How the Apple Ad reveals that the iPad is Sniky. Why Is It Snaky? Why Does Apple Need a Kid?
Apple has a habit of suggesting its older devices are obsolete by releasing new versions that change their shells and styling without altering what they do in any meaningful way. The point of this ad is not about the iPad’s creative uses — it’s that it’s skinny. That’s the big selling point: the skinniest ever. The tools that make the things we love are what Apple forgot about when it was focused on its new marketing feature.
In this ad, technology is disposable. When that piano was hit, I flinched. But apparently, no one inside the company did — and a lot of people had to sign off on this ad. The emotional valence of crushing is unmistakable; simply reversing the ad, as Reza Sixo Safai did, so that all the creative tools spring from the iPad immediately improves it. After all, the iPad can also be a creative tool, and isn’t that what the commercial was meant to suggest?
It was sent to us that Apple would crush everything beautiful and human and leave a skinny glass and metal slab.
That view of technology is wrong and disrespectful. We are surrounded by things that are meant to last. Technology is hopeful and innate. It’s a golden thread between the past and the future.
Language is the most basic technology, the one that lets us build everything else. Writing down our thoughts meant we could begin to access lifetimes of experience. The Pythagorean theorem was so important that a cult formed around it and I learned it in sixth grade. Language, math and a few other things made possible a chain of events that allowed Apple to exist.
There’s still a place for the technology Apple crushes in its ad. If you don’t need to be traveling, a bigger screen is more enjoyable than an iPad; that’s why most people still own one. A record player allows the secondary joy of trading physical objects, and get-togethers at record stores. The arcade video game exists in places where you gather with other people.
The iPad doesn’t replace those experiences. At its best, it meshes with them. I have never met a professional carpenter that does their work with just a multi-tool. If you want to travel light, the Swiss Army knife is probably better than an entire toolkit.
“I am not worried”: The last thing you’d think about when you were young, or how you saw a guitar explode, and how art didn’t flatten
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In certain kinds of stories, “I am not worried” is the last thing you say before the monster devours you. I am worried about the economics of art, but I am not concerned about the extinction of art because it will always be made by humans. The gasp that went up from so many people when they saw that guitar explode, that sound came from the part of a human being that makes art. And that part instinctively understands that beauty isn’t fixated on tech-world dominance. It doesn’t demand to crush what is loved in order to chase the fantasy that you can fit everything that matters into the pocket of a briefcase.
Source: Yes, Apple’s new iPad ad is ugly and crushing, but art can’t be flattened
A sad side to crushing an acoustic guitar: Why is art ugly and crushing, but why can art can’t be flattened?
There is a sad aspect to crushing an acoustic guitar. Making the middle explode in splinters. That might be personal to me, as someone who grew up with a dad who was what you might call a campfire guitarist — not a performer, just a dad who used to entertain us with songs like “Dark as a Dungeon,” a little folk tune about the lethal dangers of coal mining. Maybe it’s not the guitar. Either the cameras or the vinyl records is what it is.
These aren’t practical items to start with. It’s about the least practical thing you can own, and nobody holds a piano because it’s practical. It can cause more harm to your floor. It goes out of tune. If you do get a new place, you don’t need to rely on moving services, you need to rely on special moving services. You don’t own a piano to get from point A to B in the most direct way possible. You own a piano for the reason we had one in my house: a person plays it. Someone sits down, as my mother did, and plays the “Maple Leaf Rag,” and you can hear the pedals lightly squeak, and you can watch hands skitter across keys, and of course you are listening to music — but also, those are your mother’s hands.
Source: Yes, Apple’s new iPad ad is ugly and crushing, but art can’t be flattened
Art without Artificial Intelligence: a new paradigm for self-improved production of art and their artifacts through the lens of artificial intelligence
In our current environment, the ad plays as an extension of, or maybe a companion to, the idea that artificial intelligence — or what travels under that name — can take over the production of art: of books, of illustrations, of music, of films. We’re attacking the need for individuality to be involved in the creation of art. The aim is to make devices with the right capabilities less creative, so machines can make it all without us. In this vision, we will be able to order a book or a film as a mass produced piece of fast fashion, but that will be cheap and disposable, and reliant on the exploitation of labor.