Flattening the Unquantifiable: Apple’s Disturbing iPad Pro Commercial

Or, What The Heck Did I Just Watch?!

Or, What The Heck Did I Just Watch?!

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

Crush!

That is the official title of the new iPad Pro ad that went public on Tuesday. Tim Cook shared it on Twitter, or X, or whatever, which is where it came to my attention:

If you haven’t watched it and skipped over to read what I have to say, go back up and watch it; please.

https://x.com/tim_cook/status/1787864325258162239

This ad was brought to my attention on on Twitter or X or whatever, when someone tagged me in a post, commenting that it seemed as if the creators had been reading the Anthony/Sacasas syllabus on modernity. I was flattered by the comparison. L.M. Sacasas, who has over 30K subscribers to his Substack newsletter, and is a big deal in the world of technology and society. In contrast, I only started writing seriously about these topics in January. But this astute observation is spot on. As I watched the ad, I was struck by how succinctly and powerfully the agency Apple hired had encapsulated the central arguments of the dozen or so articles I have written on AI and art on Medium over the past few months. The ad perfectly captured the essence of my work in just 60 seconds.

A central theme, or you could say, the backdrop informing all my writing on AI, technology, and art, is that technology — even before the emergence of the widely-used public generative AI models — is both useful and potentially dangerous, depending on the context and the level of awareness we bring to our engagement with it.

However, I do not view technology as inherently evil. In fact, I embrace the exact opposite viewpoint, recognizing that our ability as a species to innovate, iterate, and manifest technological tools is our most important talent. It is the application and context of technology that determine its impact on our lives and society.

The day before this Apple ad was released, I tweeted:

https://x.com/Common_Ends/status/1787848504154685614

I believe that technological tools, when utilized by artists to give ‘significant form’ to the human experience, play a fundamental role in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. ‘Significant form,’ a concept I explored in my previous article “Mother’s Day Reflections: The Enduring Power of Primordial Resonance,” refers to the way in which art embodies and communicates the ineffable qualities of human emotion and experience.

Mother’s Day Reflections: The Enduring Power of Primordial Resonance
Exploring the Vital Role of Art and the Maternal Bond in Stabilizing Culture and Resisting the Instrumentalization of…medium.com

However, when technology is paired with the modern mode of capital accumulation, as I have discussed in my writing since January, it can give rise to a vicious and violent ontology. Since the emergence of modern finance in the early 1980s, this combination has led to a progressive flattening of our ontology, a gradual yet perceptible acceleration in our pace of life. This acceleration inscribes in all of us a growing sense of anxiety, fraying not just the edges but the very core of our sense of self and our place within the broader web of society.
 
This all-consuming social acceleration is tethered to a technological ethos driven by the logics of capital circulation, most easily seen in the archetype of the startup company. With pre-defined ‘lean’ startup models, these companies shepherd — or rather, constrict — any truly revolutionary ideas and technological innovations into the Silicon Valley 5-year exit cycle. The primary goal is to ensure that all investments made see a guaranteed return for venture capitalists.

These startups, and the VC’s which promote them, claim to take ‘bold risks’ and push the frontier of innovation, but in reality, they operate within a closed loop. The sole purpose of all their expended energy is to increase the speed of capital circulation while minimizing risk, all in the name of profit and more importantly for many, social esteem. This stifles genuine innovation and reinforces a system of short-term gains over long-term value creation.
 
This ontology necessarily leads to a flattening of the richness of the human condition, like a vice pressing in on us from all sides, pushing out any spaces where the ineffable, the unquantifiable, and the mysterious reside. The result is a pure, flat, transparent plane, where all striation and verticality — the very foundations of community, difference, and nonconformity — are absent. In their place stands a chrome, shiny, perfectly machinic landscape, inhabited by nothing more than incoherent, affective, anxiety-induced points of human emotion. These points grasp desperately for something to hold onto, trying to rebuild some sense of verticality, only to be instantly siphoned off into the capital circulation carousel of the modern attention economy, trapped in an endless cycle of unfulfillment and alienation.

The iPad Pro can indeed be a valuable tool for creative pursuits, and I want to be clear that I am not arguing against its utility in certain contexts. However it cannot replace the unique, irreplaceable experiences and objects that give life its texture, depth, and meaning. It cannot replicate the feeling of playing a brass trumpet, with its weight and resistance and feeling on your sore chapped lips, or the serendipitous imperfections of an old upright piano, where a stuck C# below middle C spontaneously leads to a melody that just sends shivers down your spine. Nor can it replicate the experience of walking into a funky pizza joint with a couple of friends, pulling out quarters to play games, sharing a few slices, and just hanging out together in a real physical space with time to kill and vertical spaces to create. These experiences, rich with spontaneity, imperfections, risk, and physicality, are what make life, well, life. They are the very things that give rise to the vertical spaces in which we find meaning, connection, and motivation.

I contend that the integration of AI technology into the existing technosphere has raised the the stakes to a level that no artist, no culture, no society can possibly withstand. This is what I am trying to impart across the writings I publish here on Medium. This iPad Pro ad illustrates those stakes. Numerous individuals, many in high-ranking and well-compensated positions, contributed to the creative and business development of this ad. It was then released with apparent pride, as evidenced by the CEO of Apple who nonchalantly and without critical reflection posted it on Twitter or X or whatever:

The real issue lies in the creation process of the ad and the underlying philosophies that shaped it. It reveals, and confirms a worldview held by these titans of technology in which all that makes life wondrous, beautiful, tragic, mysterious, unquantifiable; all that is messy, slow, and vertical — all those spaces can be ‘magically’ pulverized into a pure, flat, black void for your efficient, isolated disembodied creative pursuits.

As I wrote in March:

The combination of these two forces — the disassembly of music into its component parts and the rise of AI-generated music — represents a force that no artists, no culture, can possibly withstand. While we stare into our flat black screens, trying to find any semblance of resonance amid the potpourri of incoherent affective points of capital formation, we reach for another virtual knob, smudging it with the tip of our raw finger. The only discernible outcome another bump up in anxiety, another pound per square inch of pressure on our chest, as we sink deeper into the abyss of our own dislocation.

The Transparent Artist: Music in the Age of AI Disassembly
Why generative AI and modular musical stems threaten the very essence of artistic expression.medium.com

I don’t know about you, but I am starting to think we need to build a counter narrative, a counter movement to this all-encompassing totalizing vision of a ‘perfectly’ quantified machinic life. The beautiful, the spaces in which we build upward and outward, slowly, imperfectly, I want to find a way back to that world.

I ended a recent piece on some reflections on AI generated music a few weeks ago that I believe sums up what I want to express at the end here:

Art we care about manifests through humans living in tragic contexts, in tragic times, and in our tragic bodies. It is through this very struggle that beauty and meaning find their resonance and humans find their purpose.

Frankenstein, Pollock, and the Algorithmic Void: The Limits of AI-Generated Art
Embodiment, Context, and the Struggle for Meaning in Artistic Expressionmedium.com