Seeing the things that aren’t going to be replaced by an iPad: What can we really do about it? How did Apple get its first iPod?

The people who made this ad specifically chose to crush things that are valuable not only because of their capabilities, but because they are things that creative people imbue with meaning, that they save up for and hand down to their kids. Those things are not going to be replaced by the iPad.

A little more than halfway through the new ad for “the thinnest Apple product ever,” an enormous hydraulic press bears down on an acoustic guitar — and cameras, and records, and other things that hold reservoirs of emotion for people who make art. Paint, pencils, a dressmaker’s mannequin, books, a wooden model of a person, a not-yet-dry clay bust, a video game cabinet. Everything is flattened under its power. But the most spectacular crushings are of musical instruments — that guitar, a piano, a drum set, a trumpet standing on its end until it gives way.

The message we received was that Apple would destroy all things beautiful, human, and pleasurable to look at and touch, and that it will be a thin glass and metal slab.

The view of technology is disrespectful. We are surrounded by stuff that is supposed to last. Technology, in a much broader sense, is innately hopeful. Between our past and our future is a bright golden thread.

Language is the most basic technology, the one that lets us build everything else. Writing down our thoughts made it possible to access lifetimes of experience. The Pythagorean theorem was so significant when it was first discovered that a cult formed around it; I learned it in sixth grade because it was foundational for a lot of things we created later. It’s possible that the chain of events that gave Apple its existence happened because of these foundations.

There is still a place for technology in Apple’s ad. A TV screen is larger and more enjoyable to use than an iPad if you don’t need to be on the move; that’s why most people still own one. The primary joy of playing a records player is trading objects and getting together at record stores. The arcade video game exists in places where you gather with other people.

The iPad doesn’t replace those experiences. At its best, it complements them. I have never met a professional carpenter who uses only a multi-tool to get their job done. That Swiss Army knife is better than an entire toolkit, if you are travelling light.

Making Music with An iPad Is Ugly and Crushing But Art Can’t Be Flattened: An Artifact of a High-Velocity Landscape

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Get weekly recommendations about what is making us happy when you sign up for the newsletter.

You can make beautiful music with an iPad; you can make beautiful digital art. But that art will be made alongside other music, other art, not stacked on top of the corpses of old violins. If you think of new frontiers in art as an opportunity to destroy sculptures or explode bottles of paint, you never understood art at all, and you never will.

It’s not good to crush an acoustic guitar. Making the middle explode in splinters. It might be personal for me, as my dad was an outdoor musician who entertained us with songs about the dangers of coal mining. Maybe to you, it’s not the guitar. Maybe it’s the cameras or the vinyl records.

Source: Yes, Apple’s new iPad ad is ugly and crushing, but art can’t be flattened

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But these are not practical items to begin with. Nobody owns a piano because it’s practical; it’s about the least practical thing you can own. It can wreck your floor. It doesn’t go out of tune. And if you happen to get a new place, you don’t just need movers for it; you may need special movers. You don’t own a piano to go from A to B in a direct way. You own a piano for the reason we had one in my house: a person plays it. Someone sits down, as my mother did, and plays the “Maple Leaf Rag,” and you can hear the pedals lightly squeak, and you can watch hands skitter across keys, and of course you are listening to music — but also, those are your mother’s hands.

The idea that artificial intelligence can replace the production of art such as novels, illustrations, music, and films is something that the ad plays into in our current environment. We are enduring an all-out assault on the need for anyone’s idiosyncratic individuality to be involved in the creation of art. It is an attempt to reduce creative acts to devices with the right capabilities, to the point where machines can make it all entirely without us. We will, in this vision, order a book or a film as we do a mass-produced piece of fast fashion, and as such, it will be cheap and disposable and reliant on the exploitation of labor.