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Techno Lust?
However, the stock market doesn’t seem to care. As I write, Apple is more valuable than GE. That may well be a profound omen. I must be the only person in the world whose fingers don’t work on the screen on a cold day and whose iPhone vanishes in seconds before my eyes like some mischievous imp. Yet the iPhone continues to be the ultimate object of techno-lust.

Meanwhile as stock titans like the bank Citicorp become penny stocks and markets collapse in a historic way, Apple holds a channel between $80 and $100 as if the credit crunch wasn’t happening. It’s an amazing feat of stock market resilience. It’s amazing - period.

In a sense it gets better because the market is due for a bounce and if it does rally, Apple is bound to zoom up. If Apple can withstand the biggest crash in 80 years it will certainly rise if the market takes a turn for the better.

The west coast, Silicon Valley ethos: a potent mix of leading edge engineering, strong finance and new age philosophy; this is how it is meant to work. While the old industrial dinosaurs pass away, the new, clean, smart technologies take over; raising the world to a high plane.

Companies like Apple are meant to transcend crashes and recessions and, almost supernaturally, Apple is. Obama’s ‘cap and trade,’ the carbon tax whose mind blowing cost could finish off old American industry period, plays to Apple’s new technology example. Out with the old polluting ways and in with new slick shiny ‘lick-able’ industries.

GE is/was a metaphor for the American economy, just like GM was in the 50s. The metaphor seems likely to become Apple.