With one stupid video, Apple gave us a neat metaphor for Silicon Valley’s cultural vandalism

Earlier this week, Apple released a short social media video for its new iPad Pro. The video, which is called “Crush”, begins with a series of establishing shots, a mise en scène in which we see a lavish arrangement of items – a metronome, a record player, a sculpted bust, a piano, several tins of paint – carefully displayed on a platform. The record player begins to play the song All I Ever Need is You by Sonny & Cher; as we hear Cher’s voice on the soundtrack, a gigantic hydraulic press descends, slowly and inexorably, on to the displayed items. A trumpet is buckled, and flattened. Then an old video arcade machine collapses in splinters and shards. Several tins of paint explode in a vivid blast of colour. A collection of SLR cameras are crushed, sending fragments of lens glass shooting across the screen. A pile of hardbacks buckles and implodes. Finally the press has done its work, having crushed it all flat, and only the colourful paint remains, dripping down the sides of the machine, like the lurid gore of analogue creativity. The press begins to lift, and as Cher’s voice sings “all I ever need is you”, an iPad pro is revealed in all its slim and compact glory.

Crush is a good ad, in the sense that it executes a simple concept with visual elegance, getting across a clear marketing message: within the sleek body of the new iPad is contained the accumulated tools of generations of artistic production. You don’t need all this clutter, it says; you don’t need these musical instruments and paints and cameras and books and whatnot. All of it can be crammed into, and made obsolete by, this attractive product.

It’s a vivid dramatisation of a common means of conceptualising progress in technology; it is, in this sense, very much like those memes that show an iPhone surrounded by all the gadgets it has replaced or made obsolete – a rotary dial telephone, a Walkman, a wristwatch, a pile of books, a stack of newspapers. We are being shown a representation of the process by which a consumer product can streamline and simplify our lives, and, in containing all these tools of creativity, grant us the power to create art of all kinds. The ad, in this way, works as intended.

But it’s hard not to see another dimension to the lavish, minute-long spectacle of the symbols of creativity being crushed by a very large and powerful machine into the form of another, smaller but even more powerful machine. Intentionally or otherwise, the ad dramatises capitalism’s use of technology to flatten the cultural landscape, and to destroy the means by which artists produce and disseminate their work.

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I hardly need to enumerate the effect the tech business has had on the arts and culture in that time – Amazon’s destructive presence in publishing and retail bookselling; the near-total obliteration by Spotify and Apple Music of the means by which many musicians used to make a living; the threat posed to film industry workers by the continuing encroachment of AI on visual effects, screenwriting and post-production. The work of designers, illustrators, and photographers being done, badly and cheaply, by machine-learning software. As the novelist Hari Kunzru put it on X, itself a small but crucial piston of the hydraulic press: “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenised branded slab is pretty much where the tech industry is at in 2024.” If the makers of the ad were trying to come up with a neat metaphor for Silicon Valley’s destructive presence in the culture industry, they could hardly have come up with anything better.

I’m a big believer in the principle known as Hanlon’s razor: that one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity

Watching the ad, I briefly wondered whether its makers were, in fact, trying to do exactly that – whether perhaps Apple was attempting to drive controversy and engagement as a means of shifting units. But it doesn’t really seem like its style; Apple has always carefully cultivated creative associations around its corporate brand, successfully pitching it as the chosen technology of designers and artists. Steve Jobs himself pioneered the image, spurious but potent, of the tech entrepreneur as creative visionary, as a figure closer in spirit to Picasso than Henry Ford.

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It seemed unlikely that Apple would want to deliberately troll artists and other creative people. I’m a big believer in the principle known as Hanlon’s razor: that one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Just yesterday, Apple sent an apology for the ad to the trade magazine Ad Age, acknowledging they’d failed to think through its symbolic implications. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad,” said Tor Myhren, the company’s vice-president of marketing communications. “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”

Good old Hanlon’s razor.

It’s worth pointing out that the ad, in a way that reflects its own unconscious theme of dumb appropriation, is itself copying a bizarrely popular internet phenomenon. Hydraulic Press Channel, a YouTube account with just under 9.5 million subscribers, has since 2015 been posting regular videos of various objects being crushed by hydraulic presses. (Once you start watching the videos, you’ll understand why it’s so popular, and also why it took me at least an hour longer to write this column than it should have: watching clip after clip of random objects – basketballs, soft toys, gummy bears, hamburgers, stacks of coins, kettlebells – being crushed beneath a hydraulic press is extremely addictive, stupid fun.)

The iPad ad, in a way that is similarly stupid but significantly less fun, turns this process into something much darker and more troubling: a metaphor for the campaign of sustained cultural vandalism that Silicon Valley tech companies have been conducting for some years now in the name of mindless shareholder return. The fact that this metaphor was unintentional points toward a deeper mindlessness, and a lack of self-awareness, at the heart of tech culture. Silicon Valley identifies itself with the sleek, sophisticated tool of creativity revealed at the end of the ad. What it fails to recognise is that it is actually the hydraulic press: a big, stupid machine capable only of crushing real creativity into a thick mulch of profit.