A week after Steve Jobs’ passing, we consider the great un-aired “Think Different” ad narrated by Jobs in which he celebrates rebels, square pegs in round holes, misfits and troublemakers who change the world through rulebreaking and disdain for the status quo.
The aired version of this particular “Think Different” ad was narrated by Richard Dreyfuss. However, the original was narrated by Steve Jobs himself and its impact is much more visceral and melancholy now. It is fair game to criticize certain aspects of Apple products, but none can deny that Jobs had particular disdain for those who lacked vision.
Not that everyone must have vision, mind you—just as there is anti-matter in a universe of matter, we must have people who would hold progress back.
As I noted in my May 2011 “Street Art Dispatches” on the curse of imagination:
[Y]es, imagining or picturing the world as it should be is a curse. The visionaries, however, are usually vindicated with the passage of time. Look at all the scientists obstructed by the Catholic Church, or all the visual artists and writers ignored or laughed at in their time: how they shine now as part of a very bright constellation.
And where are those with the static or atrophied imaginations? In the dust bin of history, where they belong.
The visionaries will ultimately triumph.
An interesting angle in which to view the “Think Different” ad is in the context of the Occupy protests blazing across the nation. Yes, Apple is a corporation and Jobs was trying to resurrect his creation in 1997 when this commercial was produced; but, the sentiment about vision and breaking rules, or the value in being a rebel, is nonetheless true.
And whereas Richard Dreyfuss’s narration sounds like a thespian reading lines, Jobs’ voice, though recorded almost 15 years ago, sounds as though it were coming back across the aether to remind us that we should always try to push humankind forward, not regress as a certain element in this country and the world would have us do.
And, yes, the ad was part of a clever marketing campaign but Jobs certainly believed what he was saying. Everything he and Apple ever did seems to have been a break with the status quo.
And if we can adapt this message to our time, in our current political and economic situation, we might say that it is time for this country of rebels to break with the biggest status quo mechanism of all—voting; that it now takes more than that and we need the full force of vision and problem-solving available to us, and not filtered by politicians.
Go change the world, don’t wait for it to happen by voting for a representative, a senator and a president.
None of the individuals featured in the video, and all who were not, ever asked permission to push forward.
October 12, 2011 at 8:30 pm, Wordswithnickinthem said:
be different, buy apple