Iconic moments mark historic fault lines. Some are dramatic and themselves causal like an assassination. Others are important in retrospect as reflecting an otherwise-muted cultural transformation.
The tells might even come in the guise of entertainment, say the one from that classic 1967 scene in The Graduate where middle-age McGuire takes Ben aside at the party and says he has one word of advice for him, just one word and the word is “plastics,” thus heralding the age of the so-called cheap, fake, ugly, and meaningless way of life, boring almost by definition.
It’s not that big a step, then, to imagine that our current zeitgeist might later be captured through the lens of some Apple ad.
The ad in question, which flashed briefly before it was partially withdrawn, featured a giant hydraulic press as it literally crushes pretty much everything the art world holds sacred, from music, to paintings, to literature, to a child’s imagination. All this, you see, will be replaced by the latest technological flat-screen, to the soundtrack of Cher’s “all I need is you” (Apple "Crush" Commercial).
The immediate reaction to the ad was pretty much captured in our discussion piece (click: Dear Tim Cooke, an appeal for him to “be a decent human being and delete this revolting ad.” The question for us is whether it’s the ad or what the ad might say about us, where we are, and where we are going that is revolting…
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