“Think Different” – Remember that ad campaign?

Every English teacher on the planet went insane due to its grammatical error. But what a command. Permission to think different. To step outside conformity's bounds and dream BIG.

From 1997 to 2002, images of physicist Albert Einstein, opera singer Maria Callas, modern dance innovator Martha Graham, and a host of other thinkers, dreamers, and creators were used to shine a little reflected glory on Apple by celebrating individual genius, eccentricity, and accomplishment.

What a difference 22 years makes.

The computer giant’s recent campaign for the latest version of its iPad Pro is so disturbing, so violently anti-human it has rightly been condemned by artists of every stripe and lambasted around the world – Japan ignited the backlash.

Watch it and you’ll know why – if you can stomach it.

Crush! | iPad Pro | Applewww.youtube.com

The ad’s called “Crush!” and the notion behind it is that the newest iPad is so marvelous it encompasses – and replaces – traditional creative tools such as musical instruments, paint, and cameras. It “crushes” them all into one device...the slimmest iPad in existence.

Apple illustrates this by showing those creative tools subjected to an industrial crusher. Thousands of years of human expression destroyed in a single minute.

Although Apple has backtracked furiously, the commercial is seared into my brain. It’s, in a word, sickening. It’s an abomination – a brutal assault on the very idea of individual creativity that Apple has infamously pimped out in the past. And, in an age where book-banning is once again on the rise and the arts are under assault by the purveyors of repressive ideologies, it evokes horrifying images drawn from the past and the present. I’m not being hyperbolic when I refer to a few examples:

In 16th-Century England, a convert to the Catholic religion was crushed under an 800-pound weight. The process was supposed to take three days, but the anti-Papists were impatient and got it over within 15 minutes.

In 1930s Germany, Nazis burned books – including Einstein’s, whose thinking was evidently too “different” for Hitler and company.

In 1966 fundamentalist believers in the American South torched Beatle records because they didn’t like John Lennon’s reflections on the state of then-contemporary religion.

You get the picture.

We’re told technology in-and-of-itself is neither good nor bad, it’s how it’s used – or misused. We understand that, and this isn’t an argument for analog over digital or a dismissal of AI and related developments. It’s a sharp response to a company that, as the old saying goes, “treats machines like people and people like machines.”

Apple – like AI – creates nothing. It lives on the endeavors of others. It’s opportunistic as cancer cells. It lacks the Human Factor, which can’t be replaced or eliminated no matter how hard you crush it.