The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This is a relatively brief post taking a recent Apple ad as a point of departure. I won’t rehash the criticisms that have already been offered elsewhere, but I did not want to pass on the opportunity to reflect on how we might better conceive of the relationship between our stuff and the good life. If you should reach the end of this essay and find that you’d like to read more on these themes, you can take a look at this 2022 installment: “The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self.” Cheers!

Maybe you’ve seen the ad. Maybe you’ve already read a dozen critical essays about the ad. Maybe you have yourself publicly commented on the ad. Maybe you are among the blessed, and you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. And you would be blessed indeed if you cannot be made to care. Nevertheless, let’s talk briefly about the ad.

The ad in question was for the new Apple iPad, and it was shared on Twitter by the company’s CEO, Tim Cook. You can click that link above, or you can take a look on YouTube. If you’ve not watched it, please, by all means take a look.

Titled “Crush,” the ad features an assortment of creative tools and media artifacts—piano, guitar, metronome, paints, pencils, trumpet, games, television, record player, books, etc.—being crushed by an enormous hydraulic press. When the press retracts, we see in the place of those instruments and artifacts a slim, sleek iPad. We then hear the narrator’s voice telling us that “the most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.”

There are a couple of things we might say for this ad. First, this was truth in advertising, although perhaps the ad spoke better than it intended. The ad conveyed the company’s incipient ideology with exquisite clarity: like the ring of Sauron, the iPad here appears as the one device to rule them all, chiefly by overthrowing and displacing them. Are you worried that digital devices will obsolesce the rich and multifaceted array of analog tools and instruments? Apple wants you to know that, yes, this is what it is aiming at. Are you concerned about the flattening of human experience under digital conditions? Boy does Apple have just