SMC is excited to welcome Tom Streeter, who will be soon making occasional visits to our New England lab, beginning later this month. To mark his arrival, we wanted to highlight the essay he has just published in the International Journal of Communication: “Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism, and the Desire for Good Capitalism.” (Borrowing from the summary provided by IJOC here:)

The essay explains how that story and its repetition tell us more about the culture than the man. Building on previous work about the rise of “romantic individualism” as an organizing mechanism for high-tech capitalism, this essay focuses on the latest outpouring of discourse about Jobs since his death in 2011, analyzing both its continuities with past cultural forms and what it is about the present moment that has intensified the discourse—especially the post-2008 crisis of confidence in financial capitalism. Among other things, the tale offers the appealing, if ultimately unrealistic, hope of a capitalism with integrity, of a one-percenter who deserves it.