May 15th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Freedom From Porn
Hey guess what? Steve Jobs says the iPad is about “freedom from porn.”
Yup, Ryan Tate emailed Steve Jobs and asked him:
If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company?
Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with “revolution?”
Revolutions are about freedom.
And Steve Jobs answered thusly:
Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Asshole.
I knew there was a reason I did not want one.
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Oh, yes, that is EXACTLY what freedom means. In totatlitarian mindsets, such as we find them in George Orwells 1984:
“free: meaning Negative freedom (without) in a physical sense, only in statements like “This dog is free from lice”, as the concepts of “political freedom” and “intellectual freedom” do not exist in Newspeak.”
I don’t have my hands on actual quotes, but apparently, he’s been quietly cleaning the app store from adult material for a long time. (I briefly looked into developing my own kinky apps, but concluded there was no way I’d be able to sell them.)
Also, remember the fight Violet Blue had to go through a few years ago to get her podcast accepted by iTunes? Yeah.
Steve Jobs would like to be free of genitals, by the looks of it.
Frank, I’m old enough to remember the original Mac ad in which the athlete throws the hammer through the big screen full of hectoring totalitarian blather. Quarter century later, the face on that screen is Steve Jobs. Ironic, eh?
Adele, I actually don’t have a problem with his right to maintain and sell an adult-free “walled garden” computing platform, which he’s been adamant about doing. I just don’t know why grownups would want one. It’s not like apps can sneak up on you and shove titties in your face, you have to select them and usually *pay* for them, right? So, what exactly are we being protected from?
I also think you’d have to be freakin’ insane to develop apps for a platform where there’s an opaque approval process and, even after approval, your apps can be yanked without appeal for no specific reason, as has happened to a bunch of iPhone app developers.
I agree with your observation of Mr. Job’s role reversal… so does Jon Stewart. Oh so true and tragic… http://www.huff....html
Decades ago, Betamax tried to differentiate itself by offering viewers this “freedom from porn”. Um, what happened to Betamax?
Awesome link! “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one. But now you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitos.”
I cannot believe that he actually said this. Can anybody find the link?
The link is right there in my post.
The whole email conversation is an interesting read. Mr. Tate does a good job of critiquing his own arguments as well as Jobs’.
“You might care more about porn when you have kids…” Heh. There may be some kids who, having been protected from it, come out “pure”. But I was sexualizing the stories I found in my books of Norse Myths and writing out my own fetish-y scenarios without having access to traditional porn sites or magazines when I was a kid. If you’d offered me a stack of Playboys, I might have turned them down in favor of my own inner world, but I was definitely getting off to it.
Perhaps Steve Jobs is really…Charles…Foster…Kane!
This is a silly comment – don’t bother to approve it. But in your first sentence you wrote iPod which should say iPad :D [Fixed it! Thanks — Bacchus]
“You might care more about porn when you have kids…”
Oh yes, that canard. Because, of course, people who like porn don’t have kids and if they do they’ll become mentally, emotionally and physically “damaged”. *eye roll* Mr. Jobs, with all the technology at your disposal, surely you could have accessed the vetted research that debunks that crap you just spewed.
What a shame. Us liberal, sex-positive, porn-lovin’ types really did love Apple products if for no other reason than not being part of the Microsoft status quo.
Boo!
My mac is great, it combined Apple’s UI skills with a great multi user operating system. Unfortunately Jobs is still a control freak jack aXX. I would rather deal with lack of apps for Linux and Windows stack overflows.
This shouldn’t surprise me, I avoided mac’s in the beginning because of the closed architecture and the premium priced. I was lured to the mac because I hoped it would bring linux to the mainstream. Fool me once….
Never again, time to start developing for Google.
F#*( Jobs!
The part where Jobs’s argument falls flat is the fact that every single iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad ever manufactured came from the factory with a preinstalled application allowing users to access a worldwide, distributed, petabyte-scale porn repository. It’s called “Safari.”
Apple products are just overpriced hipster bullshit to me.
Never saw the allure.
I sure as hell wouldn’t buy a car from a company that could tell me where I’m not allowed to drive it, and I’ll be damned if I’ll buy a computing device from people who tell me what content I’m allowed to have on it.
It’s not like apps can sneak up on you and shove titties in your face. . .
I would actually pay money for such an app.
Jobs’s anti-porn remark reminds me of the intolerant diatribes of the early seventies by certain highly vocal so-called feminists, against popular men’s magazines and sex work.
Nobody asked the models and others what THEY wanted.
As I always say, freedom is about MORE choices, not LESS choices.
I wonder if Steve has considered the impact on the children of these sex-workers who’s mothers and/or fathers paychecks depend on a porn-friendly web?
Porn is funded by the discretionary expenses of those who can afford the luxury. Who’s going to support the out-of-work former producers of web sex material? I can’t afford the higher taxes it would take to put these people on unemployment in a time when we need MORE jobs not less.
Jobs should be thinking less about “freedoms from” and more about “freedoms TO”…