all reason that owning an iPhone made me part of something better. And when it was in my pocket, for every idle moment, my hand was drawn to it, like Frodo’s hand to the ring.
Peter Elkind: The real magic of it is that these myths are surrounding a company that makes phones. A phone is not a mythical device. Um... And it sort of makes you wonder less about Apple than about us.
& Alex Gibney: In Japan, there’s an idea called «mono no aware,» meaning «the deep awareness of things». It celebrates the melancholy of the passing of life and sees more beauty in the fallen leaf than the one on the branch. Maybe that’s what Japan held for Jobs... The sadness of the soul as expressed in the beauty of things.
& Alex Gibney: Perhaps the contradictory nature of our experience with these gadgets mirrors the contradictions in Jobs himself. He was an artist who sought perfection, but could never find peace. He had the focus of a monk, but none of the empathy. He offered us freedom, but only within a closed garden, to which he held the key. To reconcile these contradictions, I think we have to look to the other half of our relationship with Jobs. To ourselves.
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On the IMDb
& Lisa: He was a more extreme vegetarian than my mother and I and sharp-focused. One day, he spit out a mouthful of soup after hearing it contained butter. With him, one ate a variety of salads. He believed that great harvests came from arid sources. Pleasure from restraint. He knew the equations that most people didn’t know. Things led to their opposites.
& Alex Gibney: Is that enough? Is making and selling products, even if they’re good, even if they’re the best, enough to make the world a better place?
Andy Grignon: Apple’s a business. And we’ve somehow attached this emotion to a business, which is just there to make money for its shareholders, right? That’s all it is. Nothing more. You know, creating that association was probably one of Steve’s greatest accomplishments.
& Sherry Turkle: I remember the first set of people I interviewed about the iPhone. I’ve been interviewing people about their computers for, you know, decades. I’ve never seen this kind of connection before with an object. In the beginning, the impulse was to sit you down and to show you everything on their iPhone. As time’s gone on, there’s been less of that and more of what I call the «alone together phenomenon.» It has turned out to be an isolating technology.
& Sherry Turkle: It’s a dream machine, and you become fascinated by the world that you can find on these screens. And the face of that technology was Steve Jobs.
& Alex Gibney: I was one of those people who had to have an iPhone. I didn’t want to hear about other products, and I believed against all reason that owning an iPhone made me part of something better. And when it was in my pocket, for every idle moment, my hand was drawn to it, like Frodo’s hand to the ring.
Peter Elkind: The real magic of it is that these myths are surrounding a company that makes phones. A phone is not a mythical device. Um... And it sort of makes you wonder less about Apple than about us.
& Alex Gibney: In Japan, there’s an idea called «mono no aware,» meaning «the deep awareness of things». It celebrates the melancholy of the passing of life and sees more beauty in the fallen leaf than the one on the branch. Maybe that’s what Japan held for Jobs... The sadness of the soul as expressed in the beauty of things.
& Alex Gibney: Perhaps the contradictory nature of our experience with these gadgets mirrors the contradictions in Jobs himself. He was an artist who sought perfection, but could never find peace. He had the focus of a monk, but none of the empathy. He offered us freedom, but only within a closed garden, to which he held the key. To reconcile these contradictions, I think we have to look to the other half of our relationship with Jobs. To ourselves.
--
On the IMDb