Of course, innovation potential and smart branding may not be immediately reflected in a company’s stock price. For many firms, the lure of easy profits from existing products is too great to resist—especially given that they are run by hired managers who do not much care about legacy and will find a cushy new job anyway. Contrasting Apple’s cavalier attitude to profit with the rest of the corporate world, Christensen has noted that “most companies cannot bring themselves to make decisions that result in the market for their existing core products being completely destroyed. When they consider it from a financial perspective, it just doesn’t make sense to create new products at the risk of jeopardizing your profitable, existing products.... It’s exactly that fear that has led many great companies to leave themselves vulnerable to disruption from others.” Obsessed with issues of legacy, Jobs was different in that he went in for the long term; and by focusing on innovation and branding rather than on the immediate bottom line, he delivered more value to his company than any other CEO in recent history. If you had invested $100,000 in Apple in 1997 when Jobs returned to the company, your shares would have been worth $6.86 million on his retirement.

INNOVATION IS one thing, but making money off it is another. Were Apple to stick to hardware manufacturing—putting all its energy into designing its phones, tablets, and computers while someone else was building the operating system—it would need to insure that all its latest hardware innovations would actually be supported by the next version of someone else’s operating system. This, of course, might not happen, or it might happen too slowly. Jobs sought to avoid such dependence at all costs. As he saw it, Apple in its short history had already accumulated too many scars—most of them from competitors and former collaborators. It would take risks and enter into business relationships only in situations where it could expect to gain autonomy, or at least the upper hand.

Jobs understood that abandoning control at any point in the chain—he would eventually build his own retail stores to manage the very last stage in the process—comes with risks, whatever the savings. For Apple to innovate at its own pace, which was the only option acceptable to Jobs, it had to control everything or get out. As Jobs put it, “We didn’t want to get into any business where we didn’t own or control the primary technology because you’ll get your head handed to you.” This does not mean that Apple is an autarky. Its goal has never been self-sufficiency; it does not aim to produce every single component in-house. Its ultimate goal is innovation, which, in Jobs’s view, could only come with relative independence. To that end, working with other companies is acceptable as long as it does not give any single supplier outsize influence on the company. Apple’s list of suppliers—released for the first time earlier this year—lists 156 companies (which account for 97 percent of its primary suppliers).

Can Apple’s obsession with innovation become a liability, blinding it to numerous ethical issues involved in the manufacture of its products? This is an increasingly burning question. Isaacson recounts a visit that Danielle Mitterrand, then France’s first lady, paid to Apple in the early 1980s. When she asked Jobs about overtime pay and vacation time for workers, Jobs got annoyed and told her interpreter that “if she’s so interested in their welfare, tell her she can come work here any time.” Isaacson fails to relate this episode to Apple’s more recent troubles with working conditions in the factories of its China-based suppliers, a subject that—inexplicably—is never broached in the book. The controversy is casting a growing cloud over Apple’s image. But Jobs promised aesthetic purity, not moral purity. Apple has certainly not been deaf to the mounting public concern over how its gadgets are manufactured—it has recently joined the Fair Labor Association, a respected non-profit; but it is not clear how far it is willing to go in revamping its supply chain. Given his ambition to minimize his company’s dependence on any one player, it is surprising that Jobs was willing to place so many of Apple’s eggs in the basket of Foxconn, its largest and most disturbing partner in China.

IV.

JOBS NEVER PRODUCED a coherent theory of technology, but his curt responses to interviewers reveal that he was indeed prepared to think about technology philosophically. In one interview after another, Jobs comes off as a pragmatic but sophisticated thinker—certainly not your average one-dimensional tech-loving engineer. Jobs accepted that his products would be used and modified in unforeseeable ways: “People are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined.” He was aware of the pernicious appeal and the low effectiveness of technological fixes (“What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. It’s a political problem”), and he seemed to believe that much of the digital revolution was being overhyped (“It’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light—that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important”).

While most technologists believe that technology is value-neutral, Jobs was prepared to talk about the values embedded in the gadgets and the appliances that we use. This was most evident when he described how he went about buying a washing machine:

We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.

Jobs’s meticulous unpacking of the values embedded in different washing machines, and his insistence on comparing them to the values he wanted to live by, would be applauded by moralistic philosophers of technology from Heidegger to Ellul, though it may be a rather arduous way of getting on with life. But Jobs understood the central point that philosophers of technology had tried (and failed) to impart: that technology embodies morality.

Jobs himself was never shy about the value that Apple products were to embody: it was liberation—from manual work, from being limited to just a few dozen songs on your music player, from being unable to browse the Internet on your phone. Yet liberation is hardly the only value that matters. We need to identify the other moral instructions that may be embedded in a technology, which it promotes directly or indirectly. And this fuller analysis requires going beyond studying the immediate impact on the user and engaging with the broader—let us call it the “ecological”—impact of a device. (“Ecological” here has no environmental connotations; it simply indicates that a technology may affect not only its producer and its user, but also the values and the habits of the community in which they live.)

Whether a washing machine uses a quarter of the water or more matters morally only if its users can establish a causal connection between water use and climate change, ocean depletion, or some other general concern. Jobs understood this. The problem was that Jobs, while perfectly capable of interrogating technology and asking all the right questions about its impact on our lives, blatantly refused to do so when it came to his own products. He may have been the ultimate philosopher of the washing machine, but he offered little in the way of critical thinking about the values embedded in the Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPad. When he discussed his own products, he switched from philosophical reflection on the effects of consumer choices to his Bauhaus mode of the vatic designer.

Tellingly, it was not the washing machine that Jobs invoked to promote his gadgets, but the automobile. In the early 1980s, he regularly compared the computer to the automobile, stressing the emancipatory power of the latter. The Macintosh was pitched as a Volkswagen, and the more expensive Lisa model as a Maserati. Jobs spoke of “the Crankless Computer”: in a memo he declared that “personal computers are now at the stage where cars were when they needed to be cranked by hand to be started.” In his Playboy interview, he said that “people really don’t have to understand how computers work. Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car.” He persistently praised Henry Ford for making cars accessible without following the whims of his customers; it was apparent that he also liked to think of himself that way. On the whole, the media found Jobs’s car analogy persuasive. In 1982, The New York Times reported that Apple was “to the personal computer what the Model T Ford was to automobiles.”

On the surface, the car analogy seems flawless: both technologies allowed customers to do what they wanted, and boosted their autonomy, and gave them more choices about how to live their lives. But as any environmentalist, urbanplanning activist, or committed cyclist can attest, liberation was only one part of the impact that the automobile had on how we live, especially in America. Congestion, pollution, suburban sprawl, the decline of public transportation, the destruction of public space in the name of building more highways—these are only some of the less discussed effects of the automobile. Of course, the automobile did not have the same effects everywhere—compare how easy and pleasant it is to get around without a car in Portland versus Dallas—so simple appeals to technological determinism, or to the zeitgeist, or to the canonical myths about how the automobile would transform and liberate our culture, do not explain very much. Some cities and communities simply approached the automobile with the kind of philosophical sensibility that Jobs applied to his washing machine, and others did not.

NOW, WHAT DOES all this tell us about Apple? What is its ecological impact, and should we fear it? It is tempting to point to the impending death of bookstores and music stores and suggest that Apple—along with Amazon, Google, and Netflix—is culpable. Technologists already have a well-rehearsed rejoinder: that this is all just “creative destruction,” and what needs to be preserved is the content, not the distributional channel. At least Apple, they say, has been something of a savior to record labels and book publishers. Well, perhaps—but bookstores have other important functions for the individual and the community that will not be easily replicated online.

Yet this is not the most interesting and troubling aspect of Apple’s ecological impact. Ironically enough, the most consequential of Apple’s threats is not to the physical but to the virtual: the company may eventually suffocate the Internet. Apple’s embrace of the “app paradigm”—whereby activities that have been previously conducted on our browsers shift to dedicated software applications on our phones and tablets—may be destroying the Internet in much the same way that the automobile destroyed the sidewalks and the playgrounds.

The idea of the Internet is still too young to produce strong anti-app sentiment. We do not yet have an adequate understanding of cyberspace as space. While it is safe to speculate that different design arrangements of the online world give rise to different aesthetic experiences, we still do not know the exact nature of this relationship. Nor do we know enough about how the design and the interconnection of online platforms affect the distribution of civic virtues—solidarity, equality, and flânerie, to name just a few—that we may wish to promote online. Just as we recognized many of the important civic functions of the sidewalk only after it had been replaced by the highway, so we may currently be blind to those virtues of the Internet—its inefficiency, its unpredictability, its disorder—that may ultimately produce a civic and aesthetic experience that is superior to the “automatic, effortless, and seamless” (one of Apple’s advertising slogans) world of the app.

The point is not that we should forever cling to the shape and the format of the Internet as it exists today. It is that we should (to borrow Apple’s favorite phrase) “think different” and pay attention to the aesthetic and civic externalities of the app economy. Our choice is between erecting a virtual Portland or sleepwalking into a virtual Dallas. But Apple under Steve Jobs consistently refused to recognize that there is something valuable to the Web that it may be destroying. Jobs’s own views on the Internet stand in stark contrast to how he thought about the washing machine. Asked about the future of the Internet in 1994, he was clearly reluctant to think about it in ecological terms:

Rolling Stone: Let’s talk more about the Internet. Every month, it’s growing by leaps and bounds. How is this new communications web going to affect the way we live in the future?

Jobs: I don’t think it’s too good to talk about these kinds of things. You can open up any book and hear all about this kind of garbage.

Rolling Stone: I’m interested in hearing your ideas.

Jobs: I don’t think of the world that way. I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is ... you can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.

Had Henry Ford been asked about the impact of his cars on the quality of urban life in America, he would probably have given the same answer.

Standing back and getting out of the way and letting things take on a life of their own is not a variety of moral reflection, though it makes sense as a way to think about a wildly successful product. The total and exclusive focus on the tool at the expense of its ecosystem, the appeal to the zeitgeist that downplays the producer’s own role in shaping it (“whatever happens is ... ”; “feeling the direction”), the invocation of the idea that technology is autonomous (“these things take on a life of their own”)—these are all elements of a worldview that Lewis Mumford, in criticizing the small-mindedness of those who were promoting car-only travel in the 1950s, dubbed “the bankruptcy of social imagination.”

Should we hold Ford Motors responsible for the totality of its impact on our lives, or just for the part that deals with liberation and autonomy? Perhaps it would set the bar too high to hold it accountable for pollution, congestion, and the disappearance of public space. But Apple’s brand, its lofty conception of itself, has been built on the idea that it is not a company like other companies. It was Apple that insisted that it wants to think different, and that it is not dominated by “suits” who care only about its quarterly earnings. So it is Apple who set this bar so high—and Apple that seems to have fallen short of it.

CURIOUSLY, A YEAR AFTER his tirade in Rolling Stone, Jobs gave another interview—to Newsweek—and offered a more cogent (and more disturbing) prediction about the future of the Internet:

The way to look at the Web is, it’s the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel.... You’re going to see more and more Web sites where you feel like you’re driving, where you’re asking questions.... You won’t be looking at a Web page that 3,000 other people are looking at. You’re looking at one that’s exactly what you want to see, whether it’s information on that new Chrysler Neon that you want to buy, with exactly the color you want and the dealers that have it in your area, or whether it’s Merrill Lynch showing you your portfolio of stock, updated every time you check in. It’s really going to be customized.

This is an accurate description of what Apple is doing at the moment—except that instead of customized Web pages, it is taking the form of personalized apps. But as his interview makes clear, Jobs outright rejected the possibility that there may be a multiplicity of irreconcilable views as to what the Web is and what it should be. For him, it is only a “direct-to-customer distribution channel.”In other words, Jobs believed that the Web is nothing more than an efficient shopping mall, and he proceeded to build his business around what he believed to be the Web’s essence.

That the Web did become a shopping mall fifteen years after Jobs made his remark does not mean that he got the Web right. It means only that a powerful technology company that wants to change the Web as it pleases can currently do so with little or no resistance from anyone. If one day Apple decides to remove a built-in browser from the iPad, as the Web becomes less necessary in an apped world, it will not be because things took on a life of their own, but because Apple refused to investigate what other possible directions—or forms of life—“things” might have taken. For Jobs, with his pre-political mind, there was no other way to think about the Internet than to rely on the tired binary poles of supply and demand.

This is not to say that Apple’s embrace of apps at the expense of the Web is bad for innovation—a charge that is often levied at the company by Internet academics and advocates of the vague ideal of “Internet openness.” The concern of thinkers such as Jonathan Zittrain (who uses the term “generativity” to refer to innovation) is that Apple—which inspects and approves every single app submitted to its app store—may not be able to recognize the next Wikipedia when it is sent its way. They propose that something—it is rarely specified—needs to be done so that Apple loses its fantastic gatekeeping powers. Anyone not steeped in the world of Internet theory would find the idea that Apple harms innovation quite ridiculous. If Harvard’s Christensen is right, moreover, there would inevitably come a moment when the Internet itself gets disrupted—by apps or something else—and such disruption would probably be good for innovation. Yet the promotion of innovation cannot be the sole determinant of how our digital future will be mapped. Ethical and aesthetic considerations should also serve as an important impetus for regulation and activism. But since most discussions about the future of the Internet have been dominated by lawyers and venture capitalists, innovation is still the overriding concern. And as long as innovation is the value that dominates the public debate about the Internet, Apple has nothing to fear.

What is most troubling is that Apple is not doing anything to explore its online footprint. Perhaps Apple’s design mentality—combined with its messianic self-portrayal as the only company in the world that is fighting some anonymous corporate menace (even as it is one of the most valuable companies in the world!)—has worn down its ability to ask the sort of big-picture questions that Jobs was so prone to asking in his youth. Apple, with its total fixation on the user and its complete disregard of the community in which that user is grounded, does not seem well-equipped to identify and evaluate the threats that it poses to the Internet, let alone do something about them. You would be hard-pressed to see Apple—the largest technology company in the world—sponsor events, festivals, think-tanks, books, or any other kind of research or debate about technology. It is as if they are convinced that the intellectual justifications of their work are all self-evident. After all, why re-visit truth?

Even Google, with its naïve technocratic ethos, is more committed to questioning the impact that it is having on the Internet and the world at large. They fund a bevy of academic and policy initiatives; they have recently launched a Berlin-based think tank dedicated to exploring the social impact of the Internet; they even started a quarterly magazine. Granted, Google is doing this partly in response to mounting regulatory pressure, but even so one must acknowledge that Google has not shied away from engaging many of its critics. Apple, by contrast, holds itself above the fray. It seems to believe that such discussions of meanings and consequences do not matter, because it is in the design business, and so its primary relationship is with the user, not with the society. This may be what some parochial designers thought about themselves until the 1970s—but today the advent of design that is critical, value-sensitive, and participatory has exposed the great moral void of the rigid functionalist paradigm. But Apple, alas, remains stuck in the most conservative, outdated, and bizarre interpretation of the Bauhaus, which was, ironically, a movement that flaunted its commitment to social reform and utopian socialism. Would a job applicant who spends weeks pondering the morality of washing machines get a job at Apple now?

Unfortunately, most of us are too addicted to Apple’s products to demand or to expect anything more of the company. As long as Apple can ship new devices every quarter, much like a dealer would ship new drugs, few questions are asked. How little has changed since Lewis Mumford complained that

For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old. This may be good for a rapid turnover in business, but it is bad for continuity and stability in life. Progress, in an organic sense, should be cumulative, and though a certain amount of rubbish-clearing is always necessary, we lose part of the gain offered by a new invention if we automatically discard all the still valuable inventions that preceded it.

As for Jobs, his own tragic limitations were on full display when Rolling Stone asked him about the future of technology—whether genetic research and cloning “were pushing it all too far.” He rolled his eyes. “You know—I’d rather just talk about music. These big-picture questions are just—zzzzzzzz,” he said, and started snoring. The philosopher of the twenty-first century, indeed.

Evgeny Morozov is the author, most recently, of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs). This article appeared in the March 15, 2012 issue of the magazine.