There’s a tech industry habit of second-guessing “what would Steve Jobs have done" ever since he passed away, and most of the things people attribute to him seem like guesses about a guy who was very hard to predict and often inconsistent. But recently, we have one of those very rare cases where we know exactly what Steve Jobs would not have done. Tim Cook and Apple’s leadership team have sold out the very American opportunity that made Steve Jobs’ life and accomplishments possible, while betraying his famously contemptuous attitude towards bullshit institutions.

Steve Jobs was, amongst many other things, the biological son of an unmarried Syrian immigrant who was in the United States on a student visa, and he grew up to be a person who had a really good sense of when to say “fuck you" to the man. Both of those aspects of Jobs were plainly disrespected by the pathetic display of fealty that Tim Cook put on display on behalf of Apple in the Oval Office a few weeks ago. Cook made a mealy-mouthed entreaty to Donald Trump, slathering him with compliments that were as numerous as they were false, and then used his sweaty palms to assemble a ghastly glass-and-gold trophy for a room full of press cameras. It is, quite literally, the most grim and embarrassing thing that's ever been done in Apple's name, and I was watching live when Tim Cook and Bono awkwardly butted index fingers while inflicting U2's worst album on everyone's iPods.

I’m not an uncritical Steve Jobs fan. I know, from having worked closely with people who worked directly for Jobs for many years, that he could be a mercurial, and brutish, boss. Too many of his greatest accomplishments came at significant personal cost to those who worked for him. But it’s inarguable that Jobs could see a future that many others could not, and virtually every single one of the people I know who had the chance to work for him directly have said that, even at their most critical, they inarguably felt that Jobs brought out the best of their talents and helped inspire them to do some of their best work.

But everybody knows that part of the Steve Jobs lore. What’s far less well-known is where Steve Jobs came from. As I noted fourteen years ago, “the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock". Jobs’ adoptive parents were able to take him in because he was born into that relatively unstable environment, with an uncertain future ahead of him. His upbringing and social context were all the things that the current authoritarian administration have violently targeted for attacks.

Steve Jobs was able to achieve many of the signature accomplishments in the history of American business because of the fundamental human rights and civil liberties that we extend to many of the most vulnerable and least-privileged people who come to our country.

Steve Jobs was also, plainly, a member of the 60s and 70s counterculture that defined the community and context where his work was born. The early personal computer scene was rife with psychedelic drug use (which was then criminalized, as was recreational marijuana use), and even some of Jobs’ ordinary cultural tastes such as being a fan of “hippie music” was considered so anti-social that artists were commonly monitored by federal agencies of the time.

This is the social context in which early personal computers were created, just one generation after IBM had sold its mainframe computers to the Nazis, when that company provided the numbers that would be inked onto the wrists of the prisoners held in concentration camps. And the anti-institutional, anti-war, anti-surveillance, and yes, often anti-government sentiment of those early hackers informed the ethos of everyone in that scene. That's why it was no surprise, when Jobs had the chance to make the first and most definitive global statement from Apple — the launch of the original Macintosh — that it would have a nod to Orwell’s 1984, and a shot at IBM’s PC, with what’s widely been regarded as the greatest advertisement of all time.

The son of an immigrant, a child of the counterculture, a man offering an unmistakable fuck-you to Big Brother, and a person who, above all, would never kiss the ass of someone who had absolutely awful taste. This was Steve Jobs.

And then Tim Cook handed a big shiny golden turd to Donald Trump, and couldn’t wait to stammer out how much he’d love to polish that turd for him, please sir — the emperor’s clothes look especially lavish today! It’s an embarrassment, a humiliation, not least because it was absolutely unnecessary. The iPhone is far, far more popular than this administration. Apple is powerful! An Apple that still held onto Steve Jobs’ spirit could have played the strong hand that it has, and bet with confidence on the enthusiasm and loyalty of the American people, and called Trump’s bluff, especially since this kind of appeasement is only going to embolden the administration to demand even more tithes from Apple in the future.

“But they can’t do that!"

Many people have the quisling impulse to insist that Apple had to kiss Trump’s ass. “They’ll be stuck with really high tariffs!" “They might lose government contracts!" This is foolishness, of cause, because all of this will still happen. The only thing that’s different is that Apple will have to navigate those headwinds while everyone in the world already knows that they’re led by a CEO who has already bent the knee, and by a board that collectively has no spine. There's no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say "fuck you"!

People without imagination will ask, “well, what else could they have done?" This is only a tough question if you don’t realize the immense cultural and technical assets that Apple has at its disposal. For example, just recently, Apple deployed its formidable multi-billion-user global cloud infrastructure in service of… promoting the Brad Pitt Formula 1 movie. People were, understandably, a bit disconcerted to see their wallet payment app sending them promotional messages about a film, and Apple undoubtedly screwed up in polluting a functional messaging channel about transactions with a commercial message, but hey — this is a clear sign Apple knows it’s got the power to drop a note directly into the note of millions of people’s pockets.

There’s even precedent for how a tech company can be far more effective in this kind of battle, though it was in much lower stakes, and with a company that wasn’t actually being unfairly squeezed. Ten years ago, when New York City was making the wild demand that Uber should actually follow the laws of the city if they wanted to operate within its boundaries, Uber responded by actually calling out the city’s mayor by name within the user interface of the app. Business media of the time called the move “clever" and hailed it as a great innovation. (In reality, Uber was, of course, lying and activists’ assertion that Uber was trying to destroy competition and undermine mass transit so that they could raise their prices once they had put all the taxis out of business turned out to be exactly correct.)

Here is an idea: Apple could, rather than creating golden bribes for child sexual predators, actually send a message to its users explaining that it would like to continue providing value to its customers, and ask those customers for help making that case to their elected officials.

Talk to your users

Now obviously, I’m fairly comfortable being antagonistic, but perhaps Apple’s corporate communications team is less so. Their tone might be something closer to Steve Jobs’ famous “thoughts on Flash" at the dawn of the smartphone era, where he laid out a vision of technology and competition that changed the entire landscape of how developers created experiences on the web. Despite Jobs often personally having a hotheaded personality, his letter on this topic was very well-reasoned and logical, and even many of those who were inclined to be deeply critical of his perspective on industry debates found it fairly persuasive.

Apple’s argument today could be very simple: Americans love technology like their phones and their laptops, and are proud of the innovations and success of American tech companies like Apple, and they know that those thrive best when their markets are free and open. That means rules should be made by the rule of law, not backroom deals made behind closed doors, and definitely not by greasing the palms of those in power. (If Apple wants to play nice, they can add something polite about how they know this administration would never do anything like that. Of course that’s a bald faced lie, but clearly Apple leadership wants to do some sucking-up to Trump, and this would at least be a form that does not involve rank debasement.)

Pushing out a message along these lines to every Apple user in America, with a specific call to action directed to their local elected officials and a message that they could send encouraging them to support open innovation would be extraordinarily effective. Name it the “American Phone Freedom Movement" and nudge a few of the stars of the Apple TV shows to talk about how much they love freedom.

As people are fond of pointing out these days, courage is contagious, and it wouldn't take much for others in tech to line up behind Apple if they had merely stood up in this moment. Hell, the entire industry has made a habit of copying Apple in so many areas over the years.

One more thing

In short, instead of meekly capitulating to pathetic bullies, this is a moment when Apple needed go on the attack. Instead of curling up in a defensive ball on the floor and crying while you hand out gold bricks to fascist predators, this is a time when a company full of smart and talented people should stand its ground. Because down the path of acquiescence lies only pain and a long, slow pathetic spiral to irrelevance.

Why would Apple employees believe they should follow leaders who blatantly violate the ethics guidelines that every worker is asked to follow about offering bribes to government officials? Why would consumers believe that Apple is still innovating when they’re resorting to the worst behaviors of over-the-hill incumbents who rely on graft and cronyism instead of actually making cool shit? Gold trinkets are emblematic of the Apple Intelligence flop era, right when they need to be channeling peak Steve Jobs one-more-thing energy. It's not too late. And if he gets mad, tell him he's holding it wrong.