Apple’s ‘Crush’ Ad Reveals the Digital World’s War on Reality

Watch the new Apple iPad ad, titled “Crush.” Seriously, watch it. This is important:

What did you see? Here’s what Apple wanted you to see: that all the messy ‘reality’ represented by the musical instruments, paint cans, and everything else are all concentrated in that one digital device. You can have it all, in the palm of your hand. Cool, right?

Not for me. I found it viscerally disgusting. Others did too. Many people on my social media feed were horrified by the ad. Poet and editor Paul Pastor tweeted:

Susannah Black Roberts, a writer in New York, tweeted similarly:

The negative reaction wasn’t just among my online tribe. Writing on the technology site Tech Crunch, Devin Coldeway expressed revulsion:

[T]he Apple ad sends the message that the future it wants doesn’t have bottles of paint, dials to turn, sculpture, physical instruments, paper books. Of course, that’s the future it’s been working on selling us for years now, it just hadn’t put it quite so bluntly before.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Apple is telling you what it is, and what it wants the future to be, very clearly. If that future doesn’t disgust you, you’re welcome to it.

The New York Times reported on the widespread backlash, saying that the ad’s critics among the creative community saw it as “a metaphor for how Big Tech has cashed in on their work by crushing or co-opting the artistic tools that humanity has used for centuries.”

That’s correct. But I saw in the ad a revelation of a metaphysical and religious horror: the destruction of material reality itself, and the digitization of life as we know it as the Machine relentlessly conquers humanity.

Why? Because as philosopher Anton Barba-Kay points out “Digital technology is a spiritual technology.” Why? Because “the digital era thus marks the point at which our concern will be mainly the control of human nature through our control of what we are aware of and how we attend to it.”

Last year, in a European Conservative review essay of Barba-Kay’s important, prophetic book A Web Of Our Own Making, I quoted the philosopher thus:

Never has such change been struck so fast. The printing press and firearms were technological watersheds with world-historical implications, but they took decades or centuries to assimilate. Digital technology has, by contrast, so changed human life within a couple of decades that teens are today growing up in an altogether new cultural environment—with different expectations, habits, and standard points of orientation from their parents.’ There is now arguably a greater chasm between someone age twelve and someone age fifty (or forty, or thirty) than there ever was between people separated by a millennium of pharaonic rule in ancient Egypt. The fact that we must make a concerted effort to remember how we did things “before” digital technology bespeaks the abrupt and thorough extent to which it has captivated our imagination of the ordinary.

Barba-Kay decries the integration of our selves, and indeed of reality, with digital technology. The terrifying Apple ad is a visual distillation of his book’s message. The ad celebrates the destruction of material reality by a machine, and its re-animation as digital data mediated by a machine. You may be thinking, “Cool, I can get all that in one slim device.” If so, then you aren’t thinking about it enough. This is a metaphysical crisis, a spiritual apocalypse.

Here’s what I mean. Yes, this is an extreme example, but it is just one of the many monstrous things that become possible when we think that reality is a phenomenon that can be rendered digitally, and re-fashioned according to human desires.

Have you heard about the tulpamancy phenomenon? Based on a concept within Tibetan Buddhism, tulpamancers believe that if they concentrate hard enough, they can split their own personalities, and create a separate, conscious entity—a tulpa—that resides within their bodies. You might say that they are inducing psychosis, and I would agree with you, to a point. But they believe they are creating actual entities that serve as companions.

In an academic essay appearing in the 2019 collection Believing In Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural, scholar Christopher Laursen explores the phenomenon, which he estimates involves hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people, as a cultural artefact of the digital age.

Laursen identifies tulpamancy as emerging in 2009, as the Internet made it possible for people who had these thoughts to communicate with each other. He also says that tulpamancers experience the phenomenon as therapeutic, writing:

Motivated by personal experiences, new forms of social advocacy are emerging from the online tulpa community, which proposes that human identity is not fundamentally single or unitary. It can be plural—that is, more than one identity can reside in one person. Sometimes there can be many identities. Plural advocates emphasize the healthful and positive aspects reported by many practitioners in online message boards, YouTube videos, blogs, and research surveys. Tulpa creation and plurality arrived precisely because avatars, anonymity, and, perhaps most crucially, inward-focused creativity and collaboration in online environments enabled radical, free-form identity experimentation.

The internet acts as an intermediary to realize people’s desires for companionship, which are practiced online in so many different ways, from dating apps to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). In this case, people discover online that they can create their own companions (tulpas), from which a new way of being (plurality) has emerged. Crucially, online interactions facilitate the establishment of plural identities. This suggests that online spaces that foster tulpa communities go beyond a mere communication platform. They are participatory spaces in which supernatural or trans-human possibilities are evaluated and repurposed.

This is worth repeating: tulpamancy forums are places where “supernatural or trans-human possibilities are evaluated and repurposed.” From a traditional religious perspective, tulpamancers, who do not doubt that their tulpas are sentient and independent, are bringing about a form of spiritual possession. They call this “plurality,” meaning that the individual can have multiple selves. What used to be classified as a pathology – dissociative identity disorder, the new name for what was once called multiple personality disorder – is now repackaged as an identity.

The tulpamancers are doing this in the name of freedom and self-determination. Laursen writes:

The new media scholars Katie Davis and Howard Gardner note that in this globalized, networked era, “youth enjoy greater freedom to adopt and rejoice in identities that were either unknown or scorned in decades past”— sexual orientations, racial and cultural backgrounds and blends, and, as this study shows, plurality. 

Now, chances are you find the tulpamancers to be weirdos who perhaps ought to be sectioned off from the rest of us. Then again, it wasn’t long ago that people who believed that their sex had nothing to do with their body were considered to be mentally ill. Now these people—“transgenders”—are not only celebrated in popular culture, they are also protected by law. What they believe to be true about themselves is something that most people now accept as true.

If transgender people are brought within the bounds of the normal, then why not tulpamancers, who consider the existence of their tulpas to be fundamental to their own identity? Once you have accepted in principle that the material world—in this case, the body—is subservient to the ideal world (e.g., the desires of an individual, or their imagined reality), where does it stop?

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.

It is a religious and spiritual war. In Believing In Bits, the religious studies scholars D.W. Pasulka and David Metcalfe take note of Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg’s 2016 purchase of The Eye Tribe, a Danish software company that tracks ocular movement, to make it possible to control devices with one’s eyes. Pasulka and Metcalfe say this is one more instance of “mind-machine interfacing”—that is, merging humans with machines. They write:

Zuckerberg’s intention to create an environment within which human physiology informs and instructs social technology, which then, in a feedback loop, morphs into what appears to be, and for all intents and purposes is, reality.

You see? This is Baudrillard’s “integral reality.” This is what it means for technology to destroy pianos, guitars, and the rest. The destruction of musical instruments at the hands of the digital mirrors the digital world’s destruction of boundaries between sanity and insanity. If you want to valorize Apple’s vision, you had better prepare to normalize tulpamancy. As Australian historian Carole Cusack observes in that same volume, “Already we are witnessing the transition to a world where the nondigitized is in danger of evaporating into nonexistence.”

This is nothing new, but as Tech Crunch’s Devin Coldeway put it, Apple (and other tech giants) have been for many years attempting to convince us that this is the future we should desire. In a way, we should be grateful for Apple’s misstep with the “Crush” ad. It makes shockingly clear that the Machine—the irresistible force of overwhelming mechanical power—wishes to eliminate our understanding of reality, abolish the human, and give us an ersatz substitute that maroons us in our own disembodied heads.

This is not liberation. This is captivity. This is not the expansion of humanity. This is the abolition of man.

The fact that Apple really did think that this ad would make people desire its new product tells you everything you need to know about who these people are, and what they want to do to us. In my upcoming book Living In Wonder, which is about mystical Christianity and the re-enchantment of the world, I quote from an interview I did with an academic who used to be deeply involved in occult worship. The man told me that when he would channel demons, they would tell him they seek to merge humanity with machines as a means of enslaving us.

I found this academic through an exorcist I know who has been helping him, and who vouches for his credibility. Many readers will no doubt find it difficult to accept the truth of the man’s testimony. But after watching the Apple ad, it may not seem so far-fetched after all.