Apple’s “Crush” Ad, Rentierism, and the End of Capitalism?

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Typically, Apple — market cap $2.63 trillion, the second largest company in the world — avoids advertising debacles (see the famous 1984 ad, or this ad to introduce the MacBook Air). The “Crush” ad, however, was a rare exception(1). Associated Press:

A newly released ad promoting Apple’s new iPad Pro has struck quite a nerve online.

The ad, which was released by the tech giant Tuesday, shows a hydraulic press crushing just about every creative instrument artists and consumers have used over the years — from a piano and record player, to piles of paint, books, cameras and relics of arcade games. Resulting from the destruction? A pristine new iPad Pro.

“The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest,” a narrator says at the end of the commercial.

We can leave Apple’s weirdly anorexic design philosophy for another time. For now, please watch the ad (I would turn the sound down to get the full impact):

Or in prose:

In a dank, cold warehouse, devoid of all life and humanity, an industrial crusher comes to life, and slowly starts destroying a collection of musical, philosophical, and artistic devices and instruments.

For no apparent reason, everything starts getting smashed: first, a trumpet, then an arcade video game, then cans of paint, a piano, a globe, a metronome, a guitar… on and on it goes, obliterating everything in sight into a colorful, gooey, explosive mess.

Books, camera lenses, lamps, a guitar, a sculpture, and a typewriter—all tools of the liberal arts—get mangled into a garbage heap as Sonny & Cher cheerfully sing, “All I ever need is you.”

In the penultimate moment, a goofy yellow smiley emoji becomes a bug-eyed scary-clown freak as it, too, is crushed to death.

Worse, if you enable closed captions like I do by default, the video says: “(POPPING) (SPLAT)” right as its eyeballs pop out of its head when Cher sings, “Give me a reason to build my world around you.”

(“Crush” was also tweeted by Apple CEO Tim Cook.) On “(POPPING) (SPLAT),” yes, I checked. Classy! Apple quickly issued a statement disavowing the ad. From Variety:

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Tor Myhren, Apple VP of marketing communications, said in a statement. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. with this video, and we’re sorry.”

In fact, the video didn’t “miss the mark” at all. In one way (the hydraulic press) we were the marks, and Apple didn’t miss at all. In another way (the crushed instruments of art) the ad hit the mark all too well. I will discuss each in turn.

The Hydraulic Press and Finance Capital

The press is an iconic industrial artifact (“just look at that thing“):

The above is a forging press from our Cold War Heavy Press Program, and there are various press technologies, including hydraulic presses, but industrial and iconic they all are. From ADH Machine Tool:

Hydraulic press machines are widely used in industrial fields to efficiently perform heavy processing tasks.

With the application of a small force, the closed liquid in the hydraulic cylinder generates a large compression force.

The hydraulic press machine was invented by Joseph Bramah in 1795….

These machines can be used to process a variety of materials including metal, plastic, wood, rubber, and others.

From Hydraulic Press Manufacturers:

Examples of extremely common hydraulic press applications are: automotive parts fabrication, microwave part fabrication, refrigerator component fabrication, dishwasher part fabrication and beverage can fabrication. Hydraulic presses are used for applications in many applications, though. These include: aerospace engineering, appliance, automotive manufacturing, ceramics, food and beverage processing, marine manufacturing, military and defense and pulp and paper. The hydraulic press is a vital element of industries where pressing and deep drawing operations are performed.

Nice work if you can still get it:

Operating a hydraulic press requires proper training and strict adherence to safety guidelines. Before use, individuals should undergo training covering hydraulic press principles, safety procedures, and control system operation. A pre-operation inspection is then vital to check for damages, leaks, and functional safety features. Proper material positioning and alignment ensure even force distribution during pressing. Additionally, operators must wear appropriate PPE during operations. Engaging the press involves activating the pump to build hydraulic pressure, with careful control of pressure and speed. Likewise, vigilant monitoring during pressing and gradual pressure release after the operation enhance safety. Finally, regular cleaning, maintenance, and adherence to manufacturer recommendations are essential for a safe and efficient hydraulic press operation.

Given America’s deindustrialization starting in the 1970s, it’s unsurprising that we are only fourth in the world in machine tool consumption (China being first). Of deindustrialization, Tim Cook himself said:

“Let me be clear,” Cook said. “China put an enormous focus on manufacturing, in what you and I would call vocational kind of skills. The US over time began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills. I mean you could take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in the room that we’re currently sitting in. In China you would have to have multiple football fields.”

Another way of saying this: A hydraulic press is absolutely the last kind of capital investment that Apple would make. Here let me turn to the Bearded One, as he describes the classes into which owners fall in industrializing, Victorian England in Capital Volume 3, Chapter 52. I have made a friendly amendment to the text, thus:

The owners merely of labour-power (the working class), owners of capital, and land-owners rentiers, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent, in other words, wage-labourers, capitalists and land-owners, constitute then three big classes of modern society based upon the capitalist mode of production.

(In fact, industrial and financial capital are at war in the capitalist class. Michael Hudson describes the reasons for this amendment rigorously in “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover.”)

It couldn’t be more clear that Apple’s owners fall into the rentier bucket, not the industrial bucket. They charge users rent for access to their intellectual property, for subscriptions, at the Robber Baron-like Apple Store, for data gathered from users, for their “premium” products, and so on and on(2). From Jathan Sadowski, “Landlord 2.0: Tech’s New Rentier Capitalism“:

Apple is doing more than just responding to competitive pressures — it is following the shift in how technology is being used to change notions of property ownership and profit accumulation. Facebook, Uber, and Netflix build platforms and provide services, inserting themselves into social relationships, economic transactions, and personal consumption. They mediate the everyday activities of our lives and collect valuable data about our behaviors and interests. And, crucially, they charge for access — not for ownership, which increasingly seems outdated.

Rather than representing some disruptive new “subscription” paradigm, however, what all these companies are doing — including Apple — is revitalizing of an old form of rentier capitalism that we long associated with landlords and feudalism.

Whether we call it platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, or just next-gen rentier capitalism, this model for how capital operates uses mediation and enclosure to achieve extraction and control over its subjects. “Rentier” refers to a relationship where an asset owner charges others to access that asset, just as a landlord charges tenants to rent a home the landlord owns.

Therefore, when Apple presents the brutal, crushing force in “Crush” as industrial, they’re directing us away from their nature as rentiers, and from their real power over us (to which I shall shortly turn). That is why “Crush” “hits the mark”: “the mark” being us.

Crushed Media and the Artist’s Labor

For the sort of work whose piano, guitar, paint, or other media was crushed in “Crush,” I’m going to use the word “artist,” as opposed to Apple’s neologism “creative,” which applies more to somebody working in a marketing department, not that there’s anything wrong with that, than to, say Manet or Mozart, and as most definitely opposed to the vile “creator,” which means a worker who pays rent to a rentier for the use of their platform (like a YouTube influencer).

Artists, then, had an extremely negative reaction to Apple’s “Crush” ad (see Apple Insider, Unseen Japan, Tom’s Guide, TechCrunch (twice), among many others). Axios sums it all up:

People saw beloved objects being flattened by a faceless, unstoppable machine. When Tim Cook posted the ad to X, he received thousands of outraged complaints.

“I’m definitely the target audience for the new iPad Pro but this ad is tone-deaf and insulting to artists of every kind,” wrote cartoonist James Kochalka. “We think of our tools with reverence and respect, and enjoy a healthy dialogue with them. Our tools are like trusted companions on the journey of art.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single commercial offend and turn off a core customer base as much as this iPad spot,” Michael Miraflor wrote on X. “Achieves the opposite of their legendary 1984 spot. It’s not even that it’s boring or banal. It makes me feel… bad? Bummed out?”

Apple hasn’t been a feisty upstart for decades — it’s now among the wealthiest and most powerful entities on the planet.

Missteps like this further drain the reservoir of goodwill the company once filled with its product innovations and usability.

(“Good will” meaning customer willingness to pay a higher rent.)

Making art is, of course, work; labor (and in our current system, the sale of labor power, although artists below the Taylor Swift level tend to fall into the “middle and intermediate strata,” the “the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank” also described in Chapter 52). Hence, with your indulgence, I will turn to two persona of the Bearded One: The early and the late, labor being one of his fields of expertise.

First, from the early Marx in “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844”:

(L)abor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.

As the old joke goes: Nobody on their deathbed says “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”

The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. ; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. .

At its best, I would urge, art is labor that is not coerced; it is not “external”; it is labor done for the doing alone (I was about to say “the joy of doing” until I remembered this quotation from Gene Fowler: “Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead”). Joyful or not, when making art, the maker, the artist, is not estranged. Hence, the destruction of all the artists’ tools — the books, camera lenses, lamps, guitar, sculpture, paint, typewriter — can only represent “mortification of the body” and “ruination of the mind” as the tools whose mastery makes the artist free are destroyed.

Second, the later Marx in Chapter 10 of Capital, “The Working Day“(3). Marx goes through how the working day is organized under various modes of production:

We started with the supposition that labour-power is bought and sold at its value. Its value, like that of all other commodities, is determined by the working-time necessary to its production. If the production of the average daily means of subsistence of the labourer takes up 6 hours, he must work, on the average, 6 hours every day, to produce his daily labour-power, or to reproduce the value received as the result of its sale.

The labor theory of value, axiomatic for Marx, but controversial for many. But taking it as read, Marx works through the implications:

The working-day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity. One of its parts, certainly, is determined by the working-time required for the reproduction of the labour-power of the labourer himself. But its total amount varies with the duration of the surplus-labour. The working-day is, therefore, determinable, but is, per se, indeterminate…. We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one.

Indeterminate, that is, a power relation. A Starbucks worker knows this in their bones, because the difference between the wage they take home to reproduce their labor power (i.e., to live to work again the next day) and the profit collected by the firm is printed out on every receipt, and repeated many times throughout the day. More:

Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, (7) whether this proprietor be the

Now, how would the power relationship expressed by “Crush” affect the working day of the artist, if carried to the extreme in which the iPad was used to create all art? Very simple: With the rentier’s snout under the tent, rent would be extracted from the artist through the intermediate platform — in this case, the iPad — through which the artist would be coerced to work. Not brushes bought at an artist’s store, but digital brushes rented to them by Apple. Rent that was not extracted before, meaning either that the artist’s working day will be longer, or the artist’s art will be sacrificed, or both. As even Salon understands, in “Pay us forever: Apple wants you to rent your life from them“:

In the past ten years, the tech industry has been the main promoter of the transition towards a world in which we never own anything, but merely rent our lives from capitalists — from cars to hotels, contract gigs to music to movies to games. The still-dominant big tech companies founded in the 1980s — companies like Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Dell and HP, known for software and hardware primarily — mostly avoided the rentier society game until the past decade, when they realized how much more lucrative it is to rent rather than sell. That’s why it’s near-impossible to buy Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite these days — you’ll have to settle to rent them from Microsoft and Adobe, respectively. The business reasoning is simple: If I buy Microsoft Office once, Microsoft only gets my money once; but if I have to pay $10 a month for it for the rest of my life, Microsoft has me hooked. The drug dealers had it right.

The biggest fear of rentier world, though, comes if the tech industry continues to consolidate — if there becomes no alternative to rentier society, and a few trillion-dollar companies control our lives. Then, existence would become extremely pricey. Imagine if clothes, cars, bikes, scooters, entertainment, news, utilities, homes, communication access, video games, beds, furniture, even our access to job boards (hello, Linkedin Premium) were rented. Maybe that company will be Apple. Maybe we’ll get billed for our lives on our new Apple credit cards, and we will run up debts to the company that we can’t pay once the next metaphorical Dust Bowl wipes us out. What Steinbeck wrote of the banks applies to Apple, too: When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size. It needs more money.

As Michael Hudson concluded:

One must conclude that America has chosen no longer to industrialize but to finance its economy by economic rent—monopoly rent from information technology, banking, and speculation—and leave industry, research, and development to other countries. Even if China and other Asian countries did not exist, there is no way that America can regain its export markets or even its internal market with its current overhead debt and its privatized and financialized education, health care, transportation, and other basic infrastructure.

The underlying problem is not competition from China but neoliberal financialization. Finance capitalism is not industrial capitalism. It is a lapse back into debt peonage and rentier neo-feudalism.

The “lapse back into debt peonage” (“if there becomes no alternative to rentier society”) is where “Crush” does indeed “hit the mark.” That is the power relation that the ad represents.

Conclusion

Some would urge that the triumph of finance capital presages the end of capitalism itself. From New Left Review, “The Euphoria of the Rentier?“:

There is a third debate lurking beneath the surface, one that has not yet begun in earnest but that is drawing increasing attention: the question of whether we are witnessing a transition out of capitalism. Immanuel Wallerstein saw financialization as the twilight of the capitalist worldsystem, with the Great Recession signalling its irreversible demise. At the time, he prophesied that ‘we can be certain that we will not be living in the capitalist world-system in 30 years’—‘the new social system that will come out of this crisis will be substantially different’. What it might be, however, was ‘a political question and thus open-ended’.

…For classical political economists, capitalism was defined by a pattern of self-sustaining growth driven by market competition. Competition compels producers to maximise the cost-efficiency of their operations, typically with labour-saving means, resulting in a systematic expansion of output that cheapens the price of commodities—this is what Marxists have long called ‘the law of value’. If such a dynamic is what distinguishes capitalism from other modes of production, then we need to confront the fact that the capitalist world economy appears to be transforming into the mirror image of this. With growth slowing down to a trickle and productivity stagnating, it appears that accumulation is now less about making anything and more about simply owning something. Profit-making is increasingly about cornering scarce assets in order to drive up their price—a practice that the classics called ‘rent’ and which they identified not with capitalists, but with landlords. As rentierism takes over, it appears that capitalism’s distinct forms of surplus extraction, organized around the impersonal pressures of the world market, are giving way to juridico-political forms of exploitation—fees, leases, politically-sustained capital gains. From the late David Graeber to Robert Brenner, authoritative theorists of capitalism with opposing ideas of its origins and development are now converging on the view that contemporary patterns of class domination (“crush”) look, increasingly, noncapitalist. For McKenzie Wark, this warrants the provocative question: is it something worse?

If so, “Crush” is a very appropriate metaphor that, once more, hits the mark. Then again, maybe Bidenomics will reverse the trend_{MR SUBLIMINAL Hollow laughter}.

NOTES

(1) “Crush” is also, to put it politely, homage to an ad from LG for a phone back in 2008.

(2) I grant that Apple’s rentierism is not as vile as, say, private equity’s. But rentierism it is. Despite Silicon Valley’s self-proclaimed drive to “innovate,” the essential functioning of the personal computer has not changed since 1968.

(3) I had not realized that Chapter Ten was written after the American Civil War, and incorporates some of the perspectives gained by Marx from his coverage of it, as a journalist.

APPENDIX An Alternative Version

Just run the ad backward:

If only matters were that simple….