Walter Isaacson talked nonsense to an agreeable Fareed Zakaria today on CNN's GPS. Steve Jobs had a streak of mysticism that made no contribution to his work or to his artistic capabilities.
Isaacson mischaracterized Silicon Valley. It was a place with a normal cross-section of people, a lot of semi-literate engineers and electronic technicians, and, with Stanford University, more conservatives than San Francisco. Silicon Valley, unfortunately in my view, was not Amsterdam. Nor was it off-campus Berkeley. It was a place where the electronics industry congregated, beginning in association with Stanford University.
In Silicon Valley there was no magical marriage of hippiedom and science. I knew of no one I worked with in Silicon Valley (or no one on campus at Berkeley) whom I can say was more creative because of drugs or mysticism.
Steve Jobs happened to live in the Silicon Valley area -- a fortuitous accident for him. Walter Isaacson cannot claim with any journalistic legitimacy that Jobs doing drugs or going off to India was anything but a distraction and waste of time for him. In fact it was mysticism that killed Jobs. When he was first told he had cancer he put off treating it properly and instead resorted to mysticism. When he finally turned to medical science it was too late.
Copyright © 2010-2011 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
