I'm told that not only is Tim Cook gay but also that this is something very important which should be emblazoned across the newspapers of the world.
Tim Cook is now the most powerful gay man in the world. This is newsworthy, no? But you won’t find it reported in any legacy/mainstream outlet.
Well, no, it's not newsworthy and it's this glorious freedom of the market system which makes it not so.
Part of my family comes from Northern Ireland, where you can see what an economy built around close obligations and direct mutual exchange looks like. From the main square you'll have one street leading off to the Protestant church, another to the Catholic. Lining the streets to those respective houses of worship will be the Catholic pubs, the Catholic greengrocer, the Catholic butcher and on the other street the Protestant same. Great grandfather owned the post office licence in such a village and when partition came he advised his children to leave the country. For the money maker, that PO licence, would not remain with the family. Not with a Catholic in a new Protestant ruled state.
That is what happens when we have an economy which takes note of who you are rather than what you can do, when the economy gets caught up in the mutual hatreds and recriminations of small town life. However, we can and have escaped that. We escaped precisely by moving to the impersonality of the global marketplace. I don't care that the CEO of the company I don't buy my computers from is gay, any more than I care that the chips in my phone are made by a Hindu, Musselman or Chinee, that my vegetables are supplied by a Protestant or Catholic or that the server upon which these words reside is in the UK or Poland.
This is the huge great joy of the impersonality, the amorality, of the market. I no more need to care about the sexuality of who makes my computers than he does of my sexuality (middle aged and declining, thanks for asking).
It is of course true that it wasn't all that many years ago that this was not true: those outside the mainstream culture (and it extended to much more than just same sex attraction) were excluded: at times from employment at at others even from the joys of consumption. Which is why Mr. Cook's sexual preferences simply aren't newsworthy. Society has gone through a large and at times painful change to make these sorts of things just not newsworthy: let's keep it that way, eh?
