Tributes turn Steve Jobs into a cultural icon

Steve Jobs died way too young. For that reason alone his death counts as a tragedy. And there’s no doubt that he was blessed with great vision and the highest entrepreneurial skills.

Still, the public outpouring of grief is getting strange at this point, if only in historical terms. I’m thinking in particular of all of the street interviews since yesterday in which consumers of Apple products have declared how Jobs’s work touched their lives, how deeply they’ll miss him. It’s the sense of an attachment between strangers normally reserved for movie stars, musicians, religious leaders, and politicians. These people sound like fans, like followers. That’s probably because they are.

Over the last day, I’ve been trying hard to come up with the name of a businessperson or industrial leader (the only labels that would have fit Jobs, say, 20 or 30 years ago) who became not only famous for ingenuity in his or her own field, but also a kind of icon in the culture as a whole.

Maybe former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, back in the Reaganite ’80s? Not really. Iacocca built himself into a household name through TV-ad and talk-show appearances, to the point that he’d be the number-one answer whenever the question on Family Feud was “Name an auto-industry executive.” But was he ever considered cool? Was the K Car ever the talk of the schoolyard or the boho café? Nope.

I imagine one response would be to point out that Jobs’s inventions changed how we live. I imagine it because it gets said over and over. But the inventor of plate glass also changed how we live. And few people get teary-eyed about Sir Alastair Pilkington.

So what was it about Jobs that inspires this reaction? What was it that got him compared to Da Vinci and Gutenberg on CTV’s national newscast last night, when only a small fraction of his fanbase could tell you who Alan Turing was?

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