Alan Jacobs


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Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.
I’ve seen this passage from David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years quoted in several venues, and it really is a wonderful passage: who knew that a person could get so many facts wrong in one little sentence? I can’t quite get over it. Apple Computer (not “Computers”) was in fact founded by two guys, one of whom was a computer engineer and a Republican (at least in college), who didn’t break from IBM and who didn’t start their business in the 1980s and didn’t form little democratic circles and sure as hell didn’t work on their laptops because laptops hadn’t been invented yet. I’m sure the rest of the book is totally reliable, though.

(Of course, it’s not at all fair to judge the whole book from this sentence. I have perpetrated some pretty silly sentences myself that I wish I could extract from my books. But still: wow.)