Crushed

When Apple Inc. is blind and visionary at the same time.

Forty years ago, an Apple commercial staked out the moral high ground against info-tyranny. Oh, well.

Barack Obama, meet Apple Inc. Apple, meet Obama. You have something in common. You’ve both — embarrassingly and carelessly — been caught in a truth.

For Obama it was 16 years ago, while running for the Democratic presidential nomination against Hilary Clinton. He was at a small fundraising event in San Francisco, speaking of the challenges of reaching Middle Americans embracing so-called “traditional values.”

“They get bitter,” he said. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Oh, he had it right, identifying and distilling the grievances and bigotry of what would eventually coalesce as MAGA. And he thought he was free to be candid in an intimate setting of like-minded coastal liberals, but failed to take into account the enormous glass house called “the internet.” Next thing you knew, his Democratic opponent was denouncing him as elitist. (Ironically, eight years later, Clinton alienated the same bitter people by dismissing them, also more or less correctly, as “deplorables.” That didn’t land well, either.) 

So you wonder, perhaps, what all of that has to do with Apple. Ah.

First, let’s recall that not 16 but 40 years ago, Apple established its identity, positioning and brand ethos with its monumental Super Bowl commercial titled “1984,” in which it styled itself as a weapon against the info-tyranny of IBM and a tool of liberation for the heroically independent thinker. 

The epic 60-second ad, directed by Ridley Scott, introduced the Apple Macintosh — and the revolutionary mouse — to free us from the tedium of IBM’s type-centric DOS computer interface. In the ad, the hegemonic IBM was depicted as a bellicose Big Brother in some dystopian near future, ranting on a gigantic telescreen to an audience of slack jawed, gray drones:

We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

Then a lithe young track athlete in a Macintosh t-shirt barges in and hurls a hammer at the screen, obliterating Big Brother.

“Introducing the Apple Macintosh,” the voiceover proclaims. “And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

OK, that was a reach. Unveiling the clickable cursor wasn’t exactly the Emancipation Proclamation. And if IBM was without a soul, it’s hard to see how a mouse conferred one. But this was a manifesto, not a documentary, and it certainly stuck a flag in the ground. And, though the Evil Other foil shifted in time with the marketplace to Microsoft, Apple has ever since projected itself as a portal to creativity for artists, iconoclasts and all manner of soulful geniuses who Think Different.

These days, it can no longer caricature a competing leviathan as a totalitarian menace, because Apple has itself become the leviathan. But through its perennially colorful and spirited imagery and cutting-edge products, it has continued to embody human creativity. The phones, computers and iPads can perform audiovisual magic that even a few years ago was confined to costly production houses executing arduous tasks in slow motion. As of a year ago, the company had fulfilled its preposterously exaggerated 1984 vision of itself.

Note the time reference.

Because a week ago, CEO Tim Cook had his Obama moment, using a social-media post to sneak-preview the latest Cupertino advertising tour de force. It was the commercial introducing Apple’s most powerful and thinnest iPad Pro. And it, too, was disarmingly candid about the state of the world.

Just not, you know, on purpose.

The spot, titled “Crush,” is filmed to (an abridged version of) the 1971 Sonny and Cher hit, All I Ever Need Is You.

Sometimes when I’m down and all alone
all I ever need is you
Winters come and they go
And we watch the melting snow
But sure as summer follows spring
All the things you do
Give me a reason to build my world around you
Some men follow rainbows I am told
all I ever need is you.

Get it? If you want artistic output, all you need is the iPad Pro. The message of squeezing all of Apple’s extraordinary tech into one ultrathin pad is conveyed by showing a trumpet, a sculpture, a variety of primary-color paint cans, a freakin’ piano and various other tools of creativity between the rams of an industrial hydraulic press (think of the 1964 Lincoln Continental squashed into a cube of scrap metal in Goldfinger). It’s vivid imagery, especially the paint spurting between the compressor plates like blood from a severed carotid artery.

So, sure, you can see why Apple folks were so thrilled with their visual metaphor for “compact.” So thrilled, in fact, that they failed to notice that “Crush” was an even more vivid visual metaphor for crushing the tools of human artistic expression. Because, in the last year that I just asked you to take note of, AI has come along to usurp human expression altogether with technology that can digitally mimic creativity to an astonishing and frightening degree — which will obsolete untold numbers of the very creative professionals, different thinkers and gifted craftsmen Apple has been flattering and cultivating and empowering for 40 years.

AI is coming for them and they are rightfully terrified. Because, inhuman or not, AI can turn out the product formerly known as “creative” instantaneously and at zero cost. Or, as the film actor Hugh Grant wrote, Apple is glorifying “the destruction of the human experience.”

From Grant and a good chunk of the internet, the backlash was immediate and painful, forcing the company to kill the ad.

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple,” Tor Myhren, vice president of marketing communications, told Advertising Age. “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.”

Well, that isn’t correct. They didn’t miss the mark. Despite apparently being blindfolded en masse, they totally hit the bullseye. AI will crush their customers. Like Barack Obama in 2008, Apple was caught in a truth.

The most bizarre aspect of this fiasco is the company’s obliviousness to its own vulnerability. With the ascension of artificial intelligence, not only are its iconoclastic customers being turned into buggy whips, so is Apple itself. All of those super chips, all of that software, all of that revolutionary imaging tech are charging headlong into irrelevance. A lithe athlete — or an AI-generated image of one — is racing toward Big Brother wielding a hammer and preparing to fling it loose.

It makes one think of the Sonny and Cher lyric that was edited out of the commercial.

Some men search for silver, some for gold
But I have found my treasure in your soul

For 40 years, Apple did find treasure in the souls of its customers. Again, IBM or Microsoft or Google may or may not represent the most virtuous expression of human endeavor, but this is for sure: ChatGPT does not.

The oversight, for want of a better word, is deplorable.