Steve Jobs

As a follow-up to my previous post on this topic: Steve Jobs on "Freedom from Porn," with more details filled in from the biography Steve Jobs:

The pornography ban [in the App Store] also caused problems. "We believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone," Jobs declared in an email to a customer. "Folks who want porn can buy an Android."

This prompted an email exchange with Ryan Tate, the editor o the tech gossip site Valleywag. Sipping a stinger cocktail one evening, Tate shot off an email to Jobs decrying Apple's heavy-handed control over which apps passed muster. "If Dylan [one of Jobs' idols] was 20 today, how would he feel about your company?" Tate asked. "Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with 'revolution'? Revolutions are about freedom."

To Tate's surprise, Jobs responded a few hours later, after midnight. "Yep," he said, "freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is."

Pin his reply, Tate offered some thoughts on Flash and other topics, then returned to the censorship issue. "And you know what? I don't want 'freedom from porn.' Porn is just fine! And I think my wife would agree."

"You might care more about oorn when you have kids," replied Jobs." It's not about freedom, it's about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users." (Steve Jobs, pp. 516-517).

Anyone who stops to take a moment and look at what pornography truly represents will realize what an anti-woman and anti-loving industry it really is. Pornography's only purpose is to turn a human being (almost always a woman) into an object instead of a person, and to give some other individual (almost always a man) a selfish pleasure.

There is nothing about pornography that helps family, helps loving relationships, or helps society. I think Steve undertstood that, and wanted to try to help society by removing one place the porn industry could dump its garbage.

Steve Jobs, reflecting on a visit to his biological mother, who gave him up for adoption after having him in a non- married relationship with a man who didn't want a baby:

[Steve] wanted to reassure Joanne that what she'd had done was all right. "I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was okay and to thank her, because I'm glad I didn't end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and she went through a lot to have me" (Steve Jobs, p. 254).

Salient thoughts on the topic, coming from a guy who was simply grateful his mother gave him a shot at life; out of every difficult situation, a good thing may come.

As many of my colleagues mourn the death of a great tech icon, Steve Jobs, I pray for his soul, and hope (sincerely) that he makes it to Heaven. For all his flaws, he was a good neighbor, an optimist, a great strategist, an opponent of pornography, and he built up the tech industry in ways the future history books will show.

Much of my life has been lived along with products created or conceived by Steve himself (see my ongoing computing history here), and my current profession would be nowhere near as interesting as it is without his continual push towards extending the reach of technology into my life.

Through it all, we must remember what Steve (as well as many before him) has pointed out:

Once you realize the death is a part of life, you will live life more fully.

In other words,

"For we brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it"
(1 Timothy 6:7).

I'm going to be reading Steve Jobs (the authorized biography) when it is released on October 24, 2011. I enjoyed reading iWoz, which spoke to much of Apple's successes in the engineering field, but the design and strategy aspects of Apple's success will likely be covered in-depth in this book.

[UPDATE: Looks like LifeSiteNews is corroborating this news...]

Interesting snippet from an email exchange between Steve Jobs and Ryan Tate (from Gawker Media):

While Steve and I might not agree on many things, his (well, Apple's) philosophy on porn has been pretty awesome so far: they'll have none of it... or at least almost.

The App store is happily void of the smut that covers all corners of the Internet. And Apple's OS X, iPhone, iTunes Store, etc. all have relatively robust Parental Controls as compared to most other devices/services. Apple could do better, but I think Steve might be pretty solid in his stance that pornography is not a good thing for 'freedom' and 'openness.' Rather, it's a crime against human sexuality.

Those of us who are the digital curators of the Internet should help stamp out pornography. Programs like My House are cropping up in the Church to help with this problem on a family level, but we all need to double our efforts to get rid of this societal scourge!