I own a MacBook Pro, an iPhone 4 and an iPad 2.
It gets worse. If you include family Apple products – more iPhones, iPods, iTunes and holiday Apple family photo books – we’re pushing past $5K of Apple investments from my small business and my family.
I used to brag that once you go Mac, you never go back. All that has changed. I recently read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs and The New York Times. Together their collective reporting on Apple’s horrific abuse of human beings in both America and China – has soured my personal appetite for Apple products.
Charlton Heston warned us in 1973: Soylent Green is PEOPLE!
When we consume capitalism on the backs of human misery, we consume each other.
The biography of Jobs reveals that he routinely abused his own executives in a code known as the “reality distortion field.†He cannibalized his own corporate divisions.
Jobs dismissed odds and humans – any perceived obstacle to getting stellar products to market. He did it on the backs of other people and himself. It’s likely his single-minded devotion cost him his health and life. He ignored doctors’ orders and put Apple before himself, his family and his workers. When you abuse yourself and the people around you – what’s another country like China?
Jobs clutched a bipolar view of his products and people. Products and people were either shit or amazing. Products always trumped people.
Today I sent a note to the Apple supply chain executives. I was horrified by the human misery behind the brand. Well-paid PR professionals above my pay grade are working to spin atrocity into misunderstanding.
Jobs courted one human condition: our impulse to buy his products.
For that, I thank Apple. This is the wake-up call that I needed.
Apple isn’t the only brand out there abusing people at home and abroad.
When Apple embraced the Jobs’ reality distortion field, it distorted our reality, our basic human values as consumers. It’s time Americans own their reality and the brands they covet. We must demand honest brands, American jobs and human decency behind the products we buy. We will never get there if iConsumers don’t speak with iMoney.