Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete this Revolting Apple Ad

During the Super Bowl broadcast of 1984, Apple debuted one of the most innovative and spectacular commercials ever made: Ridley Scott's ad for the then-brand new MacIntosh home computer. It showed an auditorium full of lifeless human drones staring at a dictator-like figure ranting on a giant screen, followed by an athletic blonde woman (the only splash of color in the scene) bursting through the doors and hurling a hammer into the screen, symbolically destroying the oppressor. Forty years later, Apple CEO Tim Cook took to social media to debut an ad for "iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create."  The tonal opposite of the company's most famous ad, it shows a stack of creative tools and imaginative objects being crushed in a giant press.  Sonny and Cher sing "All I Ever Need is You" as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see: a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls.  You've heard the phrase "They said the quiet part out loud", right? Well, that's what this ad is doing.  And it's not just speaking in room tones. It's practically crowing its happiness at the destruction of artists, their tools, and their process.   Look at how the wooden figurine bends beneath the weight of the press, and how the paint cans explode and spray their contents against the lens like blood in a graphic horror film. Look at the grotesque way the destruction of the musical instruments and camera lenses is fetishized: wood and metal buckling, glass shattering. They even made sure to put one of the emoji toys right on the edge of the press so that when the pressure bears down on it, we see its eyes bulge, then pop out.  This ad doesn't just show destruction. It delights in it.  When the press has stopped crushing things, the music cuts out and is replaced by eerie silence. This is a technique that movies use to summon audience unease after a character has been violently killed.  Then the press raises to reveal a thin computer pad that (one supposes) replaces all of the items that we just saw being pulverized. All we ever need, or something like that. You can tell yourself that the items on that metal press are "only stuff "and their eradication doesn't mean anything. But if you do, it means you've never had a violent person destroy something you loved as a way of warning you "You're next," which in turn means you are a person who lacks imaginative empathy and should've kept your mouth shut.  This is a disturbing, shocking ad, not just because of what it shows but because of its seeming obliviousness to the subtext that it turns into text, as well as the message it sends to every artist alive: the tech industry will crush you, destroy you; suddenly, violently, all at once. The rebel warrior with the hammer smashing the old order has been superseded by another Big Brother.  The ad arrives amid a continued furor over the ethical, moral and copyright implications of "Generative AI," which is a cool-sounding name for plagiarism software. This so-called "intelligence" is not intelligent but crudely imitative. Contrary to what its industry boosters (and their simps) keep trying to tell us, its relationship to the history of human creativity is not at all like the relationship between a flesh-and-blood art student studying a book of Rembrandt paintings or a budding trumpeter playing along with Miles Davis. It's more like the relationship between the tripods in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the people that they suck up into their bellies, shred into gory paste, and spray onto their crops, as a kind of mulch.  All of variants of Gen AI were "trained" over the course of many years by "scraping" of artwork by creative humans, past and present. Almost zero of the artists were consulted or asked to opt-in, much less compensated for their labor. Gen AI is theft of intellectual property as well as intellectual labor (and in some cases physical labor; it takes time and material to make a film, a TV show, an album, a painting, a sculpture, etc.) on a scale never dreamt of before.  "Move fast and break things" was the motto of Facebook until ten years ago, and continues to drive the tech industry, as well as venture capitalists and hedge funders who have no morals, and don't care about anything but shareholder value and executive bonuses. These are people who look for ways to siphon off money from transactions that didn't need additional middlemen to function. These are people who acquire companies in order to saddle them with debt fr