cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/20041175

Hagen

One of the stories we have in the book is about that Apple Crush ad. There was that ad where they had all these instruments and drawing materials, et cetera, like all these art related things. on the hydraulic press, and then the hydraulic press crushes it. The piano keys shudder, the trumpet gets crushed, the paint gushes out, and at the end of the hydraulic press, there’s, the iPad.

BITM

And people hated it. They had to apologize for it.

Hagen

Yeah, they apologized—for an ad. So there’s this sense of, “yes, this is actually about transferring knowledge and skills into a tool so that you can pay people who use the tool less.” This is happening over and over again in capitalism. And we’re going to dismantle by force all of these things that you love and that create beautiful art.

It’s such a useful metaphor that they handed us. It was so beautifully clear that this is a way of bulldozing precisely the aspects of like human creative activity, which labor should be. Labor should be, you’re changing something in the world in accordance with your will. And that’s what it means to be alive as a human.