The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

Mike Daisey at The Cut, Halesworth

Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 8 May 2012.

The prestigious High Tide Festival attracted US performer Mike Daisey to Halesworth. It was a scoop. His one man, stand-up (sitting down) comedy monologue about Steve Jobs and Apple has been contentious everywhere.

The late Jobs was creator, inventor and cultural icon, genius behind Apple-Mac’s business and technology phenomenon. From garage inventions to mega-business power plays with anecdotes about the evolution of devices, this was a tale for our times.

A large desk-bound Daisey sat for two hours as he animated Jobs’ biography. Voices, faces and events flowed in this masterclass of agit-prop political humour appealing to Apple or Microsoft fans, technophobes or geeks. ‘Power-point presentations’ was side-splittingly funny.

The account of China’s Shenzhen Foxconn factory which makes Apples’ and others’ components where one exploited worker died after a 34-hour shift, was intensely moving.

Still fond of Apple gadgets, Daisey nonetheless paraphrased Steve Jobs as Big Brother – ‘if you control the metaphor through which people see their world, you control the world’.

He finished with a mind-virus image: ‘now you know how the laptops are made, you‘ll see blood welling between the keys’.

A theatrical tour de force!