Steve Jobs, Kraftwerk, and the Curse of Beautiful Technology

At risk of sounding like an insensitive fanboy in light our good friend Steve Jobs' passing, I'm going to begin this by expounding upon something I've always liked about Apple's fiercest competitor in the mobile market, Android. It has nothing to do with having the best apps or the coolest interface or whatnot. It's that Android is a mobile phone platform for people who truly love computing.

And I mean really love it. The kind of people who understand and embrace computers as these complex, imperfect machines geared traditionally toward not convenience, but raw potential waiting to be unlocked. It's the stuff of tinkerers, hackers, people who just like to play around with stuff. And for a mobile phone platform to embrace that is, I think, really kind of cool.

In turn, I've embraced it as well. I see a feature or function that could work better on my phone (a first-generation Droid) and without a second thought, I'm pouring through various forums looking for a mod or tweak. I'm overclocking my CPU with custom kernels and installing unofficial ROMs that give me more control. I'm writing behaviors that alter clockspeed to manage power consumption. And despite a few reasonable safeguards, I'm finding that I'm not being discouraged from doing this.

This is my device, and I will do with it whatever I please. Sorry, Steve.

Make no mistake, these mods and tweaks very often have consequences on the stability of a device. Despite my best efforts, those behaviors I activated to manage my device's power consumption (one of the Android platform's biggest flaws by far) will occasionally goof up in a really bad way. I'll get phone calls and sometimes the processor won't be able to "ramp up" from its low-power state and I'll be stuck with a frozen UI and a ringing phone that I can't answer. Other times my phone will just randomly decide it needs a lot of juice to run one particular program and ramp the CPU like crazy, making my battery so hot that I have to physically remove it until the internals cool down.

I'll curse and yell and call my phone a piece of shit. But at the end of the day, I'll be glad that I'm still running along the razor's edge. I'll see my not-so-trusty phone-computer like a puzzle, and make strides to find the solution.

Most people say they hate troubleshooting, and I hate it too. But when you're doing it for yourself and not for some clown at your IT day gig who accidentally downloaded a virus in Outlook again, solving problems can be liberating; an intoxicating rush that can only come from knowing you didn't have to rely on some corporately-designated "genius" with thick glasses and a beard to make your machine work the way you want it to.

I've always equated this kind of elation with electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk. In the 1970's and '80s when computer systems were beginning their race to ubiquity outside of labs and government facilities, it was these German electronistas who famously declared love for computing. Through song they celebrated the undeniable empowerment offered by computer systems and embraced all of their various complexities.

They were the troubadours of the computer age, a time when cutting edge technology excited us and filled us with wonder. But as the machines grew in sophistication and shrank in size, the need for practical use began to outweigh this impassioned but increasingly anachronistic love for raw power and visible complexity.

Apple hasn't always been the first on the block with the latest processor or fastest cell phone data network, but they've always done good by being consistent. Holding a large stake in that consistency has been, of course, our dearly departed Jobs, who as CEO made it his mission to imbue the Apple name with a kind of culturally recognized seal of quality. The age of gadget fetishism was already well underway. But in order to make a computer something truly beautiful, as Jobs saw it, he needed to push the actual 'computing' into the background.

It seems almost plausible that what Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote in the '60s about technology being indistinguishable from magic could very well have been written by Jobs himself. If the iPhone is to be remembered as one of humanity's greatest technological achievements, it seems likely that any mention of it in a history textbook (or e-book, as it were) would accompany mention of this idea. Time and again, Apple has offered products which so deftly blur the line between technology and our human idea of beauty that they deny or conceal the inherent messiness and unpredictability of computer systems by streamlining user experience, wrapping it into a neat, idiot-proof package.

Therein lies the curse of beautiful technology, the confinement which leaves us unable to pursue our own ideas of beauty and perfection. From within the confines of beautifully integrated systems, we see marketplaces, music services, everything the average person could possibly want. Everything, so you never have to leave. I've likened it to living inside a lavish resort hotel: spacious, convenient and attractive, but its walls stay the same color and you know you could never go out back and build a deck. Because it would have to be a white marble deck, with rounded edges, and you would have to be an officially licensed deck-builder.

In following the Jobsian vision of computer utopia, modern computer products have become less like individual products and more like portals into the larger worlds their mother company has created. You buy a smart-phone and you have access to applications, music and books, scrutinized and selected to some greater or lesser degree by the company. You are recommended new products based on the company's predictive algorithms. Everything is integrated to make this monopolistic empire over your digital affairs seem like a natural extension of the product, and as such, a natural extension of your own life.

This is the trans-humanist approach to computing, modeled by one company after another, that has caused most of its inherent messiness to fade away. In that sense, based on what we've come to know about computers and all their unpredictable baggage in the past 60-something years, platforms like Android are closer, if however slightly, to the traditional model: powerful, open and ripe with potential, qualities that have been both its greatest triumph and most crippling downfall.

The homogenized perfection of the iPhone and its kin may be oppressive to some, but there's a reason that even the staunchest of techie nerds succumb to the intoxicating allure of Steve Jobs and his magic computer-phones. There is a clear appreciation for craftsmanship and elegance in admirers of Apple products, and that's nothing to scoff at. It makes perfect sense, from a human perspective, that we would want our tools to be as beautiful as the various art objects we admire, inside and out.

However, if anything can still be said of the art of computing, that intimate love affair with understanding our machines, we must keep our desire for elegant technology in check. Holding those perfectly contoured shells of metal and using increasingly slick, simplistic UI's, we risk losing a valuable dimension of the man-machine relationship. And while he fought to conceal it in his later years, I'll bet my short-circuiting Droid that it's a big part of what got Steve going in the first place.

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