The virtuous city of Apple ... religion, philosophy and technology in the imagination of Steve Jobs

In his book, "The Utopia's Utopia .. Media and Religious Imagination by Steve Jobs", author Brett T. Robinson examines the religious influence of American inventor Steve Jones, and how this affects the formation of the architecture of Apple that was one of its founders.

Steve Jobs's character tempted many to make many comparisons during his career, and The New York Times likened him to the inventor of the light bulb Thomas Edison, while others described him as a contemporary of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Robinson, a visiting professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame, believes that there are many things in common between Jobs (died in October 2011) and philosopher and inventor Benjamin Franklin who is best known as one of the most prominent founding fathers of the United States.

According to the Los Angeles Times article in her book presentation supplement, Jobs Jobs inherited from Franklin the Protestant spirit that blends religious ethics with the ideas of capitalism, and this is evidenced by the integration of technology with the philosophy of "sublimation." Like Franklin, Jobs saw in his work a message of moral significance.

Religious speech
The author believes that the technology giant was busy building a narrative style narrative of the Apple Computer Corporation logo that may have been inspired by religious discourse, and produced emotional iconic images, and established what looks like a "range of millions of loyal followers", as Robinson put it.

Jobs paired, just as Franklin did, between the poetic style of advertising and design skill to develop a new vision of technology that for decades had been the field of strict computer scientists. From that moment on, Apple formed a way for people to communicate with one another.

Computers were Jobs' workmanship, but the impact of religion on him was very different from that of his predecessor Franklin. Jobs was initially only Protestant on the surface, before he abandoned the Christian faith in the early days of his youth.

It soon became the founder of Apple that sought enlightenment in the religious monasteries of India and teachers of the Buddhist religion of Zen (a Japanese religion known to practice meditation) in northern California, as well as in his journey to search for a meaning that would later shape his personality and shape the spirit of Apple technology for years to come.

Technical spirit
The spirit of Apple's technology was not Protestant but rather Catholic in the Greek sense of the term, i.e. it is a universal spirit that appeals to everyone. "The technology is Catholic because it is beginning to become a universal language understood by all people," said French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellol.

In the early 1990s, Italian literary critic and philosopher Umberto Eco echoed Ellos' philosophical view by comparing computer operating systems and belief systems.

Religious war
The book says that the struggle for technical supremacy "was no less than a new hidden religious war that changed the modern world." The Echo Semiotic Reading (Study of Marks and Symbols) of Apple and Microsoft operating systems provides a glimpse into the religious implications of "smart thinking machines", which means computers.

However, Jobs saw his duty to help the world "think differently", using technology as a way to retrain the human mind, and then his campaign slogan "Think differently" was a shot directed at the computer giant IBM. Whose one-word slogan was "think".

IBM represented everything wrong in Western hierarchy. After visiting India in his twenties, he was disappointed in the West's tendency to favor reason over intuition or intuition.

"Think differently"
Jobs examined the innate approach of Hindu villagers and spiritual teachers in the East, and reached a conviction that the West lacked enlightenment despite all its philosophical claims.

He considered that the computer is very similar to the human mind, and therefore it can be designed in a way that favors intuition and creativity.

In 1985, a year after the introduction of the Macintosh, Jobs met American pop artist Andy Warhol at the birthday party of Son of the singer in the famous Beatles John Lennon.

There was a consensus between Jobs and Warhol, according to the book, as the two tended to combine the aesthetics of religious rituals and artistic expressions. Warhol went ahead with his unique blending of aesthetics of Orthodox doctrine and pop art, as well as mixing his spiritual and cultural inclinations with a group of followers around him, as did Jobs.

Religious inspiration
The relationship between aesthetics and moral perception is most evident in philosophy, as it has found its way into literature, art, poetry, drama and cinema, so why is it not applied also in advertisements on technological products?

Meditation on Apple's advertising campaign reveals a bundle of popular beliefs, and marketing expert Douglas Holt says brands have magic when they use imagination and metaphor, and through metaphorical advertising and metaphors, brands can craft a common view about the product.

In this way, the brand makes ordinary products into models that consumers automatically rush to, according to the book released by Baylor University Press in 2013.

In the early eighties of the last century, the technology market needed a new figurative language, as there was confusion about whether the future view of personal technology would mean creative emancipation or electronic slavery.

For an inexperienced user, the computer is nothing more than a mysterious magic box, its ability to perform calculations was sufficient to surprise. But with the advent of the personal computer era, computer scientists were able to solve complex equations in record time, but they lacked the graphic language needed to communicate the benefits of this revolutionary machine to an audience that is still largely ignorant.

Computers revolution
The announcement by Apple to promote the new Macintosh - which was shown on January 22, 1984 during the NFL Super Final match - marked the beginning of the era of the computer revolution.

It is considered a milestone in the advertising profession, and one of the most successful advertisements on American TV ever.

It appears that Apple’s promise to provide comprehensive knowledge and creative freedom can also be interpreted as “a new type of slavery that generates evil, not wisdom,” as the Los Angeles Times article says in its appendix to the book's presentation.