This machine is fascist: Apple's iPad ad backlash is well deserved
a crushing blow for tech's snobbiest company
Apple would like you to know that its latest act of genius is to crush creativity down into a 5.1mm thick slab of brushed aluminum. That's what its new “Crush” ad, which has gone viral for all the wrong reasons, strongly suggests. As you might expect in an era when tech feels increasingly shoved down the throat of an unwilling public, even the darling child of the industry that is Apple can no longer be indemnified against well-deserved ire.
Some have questioned the chain of decisions that must have been made, all the people those decisions must have gone through, to okay an ad in which a great number of artistic tools and ephemera are crushed by an hydraulic press which then opens up to reveal the new iPad Pro. If the goal is to market this rather drab tablet to creatives, why force us to watch the tools of creativity destroyed? Imagine a company trying to win support from queers by making us watch a Ron DeSantis speech and you've nailed the general vibe of this misguided Apple iPad ad. I felt impelled to dive through the screen and pull as many creative gadgets as possible to safety.
In fact, let's pause for a moment on the very term "creative," which Apple has for so long used in its marketing. New Macs built with creatives in mind! New interfaces that will unleash your inner creative! And every product gets a Pro moniker because it's made for creative professionals like you! Creative is here not an adjective but a noun—a person who creates. Moreover, "Creator" is now also used in reference to someone who makes a living posting "content" online. The implication is clear: painter, musician, writer, vlogger who reviews fast food burgers—they're all pretty much identical. And to a tech company, they pretty much are. Those people, however varied their mediums and messages, are merely a few among limitless, commodified points of extraction for surplus capital.
Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote his own jeremiad against the hydraulic press ad for Roger Ebert, in which he lambasts big tech for bleeding artists dry with one hand while asking us to kiss the brushed aluminum ring on the other. Meanwhile, I saw several Twitter users asking what artists ever did to make tech people so frothingly mad at us. Why do we, the "creatives," draw such blistering, irrational animosity from people who, first of all, have more money than most of us will ever see and who, second of all, claim to make products that aid our artistic practices?
If you want to understand tech bros, you must first understand that they see themselves not as the inheritors of corporate America but as the new bohemians. In their endless self-delusion, the average tech worker looks in the mirror and sees not an overpaid schmuck in an ugly Patagonia vest but a hippie, iconoclast, and free thinker of revolutionary, radical thoughts. Ensconced in a bubble of their own fetid farts, the tech sector has been breaking the fourth of the Ten Crack Commandments brought to us from on high by Biggie Smalls since at least the early 2010s. HBO's "Silicon Valley" is a documentary, not a satire. They're all actually like that.
Consider the absolutely Swiss-cheese-brained "Techno-Optimist's Manifesto" recently written and, even worse, published by billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen. "We believe rich is better than poor, cheap is better than expensive, and abundant is better than scarce," the OpenAI investor wrote before concluding his screed with a list of "patron saints of techno-optimism" among which he included Adam Smith, Ada Lovelace, and Andy Warhol before moving on to names beginning with 'B'. Had anyone else written a document like this and titled it a manifesto, it would have been dismissed as the product of delusions brought on by a personality disorder, but because the author got lucky on the roulette wheel of unfettered capitalism a couple times, there are a frightening number of very influential people who not only take him seriously but harbor similarly delusional beliefs. "Our enemy," Andreessen writes, "is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences." He seems to have no sense that he might as well be describing himself.
Apple is not immune to this fart-bubble thinking, what we might tweak a phrase of Elon Musk’s to call the "techno-capitalist mind virus." In fact, they’ve designed their own, brushed aluminum version of it. Think about Tim Cook telling a member of the press who found it hard to communicate with his Android-owning mom, "Tell your mom to buy an iPhone." Think about the Apple Vision Pro and the hubris it represents by implying with its existence that anyone would voluntarily strap it to their head.
The only thing threatening to puncture through the fart bubble of techno-capitalism is the fact that real artists exist for whom a craft and the tools thereof have real, heartfelt meaning. You know, the kind of people who think creatively rather than metaphorically and literally fiending for the blood of others like vampiric ghouls. Those infected with the techno-capitalist mind virus wouldn't know true creativity if it broke their jaw with the brushed aluminum backplate of a brand new, miraculously thin iPad Pro. Deep down, they know their conception of creativity is creatively bankrupt, which is why the very sight of someone who isn't also a calculator brained freak makes them deeply uncomfortable. They're frantically dreaming up ways to drain every ounce of profitability from artists until we can't make rent, to stack the stolen fruit of our efforts high in their corporate offices, but they won't look us in the eyes as they do it.
That's why their next project is AI, which they talk about at each product launch like Sweeney Todd singing in adoration of his straight razor. They are building a machine to kill artists off for good, sucking up all of our creativity into a machine that spits back nightmarish facsimiles of it. However, the tech nerds have never had a truly creative thought unrelated to pleasing their shareholders for another quarter, so, to them, a six-fingered, acid nightmare rendition of a busty anime waifu is basically the “Mona Lisa.” They figure AI slop ought to be good enough for the rest of us, too, and they're crossing their fingers that the world finally rids itself of human artists. Once the artists are gone, they can live out their Bohemian circle jerk without anyone to remind them that they're about as creative as one of Tim Cook's hideous polo shirts.
(Tim Cook dresses like Apple's Pride celebrations feel: sterile, puritanical, corporate, and deeply uncool. That doesn't have much to do with anything else in this newsletter but I needed to say it.)
Thankfully, governments the world over are finally beginning to have had enough of Apple swinging its brushed aluminum dick around. Here in the United States, it now faces an historic antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department, while in the European Union it is subject to new anti-monopoly regulations aimed at preventing it from deepthroating its customers (many of whom consent to the esophageal bruising with surprising enthusiasm) quite so forcefully. These measures do not go far enough by miles, but they are a start, a shot across the bow of Apple's endless ego, which by extension is a warning to big tech writ large. It feels worth mentioning that the DoJ lawsuit will probably evaporate if Trump reenters office, but that might be the least of our concerns in such an eventuality.
Speaking of the rotten state the world is in, it sure is awful, and a lot of that awfulness has been accelerated by big tech. There's a whole lot of war and genocide going on with the looming twin threats of fascism and climate apocalypse hanging in the background. We're all quite aware that big tech has snowballed at least the latter two of those issues, and are increasingly more so each day, which is why this ad backfired in such a major way for Apple.
All of this is to say: the machines will crush us if we don’t crush them first. Demolish the system that gave them to us, and scorn the people who side with the tech ghouls over working artists. There is not a single person, no matter how little they appreciate or understand art, who does not have their life bettered by it. But the tech ghouls provide nothing of value. They are designing weapons systems for the Israeli army and turning the Congo into a killing field for the metals required to build new iPads. Apple even matches employee donations to the IDF, allegedly. So, why would Apple see the value in preserving a camera or piano? What are they next to the corpse of a Palestinian child? Just so much extra rubble.
—M.A.M.