That Apple Ad

I had intended to write a companion piece this week to my post from last week about the present and future of impact investing. But, having written extensively about technology and the arts, I obviously have to comment on “that Apple ad.”

ICYMI, last week Apple released an instantly controversial advertisement for the new iPad Pro that features a hydraulic press crushing a giant pile of musical instruments, paint cans, cameras, audio equipment, and assorted creative paraphernalia. In other words, the implements of culture and creativity.

The negative reaction was swift. Within a matter of days, Apple apologized:

"Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Apple marketing vice president Tor Myhren said in a statement to Ad Age. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”

Did Apple—as the avatar of technology’s growing cultural imperium—accidentally let slip its secret agenda to digitize the whole of human existence? Do technology companies arrogantly detest the delusional masses who are hopelessly fettered by analog delights like visual art and instrumental music?

Probably not—but that doesn’t make the ad any less objectionable.

Textually, the meaning of the ad seems pretty clear: the new iPad Pro is capable of such wide-ranging verisimilitude that it can transport viewers to a world’s worth of creative experiences.

There’s an intuitive appeal to this. Part of the role of telecommunications is to provide something that may not fully replace the “real thing” but provides good enough access in many instances.

The telephone isn’t a replacement for a live conversation—but the efficiency of being able to reach anyone anywhere (and from anywhere else) adequately compensates for this loss in all but the most intimate or emotionally intense cases.

And to the extent that some of the experiences that telecommunications technology can replace or facilitate by other means experiences that can be physically, socially or economically inaccessible, then tools like the iPad Pro have liberatory potential.

The problem, as Annie Dorsen and I seek to document in the paper I shared last month, is less that the iPad Pro can offer a simulacrum of these experiences, and more that the analog versions of these experiences are now being “optimized” for platforms like the iPad Pro.

In this way, the advertisement is quite apt. In order to “fit” in digital platforms, everything needs to be extracted from its context and then flattened and styled into an interchangeable commodity form called “content.”

So maybe we should give Apple credit for telling the truth?