It’s hard to understand how it was ever released by any company that cared about its customer base. More upsetting is what it says about the rot at the heart of this once-revered company and, by extension, the highest levels of the American corporatocracy.
The ad shows a giant machine designed for crushing such as that which smashes cars into cubes. Between the top and bottom is a nicely stacked pile of stuff that defines our lives and history, especially as it pertains to art. The top begins to fall.
The first crushing is of a beautiful trumpet, the successor to that played by the angels to announce the birth of Christ. The metal slab continues to fall and hits paint cans that chaotically splatter everywhere. A large studio piano is crushed, then a metronome, a guitar, a sculptor in the form of an ancient bust, wooden people, and then active animated birds as in “Angry Birds.”
The crushing steel slab keeps falling, utterly destroying everything. It’s deeply painful to watch, like the worst dystopian film you have ever seen.
Then the slab separates again and reveals a tiny iPad. A new creation.
The effect is nothing but revulsion.
It’s hard to imagine that the company believed that people would like seeing something so painful and awful. It surely does put on display the underlying philosophy that has gained traction in the tech world. They truly believe that all of reality and life will be pushed into digits. All we consume, and all that we are, will be put on screens. We don’t need the physical anymore. We will live in the cloud, accessed through thin pieces of glass.
That’s our life. And we are expected to pay for it. If anything, this ad should turn you against technology and make you appreciate the lifestyle of the Amish.
The millenarianism of the scene surpasses anything ever advanced by the Prophet Mani, Joachim of Fiore, or Girolamo Savonarola. Indeed, something about this is reminiscent of the Florentine “bonfire of the vanities” of the 15th century, in which all residents were urged to throw all their fineries, such as furniture and paintings, in a big fire in the center of the city in order that they might all go to heaven.
Savonarola was a confused follower of Christianity. What kind of pseudo-religion or ideology do Apple executives follow and what kind of thing do they call their god?
Drawing on a more recent historical episode, a major feature of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) under Mao Zedong was the extermination of old ideas, old customs, old culture, and old habits. Along with that came a war on Western musical instruments and books. It ended up crushing the people too. The more you could find and destroy, the more favor you won politically. Is Apple working to signal an homage to this grim time?
What’s on display here, what’s being celebrated, is not creation but destruction. There is an emotion of anger behind it all, as if it is the old world itself that is the object of hatred. And why? Because it is not digital. It is inconsistent with the new world that Apple is working to create, one in which our bodies and the physical world is merely an impediment.
It’s as if physicality itself is regarded as demonic—a view that repudiates the essence of the incarnation—and interfering with our ascendence to a new age of the spirit that exists only in the metaverse as shepherded by our masters in Big Tech.
And you thought it was just a nice tool for watching your favorite movies! No, there is much more going on here. There is a kind of theological foundation that has formed in these circles, one rooted in the transhumanist ideal that would merge man and machine into a single unit far superior to anything that has yet existed.
If this is our future, why bother with learning skills, studying history, saving money, having children, going on hikes, commuting to an office, much less building pretty buildings or planting a garden? All of this is being transcended and a new world of disembodied persons is being born.
If all this sounds deeply dangerous to you, it should. It’s the kind of theorizing that seems to have taken flight in the last few years since civilized life blew up. August 2020 seems to have been the mark, the month in which a professor of astrophysics explained how the world would end in fire while Anthony Fauci urged the end of cities, extended families, and pet ownership. It seemed like everyone was going crazy.
During these years, the tech companies became rich with a dangerous global social experiment in travel restrictions, stay-home orders, no gatherings, and food deliveries to your doorstep. Americans learned to live on their laptops.
That whole disaster seemed to have unleashed a kind of global psychopathology, such that memory became disabled and fake news became nearly the only news. Clarity has still not returned, such that when President Biden claims that he reduced inflation from 9 percent when he took office, do people actually believe it? I don’t know but we live in such brain-scrambled times that it is possible. No one seems to know what’s real anymore.
This environment of cultural chaos and economic decline is fertile ground for ideologues. And keep in mind that none of the dreams of these ideologues came true. The great lockdown experiment ended very badly. One might suppose that when dreams of fanatics don’t pan out that they would reassess. That never happens. What happens instead is that they lash out at the world that failed to conform to their longings.
This gives rise to a period of history known as destructivism. It takes place when a frustrated ruling class is angry at all forces that didn’t conform to their visions and decide instead to romanticize pulling down the whole machinery of society. This is what we saw at the end of War Communism in Russia and in the last years and months of Nazi rule, not humble apologies but rather crazed and often murderous efforts to stay in charge regardless.
All of this comes to mind with this Apple ad. It is profoundly disturbing, and intended to be. They figure that their market share is so secure, and they are so flush with cash, that they no longer need to disguise their actual driving vision. Under Steve Jobs, the idea was to create beautiful products that worked well. Those days are long over. Now there is something truly evil lurking beneath the surface that comes through well in this ad. What’s being targeted is tradition, history, biology, and the inherent limits of natural law. They believe they are beyond all that because they control the keys to the kingdom of the metaverse.
What else will they destroy to realize their imagined future?
I promise you that it was not supposed to be this way. The digital revolution was supposed to be about emancipation from the state, the spreading of the democratic ethos, the explosion of learning and wisdom, and the empowerment of people. All of this has taken a dark turn. It can only end in tragedy.
Think about the origins of that word. It is from the Latin “spirare” which means to breathe plus the word into. It is a reference to the Genesis account of how God gave life to man. The word embeds a reference to the divine.
This ad is the opposite of inspiring. It is destructive, the celebration of killing life and the divine. That’s the exact opposite of what the digital revolution was supposed to be about but that is what it has become.
