At first glance I thought he was writing about us:

Given that our culture is fundamentally consumerist, every countercultural movement is by definition anti-consumerist, a quixotic attempt to create an imaginary space that exists outside of and in opposition to the marketplace. Counterculturalism is a doomed attempt to maintain innocence in the face of the market’s all-consuming cynicism.

In fact he’s talking about the Beatles, and the various vampires who coopt counterculture by packaging it up and selling it as a product. Thus counterculture starts outside mainstream culture but ends up getting absorbed by it. And someone makes a fuckload of money for performing the alchemy. This was the business model of the Beatles. We just copied them. Paul and I have had long talks about it. And since I know you’re wondering: He will indeed be on stage at the Moscone center. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we’re supposed to figure out who should replace Eric Schmidt on our board, and every fucktard in the world has an opinion, including this guy at the TheStreet.com, who says we should get an outsider, someone truly independent. Yeah. That’s gonna happen. So anyway we met yesterday, the deal was we were all supposed to bring in a name of someone we’d recommend and put our name into a hat and the old guy from J. Crew would draw them out of the hat and then we’d all say what we thought of that person. As expected, most of the board had written the name “Tim Cook,” except Andrea Jung, who continues to go rogue at every opportunity. She’d written down “Larry Summers,” which I guess was supposed to be provocative because, like, Summers would dare to talk back to me or something. And also Andrea just read “Outliers” and now she’s using the word “outlier” all the time and trying to be all “outlier” about everything she does. Whatevs. Larry Summers has as much chance of getting on our board as I have of being named to replace him as president of Yale. Not gonna happen.

Frankly I don’t even think we need to replace Eric, and if we do replace him, I really don’t care who we get, as long as it’s someone who’s a good fit with the rest of the board, meaning someone who does whatever the fuck I tell them to do and signs off on my options grants and jumps under a bus if El Jobso gets in trouble. Since I’m the boss, I got to put two names into the hat instead of just one, and mine were “Harry Potter, Esq.” and “Chuck E. Cheese.” Campbell laughed — it’s what he gets paid to do — but the old guy from J. Crew said he’d never heard of “this Cheese person” and is he an academic or something? Andrea Jung got all pissed off and said I wasn’t taking this seriously at all, and I commended her for having such tremendous powers of observation. She asked me if I’d like to try again, and this time make a serious recommendation, and I said, Sure, I’d like to recommend Diego, my gardener. Andrea told the old guy that she wanted to file a formal complaint against me, and I said I was disappointed that Andrea was opposing my motion regarding Diego, and I wondered whether this was simply because Diego is Mexican, and if that’s the case, then I would like to have an official complaint of racism placed in Andrea’s HR file. Andrea responded that I should print out that complaint, roll it up into a ball, and insert it into my rectum.

I was actually starting to enjoy this, but then my iPhone buzzed and I said it was really important and I had to step outside to take the call because it was my doctor, even though actually it was Katie doing our pre-planned bail-out call. I went outside and pretended to be talking about medical stuff and kind of wandered down the hall and never went back.

Apple lawyers just forwarded to me a 17-page letter from Ray Kurzweil citing “numerous factual errors” in my blog post yesterday about him stalking me and claiming I’ve had nanobots implanted. He’s demanding that we publish his entire letter here on the blog plus on the Apple home page. Not gonna happen, but there was one thing I did find interesting. As I mentioned yesterday, Kurzweil wears that earpiece-slash-microphone thing (see photo) wherever he goes, and seems to be talking to someone. Kurzweil lists this as one of my “factual errors,” saying that in fact he is not talking to anyone. He is just talking out loud over an always-on voice connection, recording everything he says into a giant hard drive. This way he can create a record of every thought he’s ever had, so that, just in case he doesn’t live long enough to see the Singularity, like if he gets hit by a bus or something, he can be frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored until the Singularity arrives, at which point all of his voice data can be downloaded into the new and improved Ray Kurzweil body. FSJ regrets the error, but wants to point out that, like, dude, you were way better off when people just thought you were talking to someone. But whatevs. Peace out, Ray Kurzweil. And namaste. I honor the place where your virtual soul and my own become one.

He’s all over me about the transplant and his crazy Singularity theories. It started with email, then phone calls. Then he escalated to actually physically stalking me. He keeps tracking me down in public, coming up to me in restaurants and stuff, and he’s like, You’ve started the transition, haven’t you? You have, right? At first I tried to humor him and play along, but that just made it worse. The other day I was in a stall in the men’s room at Il Fornaio and I look up and there he is, peering over the wall at me. He’s like, Just tell me what it feels like. I’m like, Dude, it sucks, I’ve got a new liver, it’s no fun. He’s like, No, tell me about the nanobots. I know you got them. You did, right?

What’s even weirder is that he’s wearing one of those earpiece-microphone things, like in the photo above — he wears it wherever he goes, and I think there’s someone on the other end talking to him, but I don’t know. I finish up and go out to the sink and he’s standing next to me, looking at me in the mirror. I’m like, Seriously, dude, what are you looking at? He says, I’m trying to see where they put the controllers under your skin. It’s amazing. It’s barely visible.

Again I try to blow him off and he’s like, Look, I’ve been studying this stuff for years. I know what I’m talking about. I know it’s real. You got access, right? You did, didn’t you. I said I got no more access than anyone else who needs a transplant, no special favors, it’s all been covered in the press, blah blah. He goes, No, not that. Come on. The liver thing was a cover. Everyone knows that. You got access to the black ops government program. We know they’re recruiting people. Tell me something — did you get the advanced intelligence module? Are there any virtual reality components?

I ask him where he’s getting all this and finally he explains that the “giveaway,” as he calls it, was that the operation was done in Tennessee. He’s like, Hello? Tennessee? Like, home of Arnold Air Force Base? Everyone in the Singularitarian community knows that that’s where they’re doing covert work on nanotechnology and biotech. I mean it’s hardly a secret. And then your doctor just happens to be Dr. James Eason, a former Air Force surgeon who did his residency at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, aka the other leading covert nanobot development facility. Good Lord, Steve. Eason is like the Oppenheimer of Singularity technologies. Everyone knows that.

Again I try to just blow him off, but he’s a persistent little fucker. He goes, Steve, I’m the head of the Singularity University. My whole team knows about all this stuff. We’ve got NASA on board. And the Google guys. People talk, Steve. The NASA guys are talking about this right out in the open. We may be crazy, but we’re not stupid. We can put two and two together and make five. So come on. Tell me. Seriously. How far along are they? Have they worked out the kinks in the cyborg vision yet? I promise I won’t tell anyone. I swear to God. They’ve approached Larry Page, did you know that? Did you know that? You’re not the only one out there with the nanobots, Steve!

By then I was out the door, and calling 911. Sorry, Ray Kurzweil. But the restraining order stays in place. And it is totally your own fault.

“It actually stayed up longer than we expected,” a Borg product manager says.

It’s called Squirrelizer. Started when some people went on vacation and tried to take a photo of themselves and a squirrel popped up in front of the camera. See a story about it here. Now some dickheads in England have created a tool that lets you put that same little Eric Schmidt into any photo you want. Iulia and Natasha used it to create this wonderful photo of PR flack Marcy Simon feigning orgasm as she spots her cute little multi-billionaire friend. (It’s a Pavlovian response; all flacks have it. Put money in front of them and they just start moaning.) Captions wanted.

I honestly don’t know what it is about me that makes people (especially hacks) so interested in trying to psychoanalyze me from a distance. But here’s yet another pathetic attempt, this time from the Times of London. Money quote:

Jobs is, in the words of the psychiatrist and scholar of leadership Michael Maccoby, “a productive narcissist”. To Jobs, the world is an epiphenomenon, a side effect of the existence of Steve. Or rather, it is a pyramid with Jobs at the top, a few bright people just beneath him, and then the rest of us — the “bozos”. The customer bozo is not, to him, always right. In the early days it was said the Apple marketing department consisted of Jobs looking in his mirror and asking himself what he wanted. His customer-relations motto is from Henry Ford: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

Not much new here, to be honest. Quick summary, to save you the trouble of reading the whole thing: I’m adopted; I’m not a very nice guy; I make great products; Apple may or may not be fucked without me; I got thrown out of Apple, founded NeXT, bought Pixar; in case you didn’t catch this the first time around, I’m not a very nice guy; despite this fact, the hack who wrote this article is madly in love with me and wishes he could have my babies. So the way he shows his devotion is by doing a hatchet job on me. Sheesh. And they say I’m the one with the fucked up psychology?

See here. Cops were ignorant dicks, yet Dylan “couldn’t have been any nicer.” No beers at the White House needed. Um, Skip Gates? Hello?

This is the Win7 upgrade path chart that some Borgtards sent to Goatberg and which he published today. It’s pretty stunning. Green boxes represent upgrades that will be painful but won’t kill you. Blue boxes represent upgrades that will kill you. Meanwhile, our upgrade path looks like this. Do you ever wonder if the Borg does this just to see how much they can get away with? Like, it’s all some sick joke? I know I do.