So I'm about a third of the way through iWoz, and while some of the stories are certainly interesting I found myself getting irritated as I read it and tried to figure out why. At some level it's perhaps all his commentary on how great a lot of the stuff he did was, but mostly that doesn't bother me so much. Clearly, a lot of the stuff he did was in fact really cool, and clearly he is really smart, so that seems reasonable (even if he could have perhaps spend a little less time drawing attention to just how great he is).
But I realized that what really bothers me that it's that he's not very honest about himself. An illustrative example, starting with a passage from the beginning of the book about how his childhood shaped him:
[...] my dad believed in honesty. Extreme honesty. Extreme ethics, really. That's the biggest thing he taught me. He used to tell me that it was worse to lie about doing something bad under oath than it was to actually do something bad [...] That really sunk in. I never lie, even to this day. Not even a little.
Then later, this passage from when he and The Other Steve are approached (completely coincidentally, although he didn't yet know it) by police officers just after making illegal Blue Box calls from a pay phone:
But then the cop turned back to us and patted us down. He felt my Blue Box and I pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to him. We knew we were caught. The cop asked me what it was. I was not about to say “Oh, this is a Blue Box for making free telephone calls.” So for some reason I said it was an electronic music synthesizer.
And then after convincing them of the above:
The internal joy I felt when the cop believed our story about the Blue Box being the Moog synthesizer is almost indescribable. Not only were we not arrested for making illegal calls with or owning a Blue Box, but these supposedly intelligent cops had bought our B.S.
Um, what? Someone who gloats to himself (and now an audience of millions) about how cool it was to lie to the police to avoid the consequences of doing something he knew to be illegal at the time is not a practitioner of “extreme ethics”, and I'm pretty sure that lying to the police isn't consistent with never lying “even a little”. And it's not just the dishonesty, but the sense that he's taking something away from others—yes, he's clearly a gifted engineer, so talking about that is fine. But there are people out there who genuinely are extremely ethical, and this just feels to me like he's robbing them of something in order to claim a virtue that he doesn't really seem to posses, rather than being satisfied with the (remarkable) things that he legitimately did accomplish.
I guess what it comes down to is that I can respect pride, but when it crosses into unfounded ego it's not so respectable.
Subscribe