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Apple have a bit of history with controversial commercials. The infamous 1984 cinematic ad directed by Ridley Scott won a sack full of awards, but many commentators highlighted how it signalled the birth of a kind of consumerist tech capitalism in which products’ branding and image were far more important that the functionality and processing power. Apple were in a technological arms race with IBM to control the domestic computer market, and losing ground hopelessly on the processing power front, they turned to aesthetics and glossy ‘dream-like’ advertising to flog its merchandise. And boy did it work.

Mark Fisher, the British cultural philosopher also took aim at the advert, suggesting that its aesthetics were a deliberate play on the Cold War of the time. In this Post-Capitalist Desire lectures he states:

“Apple is positioning itself as an upstart, as colour intervening into this grey, dreary, bureaucratic world. Apple is new. It’s female, interestingly. It’s colour intervening in this grey world of bureaucratic monoliths where IBM becomes, in the advertising dreamwork, equated with the Soviet Union.”

For Fisher, the advert signalled the emergence (or at least the ossification) of a form of desire for capitalism as the only system that can satisfy. The dark, drab, conformist world of the Soviet bloc (and by extension and indirect referencing, IBM) will never satisfy the cultural consumption demands of the new emerging technologically rich world of the 1980s; only colourful, agile, feminine, and oneiric products can achieve that.

Fast forward to 2024 and a lot may have happened, given that Apple released a similarly desire-laden commercial pregnant with very similar kind of capitalist imaginaries, maybe there hasn’t been so much change.

With the recent ‘Crush’ advertisement (for the launch of the new iPod Pro), the brand appears to champion the intersection of technology and creativity with the usual motifs of colourful paint explosions. Yet, dwell on it a bit and it’s evident that this sleekly produced ad represents the dilution and commercialization of cultural experiences and the very human-centric capacity for art, all under the guise of a genuflection to technological advancement (even though the new iPad Pro has very little new features at all).

The advertisement is designed to ostensibly showcases how Apple products enable users to effortlessly manipulate and enhance their creative outputs. Music, games, sculpture and even the human form itself is all violently compressed into a silicon chip and an interactive glass screen. However, what lurks beneath this polished surface is a narrative that subtly undermines the very essence of artistry. But for me (and also it seems, Hugh Grant), the troubling aspect of Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is not just its celebration of the violent technological intervention into the very human and material forms of art, but its implicit portrayal of art itself as a mere commodity. Art is treated as material to be bent, crushed, and reshaped at the whim of the Apple consumer (who themselves have been moulded over the years to be extremely homogenous). This perspective not only trivializes (and depoliticises) the artist’s original intention but also commodifies creative expressions as tools or accessories that enhance the mere functionality of a device.

The broader cultural implications of this are significant. When technology companies like Apple set such standards, they inadvertently encourage a culture where art is seen as content and not as it should (as I have said many times before): a form of political engagement to envisage post-capitalist worlds. For Apple, the very materiality of art is something to be consumed and manipulated with their technologically-locked-in devices, rather than something to experienced and revered through the very human interactions with the material world around them. For example, the advert shows a trumpet being crushed, suggesting that you don’t one to make the same kind of sounds; use the iPads inbuilt trumpet player instead. But (as any listener to Louis Armstrong will be able to testify), playing the trumpet with your hands, your breath, and the very fibre of your being cannot be replicated anywhere other than another trumpet (and sometimes, not even then). This ad’s portrayal of the rich variety of artistic expressions into a flat, near 2-dimensional technological device is exactly how capitalism wants you to see art.

Technology undoubtedly holds the potential to enhance artistic practice, offering tools that can open up new horizons for creativity. However, advertisements like Apple’s ‘Crush’ risk promoting a narrative that technology not only supplements but supplants the artistic process (and AI isn’t helping at all in this regard). They celebrate not the coexistence of technology and art, but the violent dominance of the former over the latter, with the aim of enshrining the capitalist mastery of technology over the very anti-capitalist nature of art itself.

As consumers and creators in an increasingly digital mediascape, it is crucial to advocate for a more mindful integration of technology and art. Technology should serve as a canvas, not a pressure crusher. It should amplify the artist’s voice and their politics, not muzzle it into a homogenous form of capitalist desire.