The New Apple iPad Pro Advertisement is Anti-Craft and Anti-Human
On May 7, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook posted this on Twitter to announce the latest iPad Pro, and included the video of the advertisement made for it:
It is the most anti-human, anti-culture, anti-creativity, anti-craft, anti-analogue, anti-physical objects I’ve ever seen.
The only objects Apple wants us to own is its products, the thinner the better - a literal flattening of culture, and not to experience anything that exists outside the digital space.
I know the digital space has its benefits for many, but it cannot be the dominating source for creating, learning, communicating and for entertainment.
Listening to Sonny and Cher sing "All I Ever Need is You" whilst objects like a trumpet, a piano, books, records, cameras, sculptures, toys, to name a few, are being flattened to symbolise the new and thinnest iPad Pro as a replacement is the complete opposite of the advertisement from 1984 for the new Apple Macintosh (directed by Ripley Scott).
A nod to George Orwell’s 1984 novel, it features a woman with a hammer destroying a screen with a Big Brother like totalitarian speaking to an enslaved audience. A destruction to liberate the oppressed.
But 40 years later, Apple’s message is let’s crush and destroy things that matter to people, especially artists, and is now the tech oppressor.
It’s been great to see how many people have responded to Tim Cook, sharing the same sentiments. A couple even suggested if the ad would have been much better if it played in reverse.
Someone in China reversed Apple's awful new iPad Pro ad — and made something surprisingly beautiful
I can’t find the name of the director of this new ad, but I saw a few tweets saying it is someone from Israel, and this from Screenslate sums it up perfectly: Not intending to suggest a blanket boycott of artists working or born in Israel. However this ad is pretty tone-deaf for a moment where we're inundated with images of leveled cities, ruined culture, and people flattened under rubble. And the irony is too rich for me.
I do imagine the person or team who conceptualised Crush! are in their 30s and ‘digital natives’ who lack an appreciation or understanding of the importance of the physical and the analogue. This is not about being nostalgic about a romanticised past, but about corporations that are eager to replace human creativity with AI.
For RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote, “This ad doesn't just show destruction. It delights in it.” and that the ad says “All these beautiful objects and materials and tools that allowed humans to make art, or that inspired art, are being destroyed, smashed, pulped, to feed the tech industry."
An extract that emphasises why the ad is so troubling,
The ad arrives amid a continued furor over the ethical, moral and copyright implications of "Generative AI," which is a cool-sounding name for plagiarism software. This so-called "intelligence" is not intelligent but crudely imitative. Contrary to what its industry boosters (and their simps) keep trying to tell us, its relationship to the history of human creativity is not at all like the relationship between a flesh-and-blood art student studying a book of Rembrandt paintings or a budding trumpeter playing along with Mile Davis. It's more like the relationship between the tripods in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the people that they suck up into their bellies, shred into gory paste, and spray onto their crops, as a kind of mulch.
All of variants of Gen AI were "trained" over the course of many years by "scraping" of artwork by creative humans, past and present. Almost zero of the artists were consulted or asked to opt-in, much less compensated for their labor. Gen AI is theft of intellectual property as well as intellectual labor (and in some cases physical labor; it takes time and material to make a film, a TV show, an album, a painting, a sculpture, etc.) on a scale never dreamt of before.
"Move fast and break things" was the motto of Facebook until ten years ago, and continues to drive the tech industry, as well as venture capitalists and hedge funders who have no morals, and don't care about anything but shareholder value and executive bonuses. These are people who look for ways to siphon off money from transactions that didn't need additional middlemen to function. These are people who acquire companies in order to saddle them with debt from their own acquiring and then cut staff and resources and financially bleed them to death. These are people who create services that shatter existing industries so quickly that the law can't catch up with regulations, and brag about being "disruptors" while the unemployment lines swell.
These are people who break other people.
-via Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete this Revolting Apple Ad by Matt Zoller Seitz
Grim.
