Apple's new ad and the world we live in
The response to the new iPad Pro ad goes much further than the typical love/hate to-and-fro for creative. If it feels existential, it’s because it is.
The new iPad Pro ad was released this week, a one-minute, human-free piece of video design and choreography that has had the parts of the Internet who concern themselves with these things in uproar.
Before I say anything more, here it is.
Now to how it went down, and what the response might tell us about our world.
There is one school of thought here that the Extremely Online brigade tend to take offense wherever they can find it, and in the rapid machine-gun fire of culture, commerce and commentary, a new opportunity to take offense comes every hour, on the hour.
In this school of thought, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter is the ultimate nest of vipers and pit of pythons, some of the snakes hissing and snarling and spitting venom, others winding their way around whatever is the locus of their attention at this very moment and squeezing all the goodness and life out of it forever.
X, this line of thinking goes, is a horrible — literally, full of horror — representation of the seething worst of humanity: all toxic rage, taking anything even remotely good and rendering it naive, meaningless or worthless. This is hell, and it’s not just on earth, it’s in your pocket, notifying you twenty times a day.
But there’s another school of thought.
This second, opposing, view is that Twitter/X is the canary in the world’s coal-mine. When it sounds a warning, the world soon pays attention, albeit wholly unconscious of the influence this social media underworld exerts on the physical plane in which all of us live, breathe, eat, vote, screw, raise kids and try not to die.
In this way, it was Twitter that first took the coronavirus seriously. Clued-in people were writing at length, gathering and posting reams of data and illuminating charts weeks before the WHO called it Covid-19 and most of the world was locked down, and it was Twitter that analyzed the lab leak hypothesis with nuanced discussion while it was still being dismissed as a tin-hatter theory by the mainstream media.
More than any other social platform, this is the dual role of Twitter/X: all the world’s good and evil, all its beauty and rage, all its hyper-intelligence and rank stupidity packed into a one-centimeter-squared icon on your phone screen.
So when the amorphous mass of X commenters congeals around something, it can be a good thing to pay close attention.
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And the response to Apple’s ad for the new iPad Pro attracted that amorphous mass in all its glory this week.
Announcing the company’s most powerful — and thinnest — iPad yet with a video post on X, Apple CEO Tim Cook would have been expecting some blowback. This goes with the territory of every online space, X more than anywhere. He would surely have been expecting reasoned arguments against the creative, which goes with the territory too.
It’s likely this effect would have been calculated by the creatives and executives who were party to the production process: the likelihood of pushback leading to widespread passionate discussion, bringing the creative to more and more people, thus delivering more and more brand visibility, and on and on in the cycle that is the corporate marketer’s waking wet dream.
The sticky mess that did erupt was not, however, inside the crisply pressed trousers in Apple boardrooms.
Here are just a few of the responses to Cook’s post on X:
The most creative response came from the Iranian-born actor and filmmaker Reza Sixo Safai, who re-edited the ad, reversing the wanton destruction of the original to show an explosion of creative forces instead, replacing dystopia with hope and ditching the backing track for “I’ve Got You, Babe”: sixty years after chart success and thirty after Groundhog Day, Sonny and Cher have never sounded so good.
Everything I produce in this publication is, directly or otherwise, about the task and challenge of growing self worth alongside net worth. The place where work, creativity and technology come together is the place where these two essential forms of worth are cultivated or corroded.
So most of all, what I felt when watching the original ad, the many passionate responses against it, and ultimately in Safai’s re-edit, was that this might well be a watershed moment for that place, the meeting-point of work, creativity and technology.
Apple has long heralded itself as the company which facilitated that meeting-point better than any other.
But technology, and the obscenely wealthy founders, investors and executives who have benefited from its explosive foray into the way we do anything and everything, might finally have jumped the shark.
More than a decade ago, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote that software was eating the world, and he and others like him rode that wave to a place beyond their wildest dreams. Last year, in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Andreessen followed up. There, he expressed his belief that there is no material problem, including problems caused by technology, that cannot be solved with more technology.
Somewhere along the way things got mixed up.
The optimistic view of technological progress was always that tech would serve the world, but more and more it seems like the world and everyone in it is there to serve tech and the tiny few who benefit the most. It is this which prompts someone like Professor Scott Galloway, one of the savviest of all marketing teachers, consultants and communicators, to say of Mark Zuckerberg, in an emotional TED talk delivered in Vancouver in April, that he had done more damage to young people while making more money than any other person in history.
I’ll come back to the Apple ad and its significance in a moment, but first a short reflection on how we got here and where, exactly, here might be.
The age we live in might well have started that Monday in September 2008 when news broke that the Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers had collapsed. The financial world had been building towards that moment for a decade, through the so-called dotcom bubble and burst around the turn of the millennium and through a generation of increasingly complex and complicated financial products which packaged and repackaged debt in as many different ways as those who stood to benefit most could get away with.
The ensuing crash and chaos brought wholesale economic and technological change: the iPhone was just a year old and its app store would become the breeding ground of the products that would change everything about how we live, work, shop, date, get healthy, get sick and commit suicide.
Over the next decade, growing in tandem but on opposite sides of the aisle were two different economic and technological philosophies, like good and evil twins where you were never exactly sure which is which.
On one side was the zero-interest-rate debt-fueled explosion in productivity and growth, manifesting extraordinary riches within the existing system. On the other were the Bitcoiners, slowly and steadily HODL-ing their way to the creation of a brand new trillion dollar digital asset class wholly outside institutional control, a small minority of freedom-loving technologists and visionaries determined to break away from established financial systems which transfer wealth to the powerful and work to the powerless.
You just had to pay attention to note the tension.
All of technology’s limitless possibilities, joined obscenely at the hip with the destruction it would carry out.
With the arrival of platforms such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, Artificial Intelligence is another new technology which leaps off the shoulders of everything that preceded it into a future that, every day now, appears weirder, more uncertain and more dystopian than even George Orwell or Aldous Huxley imagined.
And here I am, stuck in the middle with you, and 99% of everyone else.
All of us are angry. We’re just not sure who we should be angry with.
Tens of thousands of us protest against climate policy, immigration, Russia or Israel.
Tens of millions of us complain silently about these and every other issue that renders us powerless and bereft.
Those of us who decide not to protest and prefer not to complain turn instead to beating ourselves up, coping with the challenge of the new day with alcohol, drugs, gambling, porn or buy-now-pay-later shopping, all readily available — instantly or by next day delivery — through the same screen that had promised us so much, gave us plenty and then, it seems, took everything important away.
Pitched into this cauldron of anger, despair and self-medication, the ad for the new Apple iPad Pro could not have been more perfect in its encapsulation of everything that had gone so badly wrong in the past 15 years of tech “progress”.
It can’t be that there was anything intentional to this — the ad could, after all, make Apple the symbol of tech’s destruction, when in reality the company has done more than most of its rivals and fellows in Big Tech to facilitate individual creativity, privacy and freedom — but in years to come it may be seen as a moment of painful rebirth for all of us.
A moment where we realized, finally, that the primary function of technology was to mine, exploit and destroy, not uplift, liberate or create.
A moment where we rediscovered our need and love of all the beautiful physical things around us, from guitars to paint to Pokemon collector’s editions to the bark of the beech tree in your back garden.
As always, those of us who occupy the weird space of the place they used to call Twitter were just the first to know all this for sure.
Till next time.
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Yes, the Apple ad definitely had "bad optics" - evoking the destruction of the analog world. I think they started with that famous photograph that depicted all the analog devices that we had built into the iphone. The fax, copier, answering machine, TV, etc. But they wanted it on video for excitement and to demonstrate the thinness of the new iPad.
I would suggest that many people already realize the loss of the analog and they are pushing back. Just a bit, here and there. For example vinyl is making a comeback and there is the continued success of moleskine notebooks and all those bookstores with actual dead tree books still around.
If this ad helps to wake some people up to think about where they want to go, then so much the better. We ain't seen nothing yet. Just wait 'til self-driving vehicles start taking thousands of jobs away.