Apple's vision of the future is just depressing

Apple recently managed to offend good taste and scandalise the cultured classes with its tone-deaf commercialism and crass pursuit of profits over cultural preservation. I refer, of course, to its video advertisement for the new iPad Pro - an uncomfortable exercise in philistinism that has rightly provoked furious condemnation from the illuminatti of the creative cosmos.

With shocking insensitivity, the advertisement in question depicts various icons and instruments of human artistic and cultural achievement being systematically crushed into oblivion by a hydraulic press's implacable, brute force. A piano, that musical instrument which has not only birthed the sublime compositions of Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart and countless other exalted artists, but also been the humble birthplace of generations of young dreams and the first sparks of creative awakenings, is wantonly flattened. Guitars, those resonant lutes which have not only cradled the timeless folk melodies and searing blues lamentations of musical geniuses but been the loyal accompanists to millions of parents singing lullabies or lovers crooning serenades, are tortured into silence. 

Even more outrageously, in the most vicious act of cultural desecration, tubes of vibrant pigment - the essential elemental materials from which the grand masters of the Renaissance like Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci were able to breathe life into their sublime masterpieces upon ceiling and canvas - are cavalierly crushed along with brushes and palettes, those sacred tools and sacraments of inspiration and creation.

It's as if Apple, that secular titan of sterile technology, has fully embraced and glorified the most severe and destructive strain of heresy - the merciless obliteration of those precious, irreplaceable artefacts that enshrine and give bodily form to the divine creative spark of the human spirit. No wonder a righteous furore has erupted in response, a roar of contempt to rebuke these arrant philistines for their heedless erasure and denigration of civilisation's crowning cultural and artistic glories.

Hugh Grant, the ever-sanguine observer of our modern pathologies, instantly diagnosed and raged against this "destruction of the human experience, courtesy of Silicon Valley". The ever-insightful Justine Bateman rightly denounced it as a deliberate and corrosive effort to "crush the arts" in service of the tech sector's reckless, unbridled pursuit of artificial intelligence and automation. In doing so, they echoed the strident outrage and condemnation of history's most ardent defenders of cultural ideals against the pillaging of grasping desecrators of all that is elevated and transcendent.

Apple has apologised for the ad after it sparked backlash online.

"Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it's incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world," Tor Myhren, Apple's VP of marketing communications.

"Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad," he continued. "We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry."

But cultural tone deafness is ingrained in Apple's development arc. The company ravenously mimics traditional creative practices to maintain an increasingly challenged market foothold.

Apple's obsessive pursuit of minimalist design purity reflects an ancient tendency to view the physical world as restrictive and debasing of human expression. By crushing diverse forms of creativity into lifeless digital flatness, they embrace an aesthetic vision akin to the most reductive and conformist artistic movements of the 20th century – such as the Bauhaus cult of geometric abstraction. Tragically, this harsh industrial minimalism became aligned with the totalitarians' dream of total cultural uniformity and their soulless machinery of cultural uniformity. One can envision Apple CEO Tim Cook in this dark alternate reality as a zealot for minimalist conformity, stripping away colour, ornament and individuality to impose a regime of severe aesthetic monotony.

Of course, this allegory is not intended to distract from the appalling symbolic terribleness of Apple's profane commercial. It symbolises a deepening cultural sickness - the gradual disconnection of our species from those sensual touchstones and repositories of beauty and artistry that have elevated the human experience and rendered it transcendent.

Before the virtual realm colonised our interior worlds, tangible artefacts served as gateways to the sublime. A piano was not just wood and strings but an altar to the Muse of Music upon which creative passion could flow unimpeded. Paintings and pigments were conduits to mystical realms unveiled by Renaissance masters. But our capitulation to the vacant imitation of digital dimensions as spiritually emaciated as their constituent pixels is gathering momentum.

We willingly prostrate ourselves before these soulless anti-creations, entranced by their two-dimensional phantasms as the eternal beauties of nature recede behind pixels. Rhapsodies of birdsong fade from our indifferent ears, drowned out by synthetic drones. Our estrangement from the tactile, the viscerally embodied, reaches chemical levels - atrophying those neural pathways grounding us in experienced reality.

Apple's grotesque commercial apotheosis of lifeless minimalism points toward total alienation from physical existence into an abstracted anti-reality. As in humanity's darkest chapters, living artefacts of artistry and enlightenment face desecration as grist for a forthcoming digital monoculture. Our museums, concert spaces, and libraries - beacons of our ascent - are rendered obsolete by this escalating war on realness by the simulation's empty touchscreens.

Though Apple apologised, their offensive represents graver metaphysical omens. Will new generations know rapture, divine inspiration, or merely simulated fodder distorted through glowing screens? Will they thrill at a symphony awakening primeval energies within, or just virtual dirges as synthetic as AI-prompted melodies?

So we cultured defenders of the tangible must raise human creativity's vivid emblems - defiantly celebrating humanity's soulful fires against monochrome desolation. We can wield brush, chisel, trowel and pen to preserve beauty from techno-minimalists who would entomb it in lifeless black mirrors.

If we do not take notice, will civilisation's brilliant emanations be extinguished - smothered under the sleek march of the virtual world's soulless domination? We can still defend our rites and spaces honouring transcendent creativity over hollow simulation. Our cathedrals' soaring sculptural elegance, our cultural heroes cast in bronze or carved marble - these enduring emblems remind us that the human spirit can forge more sublime masterworks than any imitation.

We celebrate through our art something the virtual realm can only counterfeit without comprehending - the multi-dimensional, spiritual depths of lived experience unlocking the boundless potentials of our nature as a race of creators, not merely passive receivers of context-free pixels. Our soul's longing for expression through artisanship that awoke consciousness across the generations should remind us why we must reject the absurd reductionism of Apple's nihilistic commercial.

We are increasingly conditioned toward a materialist conception of human experience defined solely through mathematical modelling and Silicon Valley-based depictions - a blinkered perspective rendering creative achievement just another substrate for computational flattening into abstractions of light and pixels. Apple's senseless ode to crushing all that is sacred about human creativity struck an already raw nerve - revealing hopeful reservoirs of resistance to this encroaching creative extinction.

We can unite in rejecting the immolation of beauty, our banishment to a desert of soulless mirrors winking emptily - affirming civilisation's faith in the soulful majesty of inspired artistry as the human spirit's most transcendent emanation. From a tragic advertisement depicting our highest aspirations as demolition rubble resurrected into oblong screens, we see a stark warning to rekindle the primordial flame of human creativity.

Our faltering civilisation can rekindle the perpetual blaze of creative inspiration, honouring creators over imitators and sages over simulators. Our species finds meaning when sculpting, dancing and singing. We were born to craft and dream—not endlessly doom scroll, no matter how wondrous the enabling technology has become. Our future hinges on makers and visionaries, shapers, not flatteners - lest our true potential as a civilisation is unmade into soulless, airless virtuality.

Now, where did I leave my iPhone?