The Great Flattening
Apple did what needed to be done to get that unfortunate iPad ad out of the news; you know, the one that somehow found the crushing of musical instruments and bottles of paint to be inspirational:
The ad was released as a part of the company’s iPad event, and was originally scheduled to run on TV; Tor Myhren, Apple’s vice-president of marketing communications, told AdAge:
Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world…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.
The apology comes across as heartfelt — accentuated by the fact that an Apple executive put his name to it — but I disagree with Myhren: the reason why people reacted so strongly to the ad is that it couldn’t have hit the mark more squarely.
The Internet, birthed as it was in the idealism of California tech in the latter parts of the 20th century, was expected to be a force for decentralization; one of the central conceits of this blog has been to explain why reality has been so different. From 2015’s Aggregation Theory:
