Bill Barol,Thirty-one years ago I stood in Copley Square in Boston, holding a candle and freezing. It was a vigil for John Lennon, who’d been murdered the night before. I wasn’t then, nor am I now, a vigil-attending kind of guy. But there was something about the enormity of the event, the dividing line it marked between the world before and the world after, that made me feel like I had to be there. (A friend of mine told me that night he’d seen me on local TV, looking bereft and miserable. I was bereft and miserable, but I was also really, really cold.)
It didn’t take long for the TV talking heads, searching for a way to sketch the magnitude of last night’s story, to draw parallels between Lennon’s death and Steve Jobs’. As usual, they were reaching in a dumb, automatic sort of way for a convenient means to shorthand what they were seeing. But they weren’t wrong. There are significant similarities between the historic moments, and the two guys whose passings they marked.
Both Lennon and Jobs were deeply enmeshed in the pop-cultural fabric of their times; Lennon as a creator of music, and Jobs as a seller. But there was more to it than that. Each, in their time, was instrumental in tearing down a stultified structure. (If there was anything that was more hidebound and stodgy than the pop music of the late ’50s, it had to be the pop music industry of the ’80s and ’90s.) Both were supremely disruptive — a term that, in the world Jobs did so much to create, would become a highly complimentary adjective, a way of describing the most effective agents of creative destruction. Lennon surely would have liked that.
Both died young — Lennon at 40, Jobs at 56. A friend of mine who’s a surgeon noted on Facebook last night that Jobs had been on borrowed time for a while, and indeed, seven post-diagnosis years is a long time to live with pancreatic cancer. (Jobs had the kind that’s operable, relatively speaking, but still blazingly deadly.) But just as it stings to think about Lennon, happy and settled at last, and the music that might have been, it’s hurtful if you care about technology — and Jobs did more than anybody else to make people care about technology — to think about the products a still-young Jobs could have shepherded to market with ten more years, or even five. Apple’s product lines are planned about two years out, so consumers will continue to get the benefit of Jobs’ guiding hand for more or less that much longer. What the post-Jobs generation of Apple products will look like, though, is anybody’s guess. Tim Cook is by all accounts a smart and effective CEO. But as tech analyst Leo Laporte said last night on twit.tv, “You don’t get a second Steve Jobs. There’s only one of those.”
Finally, both Lennon and Jobs were figures who personified aspiration. I still cringe when I hear the line “Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can”; it always clanged a little in my ear, coming from a guy who owned the top floor of the Dakota and half of upstate New York. But I don’t question Lennon’s personal generosity, and his fealty to the idea that the world could be, should be, ought to be a kinder place. (There’s a lovely moment in the documentary LENNONYC in which a disheveled young fan shows up at Lennon’s country estate. Lennon, firmly but not unkindly, lectures the kid on the foolhardiness of celebrity worship, then asks him if he’s had anything to eat lately and invites him in for breakfast.) Jobs, for his part, saw right past what personal computing was in the early 1980s to what it could be and should be, and he never lost sight of that elusive horizon. A practicing Buddhist, he almost certainly realized that perfection is a slippery thing to grasp. Not that the guy was a monk. He was a practicing capitalist too, and he did well in material terms, and so did his shareholders. But there’s something inspiring about his mania to make information devices more beautiful, more simple, more functional, and always, always better. That’s the kind of leadership that inspires, and inspires sincere sadness in its passing. The grief people felt for Lennon on that bitter day in 1980 was real, and hard-won. He was a huge figure who spanned generations and altered their trajectory. Jobs was too.
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