FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Hero Worship Of Steve Jobs Will Live On As A Postage Stamp

Finally, you'll be able to lick photos of Steve Jobs without feeling weird about it.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Steve Jobs. Now there's an innovator for you. If there's one figure from the modern tech industry that's subject to endless hagiographic exploration, Jobs is the guy. It's hard to find a tech entrepreneur today who can resist the urge to compare himself to Jobs, inevitably citing some anecdote from the Walter Isaacson biography to explain their work, if not their vision.

Sure, Jobs was a little crazy. He was notorious for berating his own employees. He famously mocked his chief rival Bill Gates's move into philanthropic and human development work as a failure of entrepreneurial imagination. But he also co-founded Apple and later led the company through a period of remarkable, unprecedented growth. In doing so, he was (at the very least) partly responsible for creating many of the most important pieces of consumer electronics in recent history. And boy, the man could rock a turtleneck.

Advertisement

How do we make sense of this profound and conflicted legacy? Biographers and historians—and occasionally psychics—will be debating this question for decades. But come 2015, a far more basic seal of approval will be granted in the form of a US postage stamp, according to a document from the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee obtained by the Washington Post. That's alongside other stamps that celebrate the musician James Brown, television host Johnny Carson, and a reissue of one of the postal service's top-sellers: a 1993 stamp commemorating Elvis Presley.

Leave it up to the tech press to take this as an opportunity to not-so-subtly hint that a ruthless and brilliant businessman like Steve Jobs might be just what the US Postal Service needs at this dark hour. As CNET put it this morning: "The US Postal Service hopes Steve Jobs can do for it what he once did for Apple."

There's some truth to that statement, however. The Washington Post reported that adding "popular subjects" like Jobs is part of a plan "the financially strapped service is embarking on" in the hopes that it will "increase revenue and attract young collectors."

That's an understandable goal, but it's not without its controversy. When the USPS unveiled a Harry Potter stamp in 2013, for instance, many in the stamp community felt it had gone too far. As one collector put it the Post at the time: “The Postal Service knows what will sell, but that’s not what stamps ought to be about. Things that don’t sell so well are part of the American story.”

Obviously, Steve Jobs is part of the American story—and an important one at that. But what role he played in his own life and beyond remains unclear. Once his visage does grace a stamp, he will stand alongside other American technological luminaries like George Eastman, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla.

Is something like the iPhone as revolutionary a technology as the assembly line, nuclear power, or electricity? Comparisons like these aren't necessarily fair, but they bring to mind a great Economist cover story from 2013 about the state of innovation in the 21st century. So far, the magazine's author(s) wrote, nobody has managed to "come up with an invention half as useful" as the modern toilet.

As the careers of people like Steve Jobs show, that's not necessarily for lack of trying. But maybe now that his legacy is set in stone (or, at least, in stamp), the tech-minded among us can start thinking about how the incredible advances that have been made in consumer electronics in recent years can be applied in ways to bring us back to "toilet territory," to quote former Wired editor Chris Anderson. Bill Gates, for instance, is now using his enormous social and political capital (in addition to good old-fashioned personal wealth) to spearhead the development of a new kind of condom.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't call that unimaginative.