Spot Ghosts | newspaper

This was the new commercial for the computer company Apple. It shows a huge hydraulic press crushing all the tools of human creativity; Trumpet, piano, photography lenses, books, paint, bust, etc. And at the end of this virtual disaster emerges, as company president Tim Cook wrote, “the thinnest product we’ve ever created, and the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, the new iPad Pro.”

“The collapse of the human experience.” “Thanks Silicon Valley,” actor Hugh Grant commented. “Did the Taliban make that ad?” another person chimed in. “Forty years ago, Apple made its ‘1984 spot,’ a bold statement against a dystopian future. Now you (Apple) are that dystopian future. Congratulations,” wrote author Juval Cordoff. Note: “The 1984 Spot” is a legendary ad run by Ridley Scott that showed how the then-new Macintosh was liberating people from big gray computing systems and concluded: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be the same in 1984. “1984”.

The backlash was so great (16,000 negative comments on the X platform alone) that Apple was forced to apologize. “Our goal is to honor the countless ways they express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We didn’t achieve our goal with this video and we’re sorry,” said the VP of Marketing.

But why all this protest over an ad whose idea was actually stolen? In 2008, LG also put technical tools in a press and crushed them to show that its new phone condensed them all. This announcement went unnoticed, perhaps because LG is not Apple, the latter a totem of technological progress. Its charismatic founder, Steve Jobs, helped shape the technological world in which we live. He was always selling – at a high price – the hippie ideology that called for the democratization of technology and the liberation of human creativity. Destroying art objects was a kind of blasphemy in the tradition of a company that had once sold computers while glorifying poetry.

Perhaps the reactions are due again to the fact that “the pace of the world has changed within us.” In 2008, the technology was still promising. Now, with advances in artificial intelligence, it looms as a threat, and this cheeky announcement reminds us how much we lose out in the new technological environment.