That’s why we all miss him: Steve Jobs produced technology that he believed in, but managed to convey that it was the product of his belief in himself, and in us. He made machines, but he never stopped struggling to shape the machine more than the machine shaped him. For all his optimism, for all his refusal to heed the lessons of the past in his attempt to write the lessons of the future, he also seemed to be fighting a deeply personal rearguard action — he was John Henry, if John Henry had decided to go ahead and invent the damn steam engine, instead of fighting vainly against it. We like to think that Steve Jobs’s fight was against death, and indeed while no one we know has lived like Steve Jobs, everyone we know should have the courage to die like him. But the fight he’ll be remembered for is the one he was fighting from the beginning — his fight against the ugly and inhuman aspects of the very world he helped create. We will miss him, but not because he was the first to stake his life on that battle. We will miss him because he might very well be the last.