What Steve Jobs Understood That Our Politicians Don’t

As in most other big American cities, it would be hard to walk 100 feet in Washington and not slam into somebody who’s using something that Apple created — an iPhone or an iPad or a Macbook Pro. And so it’s staggering to contemplate just how little of Steve Jobs’s genius ever permeated the nation’s politics, and how much he understood about modern America that those who govern it still don’t.

Political Times
Political Times

Matt Bai’s analysis and commentary.

After all, if you wanted to really get a picture of how the national culture has evolved in the last few decades, particularly in the urban areas that drive economic growth, you could do a lot worse than to study Apple’s string of innovations. Mr. Jobs understood, intuitively, that Americans were breaking away from the last era’s large institutions and centralized decision-making, that technology would free them from traditional workplaces and the limits of a physical marketplace.

This was the underlying point of “think different” — that our choices were no longer dictated by the whims of huge companies or the offerings at the local mall. This was the point of a computer that enabled you to customize virtually every setting, no matter how inconsequential, so that no two users had the exact same experience. This was the essential insight behind devices driven by a universe of new apps, downloaded in seconds depending on your lifestyle and interests.

At the same time, while Mr. Jobs saw a society moving inexorably toward individual choice, he also seemed to understand that such individuality breeds detachment and confusion. And so Apple sought to fill that vacuum by making itself into more than a manufacturer; it became a kind of community, too, with storefronts and stickers and a membership that enabled you to get your e-mail, or video-conference with your friends, or post a Web page of your vacation photos.

In his obituary of Mr. Jobs on The Times’s Web site, John Markoff quoted him as explaining his aversion to market research this way: “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” In other words, while Mr. Jobs tried to understand the problems that technology could solve for his buyer, he wasn’t going to rely on the buyer to demand specific solutions, just so he could avoid ever having to take a risk. This is what’s commonly known as leading.

If Mr. Jobs and Apple grappled successfully with the complexities of modern life, however, then American politics, across the ideological spectrum, mostly wished them away. In our political debate, there is no compatibility between the notions of customization and community, the twin pillars of the digital age. It’s always one or the other.

Either we’re being told that centralized, 20th-century systems can never be changed to accommodate more individual flexibility (like say, decoupling health care from employment), or we’re being told that all federal programs are wasteful and that every American should basically fend for himself. Either we’re supposed to rely entirely on large institutions, or we’re supposed to rely only on ourselves.

And no politician wants to really innovate without focus groups, to make a sustained argument for any solution that might entail risk or imagination. Our parties are less like Apple and more like General Motors, churning out this year’s streamlined model of the same cars it was asking you to buy 20 years ago. Even the circuitry of the democracy remains essentially unchanged; a nation of voters who can find their cars and pay their mortgages online still can’t envision the day when they can cast their votes from an iPad.

This cultural gulf, between Mr. Jobs’s America and the one our political leaders inhabit, is largely generational, and it goes long way toward explaining the enthusiasm among younger voters for Barack Obama in 2008. Mr. Obama’s campaign, conceived outside the party establishment and built on a platform of online membership, felt like a high-tech reimagining of politics. It seemed to presage an age of government that could champion both individuality and community, a government that made programs more responsive and flexible without eroding our sense of shared responsibility.

It’s safe to say that Mr. Obama no longer inspires much of that, at least partly because whatever more futuristic governing vision he might have had ran smack into economic realities and into the orthodoxies of both parties’ aging establishments. Three years later, he’s sounding a lot more like a conventional Democrat running for re-election and much less like a political innovator.

But generations will, inevitably, turn over, and Americans who grew up using Steve Jobs’s gizmos and apps will ultimately inherit a governing culture that feels dated and stifling. Perhaps then Mr. Jobs’s contributions to the American culture will at last reach the city where his Apple logo has become so visible, inspiring a government to try to think a little bit different, too.