Rushkoff on Apple fanboy rage at Steve Jobs for having the audacity to have had a liver transplant

“Life, Inc.” author and former BB guestblogger Doug Rushkoff has a piece up on Daily Beast about the fanboy fallout over recent news of Steve Jobs’ liver transplant:

Feel better Steve, but what about me? I mean, I know cancer surgery is no picnic, but what does the possibility that you’ll reject your new liver mean for my Apple share price? Or my iTunes collection? Should I be converting it all to MP3? I just got a friggin’ iPhone – what if you leave us before my five-year contract with AT&T ends? I made a commitment…How about you?

Sorry, but that’s the emotional current underlying nearly all of the coverage I’m seeing about the Apple founder’s just-revealed liver transplant operation in Tennessee for his metastasized neuroendocrine tumor. It’s not what I expected from the Apple community, but perhaps it does serve as the most accurate expression of where the once-renegade personal-computer company has ended up.

To buy an Apple product is to bet on the longevity of the closed system to which we’ve committed ourselves. And that system is embodied–through marketing as much as talent–by Steve Jobs.

“He said all he needed was a little rest!” one commenter on the Fortune magazine Web site complained. “This is bullshit.” On Bloomberg, all the talk is about share price, Apple’s chronically cryptic and delayed press releases on Jobs’ health, and whether this deputy Tim Cook is capable of taking the helm. Such “me-first” sensibilities don’t fit with the highly humanized, creative individuals celebrated in Apple’s early commercials–but rather the cultish consumers and shareholders that those commercials, and the products, actually succeeded in generating.

Apple’s Army of Whiners