in the new apple “intelligence” ads, ai is actually about artificial affect.
a garden of pure ideology…
— Big Blue dictator, Apple 1984 advertisement
…I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computersas
if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
— Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace
In both the story of the Garden of Eden and in the myth of Prometheus, the fact that humans have to work is seen as their punishment for having defied a divine Creator, but at the same time, in both, work itself, which gives humans the ability to produce food, clothing, cities, and ultimately our own material universe, is presented as a more modest instantiation of the divine power of Creation itself. We are, as the existentialists liked to put it, condemned to be free, forced to wield the divine power of creation against our will, since most of us would really rather be naming the animals in Eden, dining on nectar and ambrosia at feasts on Mount Olympus, or watching cooked geese fly into our waiting gullets in the Land of Cockaygne, than having to cover ourselves with cuts and calluses to coax sustenance from the soil.
— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
New commercials for Apple “Intelligence” demonstrate how AI has perhaps never been about intelligence, but rather about the production of affect and emotion. AI is not directed at thoughts. With Apple’s entry into the contemporary con game of AI, we start to see more clearly how it is pointed at feelings. The tech company that can control them controls customers. Miserable with your life, but don’t want anyone to see it? AI can be your shield. Bored out of your gourd by your job? AI can be your front of expertise and interest. Seething with rage inside because of your unhappy marriage? Let your AI be your Superego.
Apple’s new ads emerge from a long history of the company’s commercials as screens that mirror the state of American self and society. Let’s go back to 1984 and the foundational Superbowl halftime commercial, directed by Alien/Bladerunner director Ridley Scott, that helped Apple break through to a mass audience. In the commercial, one of the most famous ever made, a platinum blonde young woman in tank top and red track shorts, a kind of “Let’s-Get-Physical” Olivia Newton-John of the future, jogs into a meeting of zombified workers with shaved heads, gas masks, and dazed looks. They sit on benches listening to a pallid gray video indoctrination by a scary Nazi-like dictator. She outruns the riot police goon squadrons to spin around and hurl a hammer into the screen of Big Brother, I mean Big Blue: IBM as a fantasy of Orwellian totalitarian control over the masses, whom the Macintosh is about to liberate so that “you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’,” as the ad put it.
The Macintosh was to revolutionize society, striking a blow for freedom, letting loose the repressed-hippie rainbows in an oppressive, stagflated, Reaganimited post-1960s America. Cybernetics rises from the acidic ashes to bring you, the alienated individual, along with the masses, back to the garden of individuality, innocent and reborn and ready to be your creative and authentic self, not so much watched over by a machine of loving grace, as Richard Brautigan fantasized at the countercultural apex of the Summer of Love itself in the 60s, so much as blending with the machine, identifying with its smiley face greeting, making nice, and inthe process making your self free by buying access to the Mac’s Garden of Eden. It was as if someone was running the Adam and Eve story in reverse. The apple, er, um the Apple, didn’t banish you from paradise with knowledge; it returned you to it. The snake was just a cute little mouse. With one click you were free. Purchase a little “personal” computer to become your own self-made machine of loving grace.
The 1984 ad was all about how Apple opposed the Man, man. It was anti-system. Earlier this year, however, Apple seemed to turn totalitarian itself. Perhaps befitting the growing interest in authoritarianism and mood of the nation and world, now Apple seemed to have become the empire instead of opposing it. In a new advertisement for the IPad Pro, the company borrowed from a social media video fad of crushing things with a hydraulic press to show various symbols of artmaking and creativity—trumpets, an upright piano, brushes, paint cans, a Space Invaders vintage video game machine that reads Game Over on it, a turntable, a video monitor with an alarmed animation character on it, an acoustic guitar, books, a wooden figurine, an emoji doll getting its eyes popped out—being compressed into the thinnest, sleekest, blackest, most Imperial Empire-looking Ipad Pro ever.
Cue the music from Star Wars. Dumb-dum-da-dumb-da-da-dumb. Except what we heard instead was the faintly countercultural-sixties pop flowers-in-your-hair soundtrack of Sonny and Cher’s “All I Ever Need Is You.” The unspoken message was, of course, “all you will have is us.” The point of the ad was supposed to be, I suppose, that all one needs to be creative is an Ipad Pro. The new Ipad compresses all that creativity and history of culture making into this amazing device that puts everything at your fingertips. Maybe it will even be creative for you if you just buy it.
The press was on here, however, as if Apple was suggesting that if you do not purchase an Ipad Pro, you would be crushed yourself. Here was the only way to keep up with the “creatives.” Join the platform or die. Pony up the big bucks and you would soar into the Iclouds. Your only path to self-expression and authentic creativity would be by way of the device. This was the Orwellian Big Blue of 1984’s Superbowl commercial turned inside out. The hammer-throwing woman in the red shorts bursting in on the totalitarian world to destroy the screen of control—was she Eve perhaps?—had now been crushed back into it. “The most powerful Ipad ever…is also the thinnest,” a female voice calmly told us after the trauma of what we had just witnessed.
The new Intelligence ads take this reversal even further. But it’s worth stopping first to notice how Apple commercials during the festive neoliberal era of the 2000s began to turn the hammer-throwing woman of 1984 into a mere silhouette of the machine itself. These were the years of the Ipod, the device that seemed to liberate massive libraries of music from the CD tower but in fact tethered users down to the Apple platform. As cool young people danced stylishly across abstracted splashes of color, they were but shadows. Only the portable device and its headphone cables were lit up in bright white, set against their negative-space bodies.
These ads marked a step along the way toward the ongoing saga of Apple as a screen for American perceptions of individuality. Ipod, Iphone, Ipad. You are only a self if you have one. Of course most Americans don’t use Apple products. They are too expensive. Nonetheless, in the advertisements for this elite consumer item, we can perceive the fever dreams of American selfhood, dreams of achieving authentic individuality by way of linking the self into a cyborgian blending with consumer technology. This pursuit of selfhood, however, is also always a presentation of how to feel a sense of belonging. With our device, on our platform, on our Icloud, and now with our “Intelligence,” saith Apple, you will find your perfection, you will be as one with the animals and whales in the cybernetic meadows and forests and ecologies. You will (right now, please!) find yourself. And…if you don’t, you ignorant fool, if you can’t dance happily to our IPod beat, then we will, intelligently of course, find you.
In the latest advertisements for Apple’s new version of AI, called, simply and ominously, “Intelligence,” we see Apple’s efforts to manipulate selfhood intensify even more. The protagonists in these commercials are descended from the hammer-hurling woman in red shorts, but barely so. We see just the dim outline. This figure is no Olympian athlete arriving to liberate, but rather almost the opposite. She is a hollowed out failure of a human in despair. Everyone is utterly alienated, feels like an idiot, experiences staggering moments of awkwardness, is bored and alone, is sadder than can be, and doesn’t see the point of much of anything. The Apple users of “Intelligence” are no longer creative rebels, but exhausted, anesthetized, estranged sacks of nothing. They do not hurl the hammer, they have been hammered into oblivion. Addicted to our phones, we have become a nation of phonies, but here comes Apple to save the day, to save our feelings, not with liberation but rather with automation.
Some of the ads address the emotional experience of what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” the need of capitalism to create a world of pointless work when automation suggests that humans could spend more time trying to figure out what actual freedom and a free society might be. An African American man who hasn’t prepared for a board meeting is asked to explain a business prospectus; having no idea what the prospectus states, since he hasn’t done the reading, as it were, and with the implication that the whole thing is bullshit anyway, and so are all the jobs of the people sitting around the table high up in a shiny, sleek office tower, he comically slides his fancy chair away for a minute, quickly summarizes the prospectus on his laptop using Apple Intelligence, and fudges his way through leading the meeting.
Similar ads feature a young woman. She is at a fancy lunch pitch meeting and has to summarize some kind of novel or film proposal she has not read. She uses Apple Intelligence to “summarize” it and, as with the managerial businessman at the meeting mentioned above, bullshits her way through responding to the person pitching her at the lunch. Is actual human engagement needed here? No. Precisely the opposite. The summary zaps out the fact that the pitch she did not read features a “unique relationship.” The woman looks up from her phone to her overeager lunchmate. “I love unique relationships,” she remarks. Of course, the whole point of the ad is that neither this meeting or possibly any of these lunches involves one! “With a twist,” says the lunchmate. The twist is that the whole thing is total bull. Life’s business relationships couldn’t be any more monotonous, exhausted, and less unique. What are we but just a bit more code for the machine, to be summarized without knowing the actual particulars of the story.
At the end of the ad, the woman gazes for a moment at the camera, conspiratorially. You don’t actually want real human interaction either, her look suggests. You know you are just bits and bytes in the matrix of fakeness too. What you really want to do is just want to go home and doomscroll (itself a kind of labor for the system of the attention economy, maybe one more productive and valuable than any business meeting now). Who needs this responsibility and empty social interaction? It doesn’t add up to anything necessary. It is unreal. The setting is fancy and the drinks are overpriced and you can put it all on the corporate credit card as a business expense. What the moment calls for is total fakery. Fakery is, Apple suggests, intelligence now. Where have you gone, hammer-hurling woman of 1984? What liberation is this now, in 2024? What is real, the woman’s closing glance and twisted smile proposes, slyly, is using AI to step out of the dying emotional connections and interactions of the past. Her look is a hurled hammer. Come be numb with me, she seems to say with her eyes.
The sleek silver office fridge door closes and we see a young, mustachioed man in glasses and a red sweater. He is a bit reminiscent of Theodore, Joaquin Phoenix’s deeply alienated office worker in the 2013 dystopian techno film Her. Someone has stolen his homemade pudding again. Outraged, he composes an angry, seething email and is about to send it to the whole office when he glimpses a little teddy bear on a woman’s desk a few cubicles away. On its red sweater, the saying: “Find Your Kindness.” He turns to Apple Intelligence to revise his email into a “friendly” tone. Sending it off with its affective tone remade, magically a cute woman appears from nowhere to return his glass jar with his name on it to his desk. She apologizes. We see him at the end of the ad chowing down on his pudding joyously, all alone, finding a meager, sad, solitary pleasure in an otherwise utterly alienating environment.
A third man is bored out of his mind at the office. He is about to send an informal, borderline rude email to his boss about how dumb the current project his team is working on is. Then Apple Intelligence allows him to “professionalize” the message so that he can recommend his colleague for fixing it. Presumably this makes him look good while also getting him out of doing any work. The ad ends with him swinging a paper clip chain around as if it were nunchucks and he a karate mastermind.
These ads are all oddly evocative of The Office, with its painful alienations of characters adrift and alone in the world, looking for something better but utterly unable even to name, never mind pursue, what that freedom might entail. Whatever a satisfying life of “loving grace” might be, to return to Brautigan’s poem, this isn’t this. We are back in Apple’s 1984 totalitarian nightmare, only now it is not the Man creating a world of alienation, and not even clearly the system. It is just life, a completely enfolding world of meaninglessness. In 1984, so far as Apple was concerned, the enemy was clear. Their audiences, trapped in automaton posture, forced to listen to the speech of Big Blue, longed for a hammer to hurl at the screen in order to break free. Buy the Mac and you’ve got your hammer, the ad proposed. Now, automation is proposed as liberation. AI is both hammer and screen. Use our device not to liberate yourself but to bullshit your way through your un-freedom.
Maybe the most striking of the AI Intelligence ads, the most chilling of all, features a wife and mother who has forgotten her husband’s birthday while her daughters present him with (nothing less than!) a hammer (here’s to you 1984!), with his initials impressed neatly in the wood. The wife and mother of the family, meanwhile, stands in the kitchen watching them. She looks tired, frayed, harried. She sadly stops pouring her first cup of coffee for the day and looks desperately around for what she can do to save face. Does she actually love her husband? Or her daughters? Does she really even want to be there in this middle-class family?
It would seem not, but she has to play the part. So she whips out her Iphone, hits up the Intelligence feature, and creates an instant slideshow of nostalgic authentic family memories to bring over to the couch and show her husband and daughters. Having successfully bullshitted her way past not actually caring about his birthday at all, or about him, or about her daughters, or maybe about her entire life, she walks out of the room, away from any actual emotional engagement with them (Apple Intelligence has done the emotional work). Like the woman at the pitch meeting and other protagonists of the Apple Intelligence ads, she too gazes conspiratorially at the viewer at the end of the commercial while a snatch of Krizz’s stuttering hip-hop song “Genius” grows louder and louder.
Genius, according to Apple in 2024, seems to be about about avoiding any kind of actual attachment or commitment. To me the word in the song also sounds like “chaos,” but maybe that doesn’t matter as much as a bigger point: whereas the “1984” ad proposed that the “personal” computer could offer escape to freedom by way of purchasing a Macintosh, 2024’s Apple Intelligence ads suggest that all one can do is achieve a kind of dull, cynical escapism within the total enclosure of the system.
There is no way out now. In “1984,” automation and what we might call the threat of an automatonic life was the problem. The Macintosh would help you escape it. Now, Apple’s business plan demands that automation become the solution. The point is not to hurl a hammer into the system of control’s authoritarian leader, with his ugly, looming, leering, threatening face, but rather to throw it into yourself, to automate all aspects of your life, from work life to family life to any other forms of intimacy. Don’t get free, says Apple Intelligence; instead, desensitize. Click. Swoosh. You’re done.
Apple used to present itself as a technological tool for your creativity and discovery of self-expression. Now, says the company, let us take that weight off your shoulders. We will handle all that bullshit. You will find freedom in our total domination of your life, your social relations, your very self. Creativity is for suckers. Sincerity is for fools. You are a failure at everything, anyway. Finding your authentic self is a joke. Given the situation, Apple’s Intelligence ads propose, intelligence is now about forsaking it. Or at best just faking it. Not faking it until you make it, mind you, but making it because you fake it. Embrace the bullshit by buying an Apple product. Take a bite of our knowledge and we will help you see better how that paradise of emancipation to yourself is but a virtual reality trick of the headset. There is no yourself. We are yourself. You are nothing but an empty hardshell case for our product.
There is a narcotic dimension to the Apple Intelligence ads, but probably the kind borne more of terror than pleasure. The AI seeks to replace actual intelligence with the fleeting feeling of successful trickery. Yet it does not suggest absolution from this act of deception. Sure, the protagonists get away with things thanks to their Apple products, but they also get further away from themselves. Somehow the product sells not only deceit but also self-immolation as self-gratification. The death drive lurks in AI, particularly when it comes to turning the technology toward feeling rather than logical computation. There is no forbidden fruit anymore, no emotional repercussions of struggling to know, only the compost trash heap of bullshit from start to finish. Not even existential angst is a concern now. Apple will take care of free will too, along with everything else, automating true feelings into socially permissible ones, engineering affectlessness into emotion. Whatever it was that the original apple from the tree of knowledge delivered to humankind, Apple seeks to reverse it. Yet we are not getting back to the garden here. The desire is no longer to be all watched over by machines of loving grace. Now we are simply all machined over by watchers.