It seems at first like a brilliant, if unsubtle, piece of dystopian satire: countless symbols of human creativity — books, musical instruments

Apple’s Soul-Crushing New Ad: Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

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2024-05-09 02:00:06

It seems at first like a brilliant, if unsubtle, piece of dystopian satire: countless symbols of human creativity — books, musical instruments, artworks, arcade games — crowded onto a platform and slowly, painfully, sadistically pancaked between the massive metal jaws of a machine. An upright piano splinters and cracks. Paint gushes like blood. With its bleak industrial aesthetic, the clip mirrors the look — but inverts the point — of one of the most famous advertisements in television history: Ridley Scott’s 1984 spot for Apple, in which a colorfully dressed female Olympian tosses a hammer into a screen and shatters the televised face of an Orwellian Big Brother, breaking his authoritarian grip on society. With the release of the new Macintosh computer, the ad concluded, “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984,” suggesting that personal computing was a force of liberation. Related Stories Movies Apple Releases May the 4th 'Star Wars' Ad Starring 172 Real-Life Fans TV 'Loot' Creators Spill on Guest Stars and Downsizing (Sorta) in Season 2 of Maya Rudolph Comedy

One almost expects the new clip, titled “Crush,” to end with a rueful answer to that slogan, one that reflects a widespread anxiety about the global advance of fascism and the inexorable rise of artificial intelligence: “2024 will be like 1984.”