“Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant once. The cheery moment is captured in a classic production called Electrocuting an Elephant, a black-and-white film the inventor used as part of a lengthy marketing campaign against his commercial rival, Westinghouse, and his former protégé Nicola Tesla,” Matt Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone. “Edison was trying to prove that Westinghouse’s AC current was more dangerous than his own DC current, so he first fried a succession of cats and dogs in a sort of zoocidal barnburning tour, then finally conflagrated a Coney Island circus elephant named Topsy as part of what was, one must admit, a very inspired public relations idea befitting the greatest corporate innovator of his time.”
“When the Supreme Court of Assholedom decided to consider the case of the late Steve Jobs, we instantly collided with a problem we’ll call the Edison Conundrum,” Taibbi writes. “This dictates that the question of whether or not a person is an asshole can be complicated by the utility of that person’s assholedom.”
Taibbi writes, “In other words, if being an asshole is part of what brought us electric light, motion pictures, the phonograph, or (more pertinently) the iPhone, do we excuse the assholedom? Or do we just share in it?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Steve Jobs was an asshole, then the more assholes, the better.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan Kennelly” for the heads up.]