Rob Horning aims for an air of intellectual contrarianism but falls – with a thud – on reiteration of dogma.
Jobs represented the tyranny of design, the soft command of seductive interfaces, the covert control through cleverly marketed convenience, the triumph of closed, hierarchical systems over open-source ones, commercial protocols and the ethos of the gated community over the commons.
In other words, the “tyranny” of systems that are beautiful, that work, and that people want. The only people who object to such things are on the losing side, not coincidentally because their systems are ugly, dysfunctional, and shunned.
At some point, open-source advocates become indistinguishable from Objectivists and libertarians in their insistence that their hypotheses are better than reality. Even after Steve Jobs’s death, opentards insist their way is better despite the actual facts.