When You Destroy the Tools of Creativity - by kyla scanlon
I am back! Apologies for the delay! My first book is coming out at the end of the month (you can preorder here, get a signed copy here, and/or enter a giveaway here, if you’d like)
Apple released an ad to highlight their new iPad Pro with the M4 chip. That’s fine. Great, even. New technology is phenomenal! But what Apple also did in this ad was use a hydraulic press to crush musical instruments. It was meant to show how skinny-coded their new iPad is, but if anything, it just felt sad. Like oh gosh, they just crushed creativity? Culture? Of course, if their goal was to get people talking, they achieved that.
It was an accidental metaphor1 that hit a little bit too close to home (as Leiris wrote, it’s hard to know where metaphor begins and where it ends). A absolute smushing of things that people love to make another little screen that we stare into. People are comparing it to Apple’s 1984 advert, where the opposite happened - a hammer breaks a TV, turning the world into color, in this ad, the color is stamped out by industrial machinery. Ben Mullin -
In “1984,” a dissident throws a hammer through a TV screen, symbolizing humanity’s power to conquer technology. In this ad, a hydraulic press crushes beloved cultural artifacts, symbolizing technology’s power to conquer humanity.
