More than anything, Steve Jobs was a salesman, maybe the greatest one ever, with a taste for auto-hagiography. Sure, that’s not the total picture. While he had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Apple I and Apple II, he did ultimately (twice) become the company’s Nudge-in-Chief who hectored his teams to perfection, the way Ahab urged his to the great white whale. 

I can’t wait to see Alex Gibney’s new doc, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which wonders why the late Apple founder was mourned deeply in office parks as well as Zuccotti Park. In an L.A. Weekly piece, Amy Nicholson sees Gibney’s latest as almost a sequel to his last work, Going Clear, the Cult of Mac being analogous in some ways to Scientology. An excerpt: 

Both Scientology and Apple were founded by now-dead gurus who commanded devotion. Both are corporations that claim to stand for something purer than greed. Neither pays fair taxes. And neither functions openly, speaks freely or tolerates critics.

Where the two films differ is us. Dismantle Scientology, and audiences will cheer. Chink away at the cult of Apple, and we all feel accused. I imagine that people will slink out of Steve Jobs keeping their iPhones guiltily stashed. When they make it a safe distance from the theater, they’ll glide their smartphones in front of their faces, swipe the black monoliths awake and disappear into the dream machines of their own desires: where they want to visit, what they want to hear and who they want to reach. As MIT professor Sherry Turkle describes it, the iPhone that was meant to connect the globe instead made us “alone together.” In the future, will historians wondering how society fractured look to Jobs’ Apple as the original sin?

We love our smartphones. In the eight years since the iPhone 1, they’ve become necessities — almost a human right. Though they’re made of circuits and wires, our attachment to these external brains is personal. They keep us company, and in turn we fondle them, sleep with them, flip out when they break. Which is why we have this documentary about their creator and not docs about the inventors of the subway, the shower, the fridge. Gibney’s film asks “Why did Jobs’ death make us mourn?”•