Apple Crushes Reality

And: Post-Christian Ireland; Russia, The Promised Land?; Miserable Libs; Holy Fire

Apple, crushing an image of man

Have y’all seen the new Apple ad? Watch it here. Go on, it will only take one minute. It’s important:

The ad sells its powerful new iPad. But there has been a huge backlash to its messaging. As you will have seen just now, the ad shows a huge drill press crushing musical instruments, paint cans, a bust of a human being, and other artifacts of material reality. The idea is that all of these things have been digitized, and made available to you in the magical Apple device.

The thing to notice is that the ad doesn’t promise that the iPad is some new technology. This is what digital technology already does, and has been doing for some time. This ad, though, makes gruesomely explicit what has only been implicit: that all of reality is being dissolved, and is being re-coagulated digitally.

I use those terms “dissolve” and “coagulate” intentionally. They are part of the occult process of “spiritual alchemy,” in which a substance is taken apart, and put back together transmuted into a different substance. I have a longer piece about the Apple ad’s meaning coming out soon in The European Conservative, so I won’t write too much more about it here. In it, I draw from last year’s review essay of Anton Barba-Kay’s great book about how the digital world is changing us. And I mention the recent discussion in this newsletter about tulpamancy.

The basic point is that digitalization is not just an add-on to the way we see the world, but fundamentally alters it — and with it, the way we see ourselves.

This is all part of what the French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard called “integral reality.” For Baudrillard, the concept of objective reality eventually gives way to integral reality, which the French philosopher called “the murder of the real.” In a state of integral reality, our sense of what is real is without limits. This happens when technology advances to the point at which it merges with human consciousness, redefining “reality” as whatever this new symbiosis produces.

To put it more bluntly, this is when the term “virtual reality” becomes meaningless. Reality and its simulation are the same thing.

All of this sounds like the kind of esoteric mumbo-jumbo that gives French philosophers a bad name. But the Apple ad makes their theorizing vividly clear. Apple wants you to see their ad as a tribute to the wonders of digital technology: We wizards at Apple have destroyed materiality, and brought it back to life in a magical way that is accessible to you through this device, the iPad. What you don’t see is that we are in a war for reality.

And I’m pretty sure we’re going to lose. It has been gratifying to see so much revulsion over the Apple ad, but in the end, Apple is going to sell a million billion of these devices, and the digital revolution, which merges Man with the Machine, will carry on largely unimpeded. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.