Crushing Culture or Creating Culture?
The new iPad Pro is Apple’s ‘thinnest iPad yet’, and to drum up some commercial momentum, Apple released a short, snappy advertisement for it. We’re shown a monolithic hydraulic press (a scene any TikTok scroller will be familiar with), poised to crush and squeeze several everyday cultural artefacts between its jaws. A guitar, a sculpture, some camera lenses, a painting set. We all instinctively know what’s coming next.
As the hydraulic press closes, the contents within are flattened and pulverised into oblivion. Paint and colour explode, hissing everywhere. And as the jaws of the press open up, what’s left behind? An iPad Pro, of course.
I guess the message Apple was trying to convey is that all the best parts of these things you love most – a stack of books, a musical instrument, a games console – they’ve all been distilled into a neat glowing rectangle. This new iPad can replace them all!
It’s fair to say that this desired ‘message’ did not land in the way Apple expected.
Internet users took to their keyboards in droves to express how tone deaf they felt the advert was. Among them, actor Hugh Grant described the advert as symbolising “the destruction of the human experience, courtesy of Silicon Valley. Who wants to see their favourite hobby, their preferred creative outlet, destroyed before their eyes and replaced by another glowing screen?
Since the commercial’s release, Apple has apologised for ‘getting this one wrong’, and rival Samsung has bitten back with a snappy counter-advert.
Why such a visceral reaction to what should’ve been just another attention-grabbing advertisement? Here are a couple of quick thoughts on it.
1. We are created for life in all its fullness
All life is an abundant gift from God.
The Hebrew creation story shows us a God who creates the cosmos and fills it to bursting with living things. It is a picture of abundance. God creates a world teeming with life, and he fills the oceans and the skies with creatures. (Genesis 1v20) He places humanity to live and thrive in this kind of world, a world which doesn’t exist because it needs to, or because it’s efficient, but exists because the good, abundant life of God overflows. Jesus pulls on this thread in the gospel of John when he proclaims that he has come to bring ‘life in all its fullness’. The same life that spoke the cosmos into being is the life which Jesus has come to bring you and me.
This is the life you were made for. And in this life, there is space for all kinds of culture and creativity – music, art, food, and many other things that don’t exist because they ‘need to’, but exist because they glorify Jesus.
And so, when we see all of this gloriously frivolous culture squashed before us, our hearts know that something is off. We were not created for a flattened life, governed by utility and efficiency. You were created to experience life in all of its fullness, ‘more and better life than you ever dreamed of’.
What the iPad Pro ad misses is that culture is part of the gift of life. The reason human beings have created guitars, trombones, Pac-Man, and digital cameras is that God has hardwired us to create as he does. He blesses the first humans in Genesis and tells them to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over every living thing that moves on the earth’. It’s what theologians often call our ‘cultural mandate’ – our invitation to continue creating in reflection of our Creator.
And here’s the truly ironic thing: the new iPad Pro is just another expression of that cultural mandate. It’s an expression of creativity and culture just like the destined-for-destruction piano or record player. So why crush other cultural artefacts to prop up this one?
A biblical worldview doesn’t crush culture; it cultivates it.
2. Modern technology doesn’t keep its promises.
You know those old videos from 50 years ago where journalists ask school kids what they think life would be like in the 2020s? They always talk about flying cars and jetpacks. Where is my flying car or jetpack?!
Instead of a jetpack, we got smartphones and attention-sapping algorithms. Even though our modern culture has given us many remarkable technologies (which can indeed bring glory to Christ), our relationship with them is also deeply broken. As humans, we have not always cultivated a culture that glorifies Christ, and society has suffered the consequences. Our work, our leisure, our culture, is marred by sin.
And yet, often in our secularised Western culture, we act like Utopia is just one more generation of iPhones away. Reflecting on the jetpacks that kids in the 1950s thought we’d have, Andy Crouch wrote, ‘We were promised the fullness, the allness of life that we all experienced when we learned to ride on two wheels as children – the engagement of our bodies, the sharpening of our minds, the awakening of our hearts that we knew and longed for’. But where is it? Most of us have a delightfully slick Apple device within reaching distance right now. Is it offering that ‘allness of life’ we yearn for, or are we more bored, more anxious, more isolated as a generation than anyone before us?
Comedian Bo Burnham hit the nail on the head in his song ‘Welcome to the Internet’, where he caricatures an Apple-esque Silicon Valley CEO:
‘Mommy let you use your iPad; you were barely two.
And it did everything we designed it to do.
It was always the plan to put the world in your hands.’
The online world may be in the palm of our hands, but have we lost touch with ourselves in the process?
We traded the film camera for the VSCO app. We got rid of our pens and pencils and have been given Snapchat filters. We’d rather settle for a 10-second reel than a 200-page novel. God has given us so many good gifts, and yet we keep thinking that satisfaction is hidden in the next shiny gadget. As poet Joshua Luke Smith says, ‘the life you’re longing for is hidden in the life you have.’ The life God has given us, life spent with Jesus, is the satisfaction of all these desires.
The rise of modernity has coaxed us away from our God-given world and has invited us to get caught up in distilled abstractions and impressions instead. The priest Robert Farrar Capon wrote ‘one real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world.’ In this advertisement, Apple claims that the iPad Pro is the distillation of all the cultural goodness that it squished. But what has been lost in the process? Does this thinking allow us to be more present and incarnate, both to God and to each other, or does it alienate us further?
Capon wrote, ‘Everytime someone diagrams something instead of looking at it, everytime he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him – everytime he substitutes a conceit for a fact – he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him, and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol.’
When reflecting on how Christians can make a dent in culture, someone once said, ‘Most of us want to be a force. But Jesus calls us to be a taste.’
In other words, what humanity really needs is not a more powerful tablet, or better processing speeds, or super-efficient AI – it needs a taste of the world that is to come. ‘You are the salt of the earth’. The world needs a taste of Jesus’ beauty. The thinking behind Apple’s iPad advert has left a lingering bitter taste for many- what kind of taste could a Christian vision of culture leave instead?
– Written by Wallace Bruce, North West Staff Worker
