Apples Also Rot
The state of technology, 2024
I. The infamous ad is a sign of the times
I’ve never owned an Apple product. Not out of contempt, but by choice. The design is exquisite, the brand powerful, and there’s no denying the iPhone was a paradigm changer for fans and contrarians alike.
That’s perhaps why the new iPad Pro ad is doubly terrible—first because it was a shockingly honest depiction of its priorities as a desoulation machine and second because although Apple isn’t particularly fond of peasants like us—not that they’ve ever pretended otherwise—at least we kinda agreed they had good taste. I don’t think anyone believes that anymore.
The symbolism is so grotesque and viscerally wrong that it’d be hilarious as well as illuminating if no one at Apple expected the backlash it’s received. Are they so unattuned to the general sentiment toward big tech that they thought, “People like to watch clips of industrial presses crushing things, right? Let’s do that”? (I’m sure that exchange happened recently in some Cupertino meeting room, or maybe they took inspiration from somewhere else.) It took a Twitter commenter a day to come up with the simplest, cheapest-ever commercial alternative—reversing the video. It conveys the same meaning to investors and customers (“Crazy how thin the new iPad is!”) while sending a positive, respectful message to artists and creatives. (Or, I don’t know, they could’ve avoided getting a crushing press near any instruments at all.)
Anyway, it’s so bad—especially given the evident care they put into everything else, from lighting to layout, to rhythm, to entropic control—that my first reaction is that this was on purpose. They wanted to ignite the audience because that’s what works nowadays. But I don’t think that’s it; the most revered brand in the world doesn’t need to ascribe to the “all publicity is good publicity” motto. No, this was a mistake. A big one if you read the comments to Tim Cook’s post. I just don’t think it was an isolated mistake, or to phrase it better, a mistake out of an isolated mindset.
This is the state of consumer technology in 2024. We caught Apple today. Yesterday it was Google and tomorrow it’ll be Meta. It says a lot about how the most powerful companies in history think about stuff. It says a lot about the huge gap between the way they see the world and the way the rest of the world sees itself. And it says a lot about how they likely approach other tech they’re engaged with, like AI.
II. The creative medium always matters
I’ve tried for years now to understand what is it about generative AI—all kinds but especially writing and image tools—that makes creatives uneasy, sad, and angry at the same time without successfully putting my finger on it.
Now I can. They say an image is worth a thousand words so if a video is worth a thousand images, there you have it—Apple’s ad is a million-word-worth visual representation of why we dislike what digital technology is doing to creativity. Every painful frame stings in a way I couldn’t explain in my articles. An iPad has little to do with ChatGPT technically but to the eyes of artists and writers, it’s the same thing: a profane soulless box that’s tainted what it means to be creative as a human for the sake of shareholder value.
“But ChatGPT isn’t killing creativity, Alberto. It’s a new medium to create in new ways.” Marshall McLuhan said “The medium is the message” and I choose here to agree with him by taking away my own interpretation of his relatable maxim. The creative medium we choose isn’t irrelevant, as tech companies seem to believe. It matters if you use a real guitar to compose a song instead of Suno. It matters if you use a quill and a fresh piece of paper—the texture, the smell, the feeling of the hand movement as symbols capture reality before our eyes—instead of ChatGPT. We like analog stuff because we evolved to deal with it. Watching a trumpet being crushed will only remind us we spend too much time away from what our bodies ask of us.
I say this unapologetically as I write these words on a computer. I don’t claim technology is to be avoided. The medium is the message but all media can be helpful and useful. Tech is an implicit promise to move us away from our lacking and scarce origins and that’s good. But our origins are also holy in a way we don’t seem to appreciate anymore—there’s a hidden cost in going too far.
Generative AI is going too far (it may not feel like it when we get text out of text but when you get an entire symphony from a short 10-word sentence, it must feel weird even to the most fervent advocates). That ad is a perfect reflection of how far they’ve really gone. Not just the revolting imagery, but the detached mentality they must have to think it was a good idea to put it out there. (I’ve acknowledged before that history erases the sins of innovation but while it happens, it’s good to say it.)
III. A hyper-optimized world is a boring world
The iPad Pro surely is among the finest consumer tech ever created. I trust Apple on that at least. It’ll be as capable as advertised; as thin, as light, and as all-encompassing. The problem isn’t the product itself, but the widespread belief that nothing is sacred to continuous optimization. A guitar and a trumpet are valuable as an inverse function of the space they take. Crushing them into a “homogenized branded slab” is worth it because they occupy less. Who doesn’t want “a thousand songs in your pocket.” Now it’s a hundred thousand songs, but will you listen to that many? ChatGPT allows us to outsource the need to write and think, which is great because those activities occupy precious time. Time we could use up to scroll on social media instead.
Hyperoptimization isn’t new. It killed the joy of playing chess against machines. Chess is fun insofar as your opponent is as flawed as you are. Once AIs like Stockfish and AlphaZero became too good, not even playing as teammates made any sense. It is now killing the joy of watching sports like basketball. I love watching Steph Curry throw unbelievable half-court three-pointers but only as long as his style doesn’t become the norm for every other player. Statistics swears it should be and coaches either follow the numbers or lose. It’s also created a formulaic entertainment culture that has cracked the code of success and repeats it over and over again in movie franchises that are perpetuated ad nauseam and pop songs that sound the same.
Apple’s ad doesn’t feel okay, but why? It’s merely a visualization of the optimization process digital tech exerts over the domain of atoms that’s also present everywhere else, right? It’s just how they turn a multimodal world of shapes, colors, and textures into ones and zeros. It’s just how they optimize the fun out of everything. It’s just…
It’s just that you can’t fit all the dimensions of valuableness as variables of an optimization function. Apple tried and failed catastrophically. Crushing instruments is as ugly a vision as it gets but the underlying meaning is worse; they’re not being crushed into ashes, dust, and splinters but compressed into a homogeneous branded slab that replaces them. It is desecration by hyperoptimization. As we do everywhere, but seeing it happen so flagrantly, so dispassionately is what set the reaction off.
I swear some people can’t understand that some things are better left untouched.
IV. A long-overdue course-correction
It may be a matter of adaptation. Humanity has a strong pro-natural bias but is in itself a long history of pursuing artificial bliss by moving away from the default at a measured pace. That’s what civilization is and I’m glad for it. But humanity is also a story of course correcting bad ideas and behaviors.
Not so long ago, war was the norm and peace was the brief period of waiting and preparation between wars. Now, although wars still happen, it’s closer to the opposite. We adapt forward and adapt backward. As landmarks of intelligence go, reflection and retreat are among the highest. Innovation is a good thing but not all instances of it are better than the default. We’d do well to tell one from the other.
Digital tech can be useful but I’ve come to believe utility is a by-product that companies need to begrudgingly keep at a minimum to satisfy customers while they focus on providing value to shareholders. That’s the result of capitalism’s entangled incentives. The reaction to Apple’s ad is a reaction to these incentives that aren’t and have never been directed to benefit the world and its people. Is digital tech something we will need to course correct from?
We think of them—the web, social media, smartphones, generative AI—as intrinsic features of our society, not just as something there is, but as something we can’t backtrack from, which is crazy because the oldest is barely 30 years old. That’s ridiculously young from a historical lens. The printing press is 600 years old, writing is 4,000 years old, and the bread we eat in the morning without thinking much about it is 12,000 years old. The last 30 years, despite having paradigmatized modernity, are but an ephemeral exhale from Cronus.
The present seems to change so quickly that the internet, born in the distant 90s, feels eternal. The truth is that, just like new stuff arrives faster, we get over it faster as well. Apple has hit a new low in support and likeability that will impact the public perception of new technology. It showed us the dystopia we wanted to avoid. 17 years of iPhones deserve a vote of confidence, but such a tone-deaf vision at a time when no one likes big tech isn’t a bright prospect of what’s to come. Apples also rot.
I wrote this elsewhere, of art before Gen AI, and I think it fits:
I just wanted to recall for a moment of what it felt like to write before this entire AI business, and to me, why this has always haunted and hurt me so much since.
To me, art has always been magical. It was always the practical evidence of a special soulfulness of humanity, no, of life itself - because I've never really excluded the majesty of whale songs, of bird dances, or fishes arranging rocks beneath the waves from the fundamental aspect of art, and in that sense, the relationship that it has always had with love. To be alone with one's imagination, to have a little bit of inspiration and then to be able to draw from the realm of the dreams and to stabilize it into something that is a little bit of marvelous, and then to stabilize it and deliver it with skill has always been an experience somewhere between meditation, prayer and magic-making, to become part of something eternal and powerful.
I remember being able to turn a phrase here and there, a little better or not, and then accumulating a huge number of ideas and clippings inside of my universe's notes so that I would be able to "discover" things about the universe. Like any writer might tell you, there is the sense of creation but there is also the sense of exploration, as if the world and the people inside had always existed and then you come to get to know them, to feel as them, and to love them - even the worst of them, because of how close you've had to be to each and every one of them.
I miss that.
I miss the feel of the subtle word and the echo of emotion from an empyrean realm, now violated by this monster of words and math; I miss even the ability to write of the future, in a time when the future seems to have become foreclosed to machines; I miss the ability to think of heroes and villains, in a time when people may no longer matter.
So there is a lot of nostalgia for the feeling of the art that way, for the feeling of the magical, and for that sense of the contact with the divine, the natural, and how it all seems to be one and the same. I wonder about the accusations of "gatekeeping" and in a way, it never made any sense, because it was never about keeping anyone else from coming to art; indeed, I would have wished everyone to be able to participate in that sense of the wonder of creation, via that process of imagination and that focus of will, to invest a part of themselves so that it becomes etched into the child-process. As only Vladímir Nabokov could have written Lolita, and only Twain could have written Tom Sawyer, so only I could have written what I wrote. And if someone would have read me, then in a way, he or she would know me and in defiance of time and distance, a kind of soul-connection would truly be. As the quote goes:
"Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul."
That, there, is the soul of the artist in product of the work.
And then there is AI, a monster that is the mimic, that creates words without experience, without life, and without any of that sense of pain or joy. Of course, I despise it. It denies everything that has been the artist - the sense of the self in the work, the sense of life's meaning, and indeed, even the sense of a future.
I have always called it the anti-life equation for a reason. What else could it be, but a thing that kills the very beauty of the soul?
PS:
For artists here that are not writers - which I think is most, I feel like the part which most resembles it is the sketch, to scrawl and to experiment until something appears. I've had an artistic friend who almost complete an entire landscape before realizing that he needed to redo it from scratch, and so that was a discovery too.
Its all a terrible lot of work. Creation isn't easy.
But it is all *so terribly beautiful, because of that effort and that recreation and reimagination.*
Never bought an iPad or iPhone, but I gotta say... this all seems like a rather manufactured drama. All it showed was a bunch of physical representations of things people do with iPads and squished them... into an iPad.