Creative Destruction

Iconic moments mark historic fault lines. Some are dramatic and themselves causal like an assassination. Others are important in retrospect as reflecting an otherwise-muted cultural transformation.

The tells might even come in the guise of entertainment, say the one from that classic 1967 scene in The Graduate where middle-age McGuire takes Ben aside at the party and says he has one word of advice for him, just one word and the word is “plastics,” thus heralding the age of the so-called cheap, fake, ugly, and meaningless way of life, boring almost by definition.

It’s not that big a step, then, to imagine that our current zeitgeist might later be captured through the lens of some Apple ad.

The ad in question, which flashed briefly before it was partially withdrawn, featured a giant hydraulic press as it literally crushes pretty much everything the art world holds sacred, from music, to paintings, to literature, to a child’s imagination. All this, you see, will be replaced by the latest technological flat-screen, to the soundtrack of Cher’s “all I need is you” (Apple "Crush" Commercial).

The immediate reaction to the ad was pretty much captured in our discussion piece (click: Dear Tim Cooke, an appeal for him to “be a decent human being and delete this revolting ad.” The question for us is whether it’s the ad or what the ad might say about us, where we are, and where we are going that is revolting

The cynical eye takes this all in and says, big deal, if it gets your attention that’s what advertising is all about, in this case to sell the iPad Pro tablet. Real human beings, though, might recognize it as an important public service announcement in that it says the quiet part out loud: the tech industry will crush you, destroy you; suddenly, violently, all at once.

Just as Jeff Bezos once reportedly said, as Amazon first eyed small businesses, “Your margin is my opportunity,” the existential threat posed by the vast ambition of technology, while perhaps not the end of humanity, might be the end of what we know as humanness. Hey, but after all, doesn’t it represent untold efficiencies? To which we are reminded once again that, in a perfectly efficient society, man is redundant.

Or, to put it in Bezosian terms, your creativity is mine for the taking as technology devolves into a vast rip-off machine. If there is some sort of unintended irony here, it comes from the comparison of this ad to Apple's iconic and most beloved ad of all time, some forty years ago (Apple "1984" Commercial).

That previous ad, which cheekily celebrated the power of the individual spirit in the face of the then looming monolithic world of Big Brother, has now been replaced by the haughty message that this same company has now positioned itself to crush such human spirit.

Or so it would seem. Make it stop. Time to rage against the machine. Discuss.