I’m per­haps not the best judge of how soon is “too soon”, but in the wake (no pun intended) of the out­pour­ing of love and acco­lades for the late Steve Jobs, there are some begin­ning to talk about the dark under­belly of Apple, and the less pub­lic side of Jobs himself.

A pair of Forbes arti­cles agreed that Steve Jobs was a jerk, one say­ing that was fine and wish­ing he could be more of a jerk like Steve. The other was a response say­ing don’t emu­late Steve, sug­gest­ing he may have been a bor­der­line sociopath or a “mere mega­lo­ma­niac”. Gawker felt the need to sum­ma­rize What Every­one Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs. The first recent arti­cle I saw on this theme was a NYT Piece on Steve Jobs which, like the oth­ers, spoke of doc­u­mented child labour and sweat­shop con­di­tions at the Fox­conn fac­tory in China that pro­duces Apple prod­ucts, where indoc­tri­na­tion and beat­ings are com­mon, and a worker died fol­low­ing a 34-hour shift. The tales go fur­ther, to paint Jobs as a hot­head whose man­age­ment style might at times be described as that of a tyran­ni­cal over­lord, berat­ing employ­ees pub­licly and voluminously.

All of that is pretty clear in its level of right­ness ver­sus wrong­ness. Some have made note of Jobs’ appar­ent lack of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, but on top of that, two para­graphs from the NYT arti­cle really struck me for the type of insight they offer.

Because of its enor­mous strength in both music sales and mobile devices, Apple has more power than at any time in its his­tory, and it is using that power to make the com­put­ing expe­ri­ence of its users less free, more locked down and more tightly reg­u­lated than ever before. All of Apple’s iDe­vices — the iPod, iPhone and iPad — use oper­at­ing sys­tems that deny the user access to their work­ings. Users can­not install pro­grams them­selves; they are down­loaded from Apple’s servers, which Apple con­trols and curates, choos­ing at its whim what can and can’t be dis­trib­uted, and where any­thing can be cen­sored with lit­tle or no explanation.

The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anar­chic com­pany pro­mot­ing the mes­sage of free­dom, whose first projects with Stephen Woz­niak were pirate boxes and com­put­ers with open schemat­ics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forg­ing. Today there is no tech com­pany that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 com­mer­cial than Apple itself, a tes­ta­ment to how quickly power can corrupt.

No tech com­pany looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 com­mer­cial than Apple itself

I’m not sure if you can call it “quickly”, but “thor­oughly” is def­i­nitely an appro­pri­ate adjec­tive here. Apple has oper­ated and traded on a cul­ture of fear with Jobs at the helm, and in the pur­suit of prof­its, has run roughshod over the weak. That said, these para­graphs express very well why I’ve his­tor­i­cally not been a drinker of the Apple-flavoured Cool-Aid.

Is the pro­mo­tion of closed sys­tems and exten­sion of mar­ket dom­i­nance in one area to lever­age another morally wrong? Some would say yes per­haps, but for most, these areas are eth­i­cally grey at best. For me, it runs counter to the nature of the Inter­net and counter to the direc­tion soci­ety is (and should be) attempt­ing to move. It’s a strat­egy of hoard­ing based on arti­fi­cial scarcity, and in sev­eral ways it’s worse than the way in which Microsoft han­dled its monop­oly for many years.

I’ve been think­ing about pick­ing up an iPad, as it’s a very func­tional device that I could make really good use of. I won­der, should I think twice about it? This is a ques­tion I ask as I sur­vey the crowd of iPhone-wielding junior ethi­cists who exhibit moral out­rage at the thought of shop­ping at Wal­mart. But rightly or wrongly, it’s the lock­down on the device that makes me ques­tion it most. And I won­der how many peo­ple would look aghast if they were told they could pur­chase a beau­ti­ful designer suit­case, but would not be able to pack any­thing into it with­out first obtain­ing writ­ten per­mis­sion from the lug­gage man­u­fac­turer for each spe­cific item. It sounds absurd unless you think of any given Apple prod­uct as sim­ply a recep­ta­cle for var­i­ous forms of media.

As Apple looks to the future with new CEO Tim Cook, I hope they can chart a course that pur­sues tech­no­log­i­cal excel­lence as they have in the past, but also makes the com­pany a bet­ter work­place both domes­ti­cally and over­seas. Now, was Steve Jobs a genius? Many have said so, and I will not dis­pute the point. He exhib­ited immense tal­ent in busi­ness, mar­ket­ing, and design… and this is what really saved Apple since Jobs’ return to the helm. But at what cost?