Grace City (which I found via BTW) desribes an interesting story on Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) and his unwillingness to make porn readily available on his portable devices like the iPhone (now, I am not sure exactly what his devices prevent. I am not privy to technology, especially hip and sleek Apple products; it is a mini-miracle that I am blogging).
Pete from Grace City points this out:
“When a critic emailed him to say that this infringed his freedoms, Jobs emailed back and told him to buy a different type of computer.”
And another complaint hit a bit closer to home, specifically, Jobs love for Bob Dylan:
one customer emailed him to ask how Dylan would feel about Jobs’ restrictions of customers’ freedoms.
The CEO of Apple replied to say that he values:
‘Freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’ and some traditional PC folks feel their world is slipping away. It is.’
The interlocuter replied:
“I don’t want ‘freedom from porn’. Porn is just fine! And I think my wife would agree.”
In the most revealing line, Steve Jobs dismissed the critic thus:
“You might care more about porn when you have kids.”
The notion of freedom evident in these comments is worth touching upon. For the upset Apple customer, freedom means doing what one wants. Freedom is the absence of entanglements. Here is the problem with this view of freedom: once one removes all external hindrances, authorities, and snags (eg, rules, software that prevents porn, disapproving spouses, God, etc.), they are still a slave to themselves. To return to Bob Dylan, “you’ve gotta serve somebody” (or something). If one removes all rules and outside authorities, one remains a slave to themselves.
The book of Exodus brings clarity to the matter. The Hebrew people find themselves enslaved in Egypt (the Hebrew root abad–serve, slave–is laced throughout the first chapter). What is interesting is the goal of the book: the Hebrews are not moving from enslavement to freedom, but from bad enslavement to good enslavement. The purpose of their exit from Egypt is to serve (again, the root abad) the Lord (Exodus 4.23). Only when the Hebrews place themselves under the authority of God can they be truly free.
This is the biblical idea of freedom. It is an idea at variance with our culture’s assumptions about freedom (evidenced in the comments directed to Jobs) but, ironically, only when one tethers themselves to God’s rule can they be liberated.
