he changed the way that we communicate with each other. he changed the way we think about what is possible in technology. and it s really hard to understate the importance of this day. xeni of boingboing.net. thanks for joining us. it s been too long since we ve had you on the show. i hope to have you back under happier circumstances. thanks for being here. thank you, rachel. there s a ton of other news tonight. it s an amazing news day you can t quite believe was all one day. we ll have quite a bit of it coming up and another look back at apple s steve jobs. we ll be right back. your time is limited, so don t waste it living someone else s life. don t with trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people s thinking. don t let the noise of other s opinions drown out your own voice. most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. they somehow already know what
about seeing technology as an extension of the human mind and as a way to extend our capabilities to communicate, to connect, to perceive the world more richly. it s a really sad day to see him pass. and in terms of what you said there about democratizing technology, using good design to do that, i think that it s i think that we when people talk about steve jobs as a visionary, i think that the basic thing people are talking about is this idea that design had to start being part of the way that you competed. but i think you re getting at something a little bit deeper there about it being functionally important that stuff became easy to use and that there became an expectation that stuff became easier to use. the easier things were to use, the more people could use them. that s not the most complicated idea in the world except when you combine it with the idea that once everybody can use these machines, they can then
technology. making you want, viscerally want to have some sort of interaction with that technology. instead of being alienated by it or intimidated by it or bored by it, frankly. computer with that voice, with that computerized voice which i remember from that time, i was 11 when this came out. i remember that voice. it says never trust a computer you can t lift. making fun of ibm mainframe. the macintosh was a computer you could pick up. it had a handle. that was revolutionary. personal computing for persons. for people who didn t know from computers. it was the first real breach of the distance between the immense power of computing and regular people s ability to access that power. apple and steve jobs created the expectation which did not exist before. they created the expectation that peel wouople would have to able to use this powerful technology in the way that made sense to the people. not just the computer or engineers who designed that
opportuni opportunity. it allows small businesses to expand their market. allows them to fibnd out where the best deal is. all generations prepared for a very competitive future they re going to find themselves in. look, our competition is going all of this right now. they re building the infrastructure, both the brick and mortar infrastructure and the technology infrastructure. if we really want to compete, if we want to maintain ourselves as the strongest nation on earth, we better make sure all of our citizens have access to this technology. with the president now trying to sell the american people on the jobs act, he s doing a much better job selling that idea. particularly infrastructure investment to the public than he is selling it to congress. part of the problem is that democrats in congress are not all alied with him. you ve always been a centrist democrat throughout your career. what do you make of what do you make of the fact that while republicans have no problem unify
share. no one has ever escaped it. that is as it should be. death is very likely the single best invention of life. it s life s change agent. it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now the new is you. steve jobs speaking at stanford university in 2005. this is how the front page of the brilliant website boingboing.net is honoring steve jobs tonight. if you sat down to write at the keyboard of an early macintosh computer as i did many times, this tribute will look forward to you. joining me, jenny of boingboing.net, one of the best intellectual writers on technology i know. thanks for being with us. thank you, rachel. you ve written about steve jobs as an influence on technology. looking at that stanford address and thinking about his career and contributions on the occasion of his death tonight, what do you think he meant to the country broadly?