A recent commercial from Apple for the brand new iPad Pro has someway managed to existentially disturb me. Titled “Crush!” it shows an ominous hydraulic press above a platform full of symbols of humanity, creativity, and joy: a metronome, guitar, classical statue, piano, analog cameras, books, paint, and more.
The metronome starts, and the press descends to Sonny & Cher’s “All I Need Is You,” slowly obliterating the whole lot in high-def slow motion, before rising again to disclose only a “thinner than ever” iPad Pro. “Just imagine all of the things it’ll be used to create,” Apple CEO Tim Cook posted on the social platform X.
I’m not alone in my revulsion. Actors Hugh Grant and Justine Bateman join me, as do apparently hundreds of vocal people on the Internet and what appears to be your entire nation of Japan. The backlash, particularly from the “creatives” that Apple was courting for his or her product, was so pronounced that the corporate issued a rare apology, saying they’d “missed the mark.”
But what mark did they miss? More than missing just the tastes of their buyers, they missed the mark of reality—each of the creative process and of the goodness of the embodied nature that is important to our humanity.
I see why Apple produced the ad. There is tremendous economic incentive for tech corporations to switch previous, more embodied experiences and tools. Apple Music won’t ever scratch like the delicate grooves of a vinyl record (also, it incorporates a lot of the recorded music on this planet). GarageBand can’t exit of tune (and its digital “instruments” can mimic your entire orchestra). One can “paint” all day on the iPad without having to clean the brushes. In half the space taken up by a paperback, slightly tablet can hold libraries.
There are some ways by which the connectivity of up to date life has, I dare say, blessed me (I watched “Crush!” on the screen of my old iPhone, in spite of everything). But it matters how sensitive we’re to the incursions of the digital and the disembodied into our lives. For humans, the intimate and physical knowledge of our bodies of their relation to creation have to be a part of any real creative endeavor (even within the more abstract disciplines corresponding to creative writing). We lose our connection to the embodied world to our deep loss.
How could the binary code of digital brass even remotely replicate the way in which Duke Ellington’s lips, alive with blood, knew the mouthpiece of his trumpet—just like the one pulverized in that hydraulic press?
There might be no substitute for the balanced weight of a piano key under your pinky finger, nor for the feel of a bronze by Rodin in a rainy sculpture garden, nor for the scratch of a fountain pen on decent stationary—a pen you may have used a lot that it has begun to flex for the unique contours of your handwriting.
This connected way of life, as Wendell Berry would say, “all activates affection.” I don’t think that is just quaint sentimentality. I actually have spent my profession writing and dealing with writers. My wife, Emily, is a classically trained oil painter. We will testify that good limitations, “friction,” and difficulty define the creative process. You know the practice is working if you end up wrestling, painfully, with something larger than yourself.
The essential human core to art is intimately related to the constraints of the artist. These limits, because they’re limits, allow for fruitful negativity. There are so many things we cannot do, and it’s within the engagement of those limitations that real art arises. It is there that real love arises. When it involves real creativity, easy is a four-letter word.
South Korean–born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han addresses this in two influential monographs, titled Saving Beauty and The Burnout Society. For Han, contemporary life is characterised by a scarcity of negativity, a high quality he calls being “smooth.”
Smooth culture, while possessing superficial attraction and visual appeal, doesn’t have the capability to be beautiful. Beauty requires elements which can be foreign to those perceiving it, and people elements are known due to their “roughness,” their negativity. The smooth thing shouldn’t be able to being truly known. It can only be perceived as a reflective surface. For Han, because of this so-called “art” produced in a smooth culture is incapable of being loved. The only way that one can relate to it’s with a “like.”
In this fashion, we move from a culture of reality to a culture of simulacrum. The illusion is superb. Often, smooth art can have the looks of being more attractive, nice, and frictionless. But it is affordable, and it cheapens us to be near it. Our engagement with the creative act becomes defined by countless positivity and the illusion of power. Apple, the very icon of smooth culture, wishes me to imagine it will probably crush all the painful, fruitful, human, good struggle into an iPad.
Our culture of consumption has, up to now 40 years, revealed itself with increasing clarity to be a part of a social and spiritual phenomenon that poses a challenge not only to Christianity but to the normal ways of human life which have defined us for the extent of historical memory.
Writer and up to date Christian convert Paul Kingsnorth has brilliantly termed this phenomenon “the Machine,” whose goal, he says, “is to switch nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the higher to meet probably the most ancient human dream: to grow to be gods.” He continues,
We are increasingly unable to flee our total absorption by this thing, and we’re reaching the purpose where its control over nature, each wild and human, is becoming unstoppable. … Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living within the name of pure individualism and excellent subjectivity. We are usually not made by the world now; we make it.
Kingsnorth’s Machine has gained tremendous momentum because the rise of digital technology, and we’ve got entered what I actually have begun to call the “Age of Pretend.” Never in history has our technological capability to create illusion been so powerful. The results are in every single place.
The quality of pretend dominates entertainment (CGI and digital shortcuts have hollowed the film and music industries), cultural conversation (gender debates are defined by pretending away unwelcome realities), and even money (each today’s dollar and the Bitcoin are fundamentally currencies of make-believe). This pretending is the enemy of art (which is worried with revealing the inside order and great thing about creation) and the enemy of true imagination, which fits outward into the world with curiosity as an alternative of attempting to rule the world by the use of the dominating self.
Instead of encountering a world larger than ourselves, capable of kill us or to be loved by us precisely due to its otherness, we’ve got begun to live in bubbles of illusion. If we wish something, we pretend until it happens. Our contemporary illusions are invariably secure (unlike reality, they provide no immediate threat to us) and straightforward (difficulty is handled either up to now or in the longer term). And all along the way in which, within the contemporary world, the pretending is monetized.
In the top, it’ll be in every single place. We won’t ever need to be alone with our thoughts. We won’t ever need to hurt to make something. We won’t ever need to stop smiling. We will pretend until we die.
The Greek mythological character Narcissus, entranced by his image in the sleek water, stared at his reflection until he died. This is the top of all self-obsession. Pretend is wonderful, until the actual lungs need real air. You cannot breathe within the land of pretend.
The Christian vision of the essential goodness of the body; of the essential quality of the human spirit as creative; of a wealthy philosophy of art that claims we uncover and reveal reality, relatively than making it; of inheriting joyfully the good Western tradition of art and literature —all these should ground an honest revulsion at any attempts to advertise the pretend as a substitute for the actual.
In the magical Age of Pretend, you possibly can be anything you need to be. It’s not about art within the land of pretend. It’s concerning the artist. About you. It was all the time about you. That black screen, before you turned it on, was a mirror. It won’t ever stop being a mirror. And like Narcissus, we might be in peril of drowning in it.
The Apple ad was not only an ad. It was a visceral and violent statement of belief claiming the “goodness” of the Machine, the “beauty” of the sleek, and the conquering of reality by the pretend. It is all a lie, and of far sadder and smaller dimensions than meet the attention. Because the reality is that there may be much joy, and life, and time, and gift, and goodness symbolically set beneath that crushing press.
We ought, within the name of Jesus, the embodied Word, to talk up with strength and gentleness to rebuke those that would crush the actual world flat, and to ask them out of the suffocating land of pretend back into the wealthy goodness of their rough, painful, beautiful human lives.
Reality, the holy natural habitat of the human, is value it.
Paul J. Pastor is senior acquisitions editor for Zondervan, contributing editor for Christianity Today’s Ekstasis, and creator of several books, most recently Bower Lodge: Poems.
