Apple’s culture crush advert shows why Big Tech just doesn’t get it

Sickly strip lighting flickers on in a grey concrete room as the strains of All I Ever Need is You by Sonny and Cher start up. Sculptures, TVs, books, musical instruments, beautiful paints and more are all neatly arranged gleaming objects sparkling with promise. That’s when the hydraulic press starts descending.

First to go is a trumpet, which crumples into an ugly tangle under the impossible pressure. A Space Invader arcade machine cracks and buckles next. TVs pop and fizz, camera lenses shatter until with a final splurt of paint and poof of coloured dust that hydraulic press hits the floor. It raises again to reveal… ta-da: a new iPad.

Supposedly, the idea behind Apple’s big new release was all about celebrating culture. The visual metaphor being that all the cool stuff you just saw squidged into dust, and what it represents — music, games, TV — is packed into this (itself very flat) bit of kit. The noise made by the cratered piano was less tone deaf.

The advert is called Crush!, a term not packed with positive connotations for the uplifting of the human spirit that art aspires to. And, why is it shot like a horror film — from the stark lighting to the ominous, unstoppable force destroying beauty and order, all set to a discordantly jaunty tune?

As dystopian storytelling goes, all of human creativity being crushed in a vice by corporate overlords, only to be put behind a glass screen, feels fairly on the nose.

The response has been pretty overwhelming from artists who do see it as a fitting metaphor — just a much darker one than the almost $3 trillion company intended. Hugh Grant called it the “destruction of the human experience, courtesy of Silicon Valley” others have found even more creative descriptions.

This is particularly jarring because many are struggling in what is increasingly feeling like a dystopian landscape for the creative arts in terms of pay and security — and then there’s the dread march of AI. Content streamers are increasingly bumping up their subscriptions and cracking down on password sharing. Will these mega corporations be passing this cash on to the artists?

Crush! caused such a stink that Apple was forced into an apology last week saying it had “missed the mark”. The advert is still on YouTube, although the comments have been turned off.

Many at the company likely don’t get what the problem is. Every time a new bit of kit is launched like an iPhone or whatever, there are gleeful videos of random lunatics putting them in blenders or crushing them with hydraulic presses just to see what happens.

With a mass-produced gadget there may well be a certain intrigue to seeing complex tech being ground into dust. But a multi-trillion company taking that idea and applying it to artists feels a touch oppressive, no?