Nick Kapur: Understanding that words and images can have symbolic value beyond what is putatively intended is literally the first thing you learn in an arts or humanities class.

Seeing this horrific Apple ad, I can't help thinking how we're destroying the humanities and arts at universities in order to force everyone into vocational majors like "marketing" where they'll learn to produce soulless crap like this. The replies are 100% negative. twitter.com/tim_cook/sta...

Tim Cook on X: "Meet the new 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. https://t.co/6PeGXNoKgG" / Xtwitter.com Meet the new 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. https://t.co/6PeGXNoKgG

You're telling on yourself and your entire company that you thought this would appeal to anyone outside of the tech bubble, where destroying things actual human beings value for profit is a virtue and an ad like this got anywhere close to being made, let alone tweeted proudly by the CEO.

Understanding that words and images can have symbolic value beyond what is putatively intended is literally the first thing you learn in an arts or humanities class.

Yeah man I don’t know, if you thought the symbolism of a big press squashing music and pictures and movies into an iPad was “Apple wants to destroy everything you love,” I think the problem is something to discuss with your therapist.

(also imagining that Apple doesn’t employ thousands of humanities grads and other artists is so outrageously wrong it’s laughable, come the fuck on)

Nah he is right. The ad conveys this message and lacks the awareness to know where music and art originally come from. It's not in the 1s and 0s. It comes from out in the real world first. You wouldn't have images without a camera, you wouldn't have piano notes without first having a piano.

I feel like even more than that it's a lack of awareness for the moment. Artists everywhere are facing the threat of being crushed by the demand for algorithmically generated art that is literally their own work, stolen and squished together by a machine.

And instead of thinking about how they've helped perpetuate this, and that that same work is what built them in the first place, mega corporations are like "Isn't this cool? We're taking your stolen labor and turning it into prohibitively expensive goods to sell back to you!"

Oh my god the ad is literally saying that exact thing you nonce. All that real stuff is being condensed into the iPad. Not replaced by. Do you seriously thing Thing A being condensed into Thing B means B created A??

Calling someone a nonce because you don't agree with their opinion really doesn't paint you in the best light, mate. Maybe you should go back to Twitter.

mm but them telling me my opinion is co-opted and thus invalid because it doesn’t line up with them is fine *pat pat*

You do know "nonce" means pedophile, right? It is astounding how many morons like yourself think that word is some twee British way of calling someone an idiot. Idiot.

That's literally how arguing on the internet works. You have your view, which was interesting though wrong, and they gave their view. 🤷‍♂️

this would be a much more compelling argument if the camera didn't linger on all the objects being destroyed in the process of "being condensed"

“It’s so beautiful to see our technology destroying the arts.”

if everything was being non-destructively comically smooshed into an iPad, that ad would have a totally different impact

I really cannot imagine getting this upset at watching tools be destroyed. Tools aren’t art. Buckets of paint (wall paint, incidentally, not portrait or landscape paint) getting crushed is meaningless. I really think lack of understand of how presses work in manufacturing underpins this. 😅

I'm not upset. You're just missing the point. You can't claim the ad depicts all these tools being compressed to fit into an iPad when they're literally being destroyed. It's a shitty, incoherent ad.

How would knowing how mechanical presses work help?

"condensed"? The items aren't shrunk, or reduced whilst retaining their essence, they are crushed to destruction.

But yeah, “not shrunk or reduced while retaining their essence” is a literal description of how a hydraulic press makes things. I think that’s a crucial lack of contextual understanding. Do you know how a synthetic diamond is made? It’s by shrinking burnt stuff while not retaining its essence.

You have very carefully managed to explain why you seem to agree that an advert that is intending to show "condensing" a whole bunch of things, without destroying them, shouldn't use a hydraulic press. And yet this one does. So it's a bad advert.

So you believe that the symbolic message here is “all that stuff was destroyed, it’s material was swept away, and the iPad sprang out of nothing, the thing most certain it wasn’t made of being all the things that stood there a mere moment before?” Do you think practical magic is real, too? 😅

The things that were there before *were destroyed*. That's the symbolism! The iPad being created out of broken dreams doesn't seem like a sensible vision for an advert, but it is what was presented.

Are you saying iPads are made of pianos, trumpets, and house paint?

The thing that this ad REALLY gets wrong is that no tablet/computer is ever going to fully replace any of those things because the element of touch is gone. The feeling of fingers on the keys of a piano, the way a brush full of paint slides across a canvas - those are essential to the creative

process and no iPad is ever going to be able to give that feedback. To think that it can is the mark of someone who fundamentally does not understand what art is. That is why this ad is so appalling.

Oh, this I absolutely agree with. I still photograph on film, I refuse to use a computer in my music, and I have spent embarrassing money on nice pens and notebooks.

Well said.

A Gritty mascot pfp fighting to the death on behalf of an ultramegacorporation, smh

Mm, but that's not happening. If you hate Apple, but liked of their commercials, would that mean you were a hopeless Apple fanboi? Of fucking course it woudn't, because human beings are complex and capable of nuance. Do you genuinely believe you can't think two things are wrong at once?

I think Apple is evil as shit, as all tech corps intrinsically are. I also think the interpretation of this commercial as Apple trying to destroy creation is amaterial, reactive, ignorant, and badly decontextualized. And yet, I still think Nazis should be slaughtered. Some things ain't simple.

I think you're corncobbing.

it's not being condensed, it's being thoroughly and gratuitously *destroyed* with shrapnel and debris flying.

there are so many people here who don't know at the most basic level what a press does or how it does it it makes me want to tear my head off 🙄 When you destroy something in a press, when you lift it, is there then a different thing not made of the crushed things? Is that how presses work? Magic?

So, since that is NOT AT ALL how a press works. does not it follow that the simulacrum of a press, chosen to appeal to the nature of a real-life press because that is how symbols work, WOULD ALSO BEHAVE LIKE A PRESS? NOT FUNDING THE GODDAM HUMANITIES IS WHY Y'ALL ARE LIKE THIS.

You'd flunk a high school class in reading the media, let alone an actual humanities degree. Look at the images - you are not seeing something being condensed, it's being destroyed.

If I showed you a presser have a human inside it and then showcase an iPad Air, thinking that the iPad Air holds the human intelligence, everyone would rightly see a murder live.

...a presser? look man if you can't correctly identify objects after you've been told their names, I don't think this convo has legs. Also, are you equating a human life with a piano, you fuckin psycho?

Sorry. I'm not English. And yes. I'm equating a human with a piano, because it's much more clear when you see it with a human how bad the optics are. But if your point is to insult, well, hope you live a happy life...

It can say both since it’s subject to interpretation. This isn’t hard, bro. Like, think.

mm, no, "subject to interpretation" doesn't mean "reason and causality no longer exist." Like if you held that this was a statement about how its wrong to, I don't know, build a time machine and kill Maggie Thatcher in 1979? That interpretation would be wrong. :P reeeeeeeeeeach

Whatever you say, bro-who-thinks-he’s-smarter-than-he-is. You got me. You win. Hope your ego’s still in tact.

Further insults. Again, unnecessary.

Artists are being kneecapped by social media algorithms, content is being stolen and repurposed by AI no one wants or asked for, musical artists are paid thirds of a penny on the dollar by streaming services, creators are CONSTANTLY asked to create for free...and you're doing the 'lying eyes' bit?

maybe you should be the one speaking to the therapist about your numbness to it.

being charitable, this ad is a form of visual art and art is interpreted different ways. if the creatives involved and the C-suite that approved it completely missed the dual meaning...that shows you how highly art ranks amongst those in the rooms

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