As I prep for the launch of the new edition of Simon Anholt’s and my Brand America: The making, unmaking and re-making of the greatest national image of all time, I’ve been taking more notice of the signposts of America’s future — both the encouraging ones (e.g., the election of a black president per se) and the dispiriting ones (e.g., the non-fate of the auto industry).

Having lived and worked in Europe for the past seven years, where everything to do with mobile phones is always noticeably better than what’s on offer stateside, I was amused by this fake tirade by the Fake Steve Jobs, who describes a phone call in which he berates AT&T head Randall Stephenson for not realizing what a gift the iPhone is (AT&T mentioned offhandedly the other day that they’d like to encourage some people to use the iPhone less on their network, which has the device exclusively, as apparently 3% of the customers are responsible for 40% of the data usage).

Fake Steve Jobs screams down the line at Stephenson, comparing the iPhone to “Meet the Beatles”:

Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not.

About America, Fake Steve Jobs laments:

We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product.

And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country.

The whole article is an extremely tightly written piece of satire. Recommended for a hearty, bittersweet laugh.

21 December ’09: A few days later the follow-up fake phone call story appeared.