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    How James Bond and Steve Jobs changed our world

    Synopsis

    They have helped shape what hundreds of millions of people wanted out of life, what they’re getting, and maybe even what they will get.

    By Bennett Voyles

    You can tell a lot about an era by its dreams. For Halloween 1969, I dressed up as a spy. My costume didn’t have much sophistication — the brim of the hat on my mask read SECRET AGENT, which might not have worked out so well behind enemy lines — but tiny tuxedos were in short supply in our house that year.

    Today, the aspirations are different. A recent poll of 1,000 British 8-15-year-olds by hotels.com found that 16.8% would like to be like Steve Jobs when they grow up, ahead of all the singers, athletes and politicians on the list, and outflanked only by Richard Branson, the brash Virgin group CEO.

    I mention this generational shift because October marks two anniversaries that matter a lot to the tech world’s collective unconscious: the 50th anniversary of the James Bond film series, and the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death.

    Normally, you don’t think of these two figures together — as one of my daughters said to me, when I told her about this article, all these guys really have in common is that they’re cooler than everybody else. However, at another level, over the past five decades this fictional character and a larger-than-life personality helped shape what hundreds of millions of people wanted out of life, what they’re getting, and maybe even what they will get.

    A Hot Knife Through Butter

    Ian Fleming published his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1953, two years before Steve Jobs was born. The novels were a hit in dreary post-war Britain, where wartime rationing didn’t end completely until 1954, drawing on his knowledge of spy work gleaned from his wartime work as a desk intelligence officer, and his own life as a hard-drinking womanizer. Sean Connery, the first 007 on film, said in a 1965 Playboy interview, that he thought the success of the series had a lot to do with Fleming’s timing:

    “Bond came on the scene after the War, at a time when people were fed up with rationing and drab times and utility clothes and a predominately gray colour in life. Along comes this character who cuts right through all that like a very hot knife through butter, with his clothing and his cars and his wine and his women.”

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    Notice the order: women run a distant fourth in Connery’s hierarchy, and not by accident. In the James Bond world, stuff matters. Some of this is just narrative technique — Umberto Eco and others have noted that he piled on the plausible to make it easier to get away with secret island missile bases and other whoppers — but the rest has to do with a genuine obsession with the material world. What reads now like a fussy old man’s obsession with how eggs should be cooked and drinks should be mixed may have been as titillating in poor post-war Britain as the descriptions of the Bond girls.

    Guns ’n’ Gadgets

    The exotic settings themselves were another escape from the grinding grey post-war years, like the package holidays in Spain that started to pop up in that decade. Foreign places serve as a kind of rough playground for Bond, colourful jungles of exotic women to seduce and baddies to kill. The culture is of little interest in itself: in From Russia with Love, for instance, Bond ruminates in a classic Anglo-Saxon way that he never bothers to learn any of the language in a new country because if you pronounce a few words correctly, it just leads to more confusion than if you know nothing at all.

    But perhaps the most important elements of all in the Bond world are his guns and his gadgets. Like the cigarette and cigarette holder with which Fleming was almost always photographed, gun and gadget seems almost like a physical extension of the hero, particularly in the Bond films.

    Magical objects, of course, are nothing new in literature. Most ancient sagas are filled with enchanted swords and tools. And as with these old stories, the magical object Q always issued Bond at the start of every film marked the frontier into pure fantasy for the Bond audience. Maybe you could order a martini made a certain way or save your money for a package holiday to Istanbul, but however much you might want one, you couldn’t actually buy a camera with a tape recorder hidden inside. But that was before Apple.
     


    The Name is Jobs. Steve Jobs

    By the mid-1970s, James Bond was veering dangerously close to the edge of self-parody, the one precipice that is usually fatal for a fictional character. In some of the Roger Moore-era Bond movies, you can almost hear his corset creak. And when it came to gadgets, those were dark days for consumers: even the science fiction hit of the time, Star Wars, didn’t really have much in the way of interesting devices. What was interesting was how dusty and beaten-up the Final Frontier had started to look.

    To see something truly magical, you would have had to go out to a garage in Cupertino, California, where two college dropouts were building the world’s first personal computer. Even by his own account, Steve Jobs wasn’t much of a programmer. In one early interview, he says that in another time, he might have ended up a poet on the Left Bank. His partner Steve Wozniak was the engineering brain of the operation.

    What Jobs did have was an intuitive feeling for was the value of the object, which he demonstrated even before they turned to computers. Walter Isaacson’s recent biography on Jobs includes a story about the first product he sold with Wozniak, an illegal device that mimicked the sounds that had begun to be used to automatically route telephone calls in the US in the 1970s. Jobs’ main contributions were to track down a “phone phreak” who went by the name Captain Crunch (after a popular breakfast cereal) for technical details, and then suggest putting the device Wozniak built in a blue case, which made it possible for them to sell $40 in parts as a $150 device.

    The New Cool

    On top of that basic sales instinct about the value of a package, Jobs had a sort of minimalist aesthetic sense shared by many other Baby Boomers that cultural critic David Brooks has described as bourgeois bohemian — a sort of anti-materialist streak that really amounts to a preference for fewer but more stylish things.

    He was part of a generation for whom cool wasn’t a Savile Row suit and scrambled eggs served on china. Cool was wearing jeans and a turtleneck to work, and coming home to a living room bare as a dance studio, and empty except for a few sleek machines that sit on a bare table in a corner.

    One part Zen, one part nostalgia for some of the streamlined Space Age designs of the 1960s, Jobs’ vision led him to recruit Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer working in California, to create a distinctive look for Apple. Esslinger, who lived by the motto, “Form follows emotion”, developed a style he called Californian Global for Apple, packaging computers in pretty white cases.

    Now that Apple stores are as mobbed with faithful customers this may seem smart, but at the time it was considered a somewhat anachronistic strategy, given the conventional business wisdom that computer hardware was “a commodity business”, and the truly smart thing to do was to shun the assembly line and follow Bill Gates into software. In fact, Jobs’ drive toward making what he called “insanely great” products seems to have been considered simply insane by the board, who pushed him out in 1985.

    Apple’s iQ

    In 1996, when Jobs returned to Apple, he resumed his quest, this time with Jonathan Ive as his amanuensis. Over the next 15 years, he developed a trio of groundbreaking i-gadgets with the English designer — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, the latter two devices so multifunctional that they make a lot of the old James Bond gadgets look hopelessly antique.

    Before his death, Jobs said after he was gone, Ive would become the soul of Apple. Recently, one tech blogger joked that Ive should take a cameo as Q in the next Bond movie. The real joke, of course, is that it’s superfluous: in a very real way, Sir Jonathan has already been the tech world’s Q for the past 15 years.

    Steve is Really Inside

    Marketers have an axiom that they don’t create desires, they merely uncover them, and then propose ways they can be satisfied. If that’s the case, what is it that we want next from Ive’s elves?
     


    One clue might be found in an old interview Jobs gave to Newsweek in 1984, shortly after the introduction of the Macintosh. The 29-year-old Jobs said that what he really wanted was “a sort of slate that you could carry along with you. You’d get one of these things maybe when you were 10 years old, and somehow you’d turn it on and it would say, you know, ‘Where am I?’ And you’d somehow tell it you were in California and it would say, ‘Oh, who are you?’...”

    Before long, “it becomes an incredibly powerful helper”, Jobs continued. “It goes with you everywhere you go. It knows most of the raw information in your life that you’d like to keep, but then starts to make connections between things, and one day when you’re 18 and you’ve just split up with your girlfriend it says: ‘You know, Steve, the same thing has happened three times in a row’.”

    The voice-activated device inside the iPhone 4S, released shortly after his death last fall, isn’t up to being a portable therapist yet. SIRI, a mysterious acronym that Apple fans joke stands for Steve is Really Inside, is still very much in beta. Ask it to tell you a joke, it’s liable to say, I’m sorry, I don’t know any jokes — or more maddeningly, responds to your question with a terse, sorry, I’m busy. It’s not even very good at giving you the weather report.

    Scary New World?

    But judging from the strong sales of the 4S and now the iPhone 5, Jobs isn’t the only one who dreams of a friendly bot, which in its way tells us something about how geeky daydreams have evolved since James Bond began flipping switches on movie screens 50 years ago.

    Perhaps our technological fantasies are maturing, and have evolved from a wish for global domination to a desire for omnipresent entertainment and constant contact with our friends and family. Now maybe all we lack is a portable pal — a fantasy we can also see played out in the recent Hollywood movie Robot & Frank, “a buddy caper about an elderly ex-jewel thief and his new caretaker robot”.

    On the face of it, this seems like a less dangerous fantasy than the old adolescent James Bond fantasies of technical omnipotence that led America to set Indochina on fire and lured the Pentagon into Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The only problem, perhaps, is that this cozy vision isn’t entirely shared. While most of us dream of shooting the breeze with SIRI, what are the old school James Bond fans dreaming? The programmers who designed the giant computers that constantly eavesdrop on millions of conversations and read millions of private emails.

    The engineers who designed the fleets of drone bombers that circle over angry, troubled countries 24 hours a day. And despite evidence to the contrary, such as the software glitches that briefly wiped out $1 trillion in global stock values in the 2010 flash crash, the defence industry lobbyists who believe automated anti-ballistic missile systems will make the world a safer place.

    You may want to ask SIRI to keep an eye out for these guys. As Steve Jobs observed, “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”.



    (The author, a Paris-based business writer, is a columnist for ET Magazine)


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