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Monarchy, Empire, and Why Humans Adore Steve Jobs: Video

Steve Jobs didn't just rule over computers and phones and operating systems and computer-generated movies and combinations of all of them: he ruled over minds. Earlier this year, digital legal scholar "Tim Wu":http://motherboard.tv/2011/3/14/cmd...

Steve Jobs didn’t just rule over computers and phones and operating systems and computer-generated movies and combinations of all of them: he ruled over minds.

Earlier this year, digital legal scholar Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch, told us about the modern-day empires run by men whom, in the tradition of the great rail and steel tycoons, don’t just strive to make their vision reality, but to re-make reality itself.

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That no-holds-barred, winner-take-all, giant-spaceship-headquarters ambition was at the core of Steve Jobs’s self-appointed mission, even if it began in a garage, with that premise that “1984 won’t be like 1984.

The irony, Wu points out, is that the hacker who helped create the personal computer revolution 40 years ago “is probably the leading candidate to help exterminate it.” It’s an echo of Hannah Arendt’s idea about revolution – that “the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” This is why Jobs is such a fascinating figure to Wu, and why Apple unnerves him the most. It’s also why Facebook’s next steps — either in the direction of an Apple or a Google — are going to be, um, interesting.

Now Wu is an advisor to the FCC, where he is helping shape the policies that police empires like the one Jobs has helped built. It’s a tribute to Jobs’s legacy that many Americans and others may not mind much: Wu says that for all the talk of democracy, humans prefer monarchy just fine, provided of course that its insanely great.

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