Mike Daisey calls Steve Jobs, the master of the Apple empire, many things in his monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." A common epithet in the show is "mad genius," for example, but he also names him "Alpha Geek," "Visionary Asshole," and "Brutal Taskmaster." But maybe the most significant for us and the show is "Giant in Our Mythology."
What powers does this mythic giant have? "Steve Jobs is the Master of the Forced Upgrade," Daisey said at his TBA performance Sunday night. And what does this mean on the atomic level? Until Jobs made it so, "I didn't know I needed a laptop so thin I could slice a sandwich with it." In his famous keynote speeches, Jobs "shows us the future." Or at least our technological future. These are wonderful powers indeed, and they have helped build Apple into the mightiest of technological forces.
By this time, just about all of us have had to develop a "theory" to deal with the great celebrity tycoons who have emerged in our celebrity culture. It's almost necessary -- they occupy such a prominent place in our cultural mythos. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Mark Cuban and Steve Jobs, to name some of the best known (I almost added Bernie Madoff, but he occupies a different slot, I think... for now) are important for their various roles in different products or ideas, sure, but they are also part of the prevailing myth, financial gods with powers that transcend the normal or even the para-normal.
We watch them for signs, we parse their words as though they were divine oracles, we acknowledge that they occupy a realm that we can't hope to reach, though we might fantasize about it. (Oh, if I could only be Zeus for a day.)
Daisey's performance -- one part comedy, one part investigative journalism, one part research into the history of Apple -- looks behind the curtain at the machine that produces those thin laptops and sleek phones, obsessively perfect in all their details. Jobs is his Wizard, but Oz isn't a make-believe fairyland that puts up with the occasional pollution caused by a Wicked Witch or two. Oh no. It's a Chinese city of 14 million, Shenzhen, and it has an industrial zone that produces many of the world's high-tech products. One of its companies, Foxconn, has almost half-a-million employees, and they make some of Apple's signature products, from iPhones to iPads.
