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Comment by thomassmith65 | Hacker News Reader

They absolutely 100% are trying to emulate Steve Jobs. But the version of Steve Jobs they have in their heads is a caricature.

Steve Jobs wanted the world to see him as some sort of artistic, cultured genius. The only aspects of Steve Jobs that today's crop of tech CEOs seem to emulate are his wealth and arrogance.

• Wojcicki admired Jobs while Youtube had the most depraved and moronic comment section on the internet

• Huffman admired Jobs while Reddit had a 'watch people die' subreddit

• Zuckerberg admired Jobs while nuts used Facebook to livestream the Christchurch massacre and Whatsapp to incite mobs to kill Rohingya

• Bezos admired Jobs while Amazon was promoting dollar-store junk on every page

• Musk admired Jobs while Grok was dubbing itself 'MechaHitler'

Those examples are embarrassing enough, though we could go on an on with more. There's no version of Steve Jobs who would allow such garbage to tarnish his image.

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Are you sure you don't have a caricature of Jobs in your head?

Apple did a lot of controversial things under Jobs.

* The raids for leaks * The no cold call agreements * etc

They aren't deifying jobs, Jobs was an asshole, but when you confabulate what you think is your tech god and then larp as that, you make a worse version of everything.

Taste is hard to cultivate. You have to care about things like art to cultivate it. As a result all of these dweebs are trying to ape Steve Jobs and they're just succeeding at his worst traits: arrogance and cruelty and a lack of empathy.

> The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.

https://libquotes.com/steve-jobs/quote/lbm0q6a

It seems the selected examples in your tendentious anaphora are entirely about justifying censorship and centralization. Strikes me as ironic, since the hacker ethos has been stridently libertarian, information wants to be free and all that. Now I hear more people like yourself, practically begging for restrictions and top down control. Reminds me of the covid hysteria over 'misinformation' around the lab leak theory and gain of function research. Many reasonable criticisms were censored by the big tech platforms. For example, lockdowns were immensely destructive and have never been recommended policy in response to epidemics, school closures caused significant harm to children who were at no real risk of the virus, Fauci admitted 6 feet of social distancing was arbitrary and not based on any science, and policies requiring cloth masks were not found to have any significant effect in preventing transmission, etc..

Steve Jobs didn't allow porn on the App Store. It wasn't the end of the world.

Besides, it would be easy to list 100 more examples of trashy practices (eg: preinstalled crapware, intrusive advertising, dark patterns, etc) for today's tech companies that have nothing to do with censorship.

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