The new apple advert wants you to stop thinking about other people
This article is six months old
I wrote this in September 2024, and simply never published it. It refers to an Apple ad campaign from September 2024. The focus still holds up as we continue to be served AI-driven features, so I decided to share it.
Introduction
The shiny new Apple adverts work with Bella Ramsey to promote the 'just-in-time' wonder features made possible by 'Apple Intelligence', whereby the iPhone can utilise access to Ramsey's data (her calendar, her email inbox, and her photo library) to avoid the realisation of an awkward or imperfect social moment. The best thing to do would be to go and watch the three examples before reading this, so here's a link with each summary:
- Bella is at a party and sees someone across the room who she met at a meeting a few weeks ago but forgets his name; luckily, Bella can ask siri who she "went to that meeting with a couple of weeks ago" at a certain cafe. Siri reminds Bella who that meeting was scheduled with, and can greet Zach by his name as he sidles over.
- Bella is lunching with an agent who asks what she thought of the pitch she emailed over. Bella hasn't read it and checks her phone, using the new "Summarise with AI" feature to read off a summary of the email and improvise a reaction. The agent reacts positively to this.
- Bella is outside with her family; her mother, father, and younger sister (Kristy) stand surrounding the kid's fresh grave for her pet fish. The father struggles awkwardly to improvise a eulogy. Luckily, Bella can ask her AI-assisted photo album to produce a custom photo album to music - using the prompt "Kristy with her fish, sad vibes".
Besides the fact that Bella is rudely checking her phone in these interactions (or ducking behind a wall to avoid the gaze of Zach) - somewhat undermining the authenticity the ad is trying to sell us, the ad shines a light on the soft power campaigns I think we'll see more of as AI continues to try and brand itself as a consumer solution, not a data nightmare.
The Apple Way
The Apple ecosystem is infamous for producing consumer electronics that work together with a continuity and convenience that improves in quality the more of their devices you add; similarly, Apple devices don't play well with outsider devices, and it can be quite frustrating to use Android or Windows devices once you have become accustomed to "The Apple Way" of doing things. This design language teaches users that Apple sorts out the technicalities of computation, and that you get to experience the benefits of technology without any of the mechanics. This new advert takes these benefits into interpersonal interactions, and should be held in the same light as we examine what apple are trying to convince us is the line between the benefits of the social world and the cumbersome mechanics we must endure only until they can be automated.
All three adverts centre on the idea that there was a failing of some sort that has led to this moment, whether it's the normal experience of forgetting someone's name, or the absenteeism of modern tech-bro fathers everywhere in not paying attention to their children. Apple make clear that these moments are undesirable and ought to be done away with if at all possible. The premise is of course disagreeable; it is normal to find yourself forgetting someones name, it is equally as normal to be unprepared for a meeting. It is (sadly) normal for a parent to forget the things that their child find most interesting and engaging. With exception to the latter example, it is well understood that you just muddle through these moments best that you can, confronting the mild and impermanent anxiety that comes with this. You come out the other end a little sheepish, but otherwise unharmed. If you find those moments truly difficult, you pursue some behavioural or communicative improvement or strategy.
Of course the advert shows the opposite of this, that the need - or indeed the opportunity, for reflection is nerve-wracking, and is about to thankfully be made irrelevant. This AI feature is an augmentation of what we already behaviourally use smartphones for: quelling anxiety. Dead space and time is filled with scrolling of social media, you are never left alone or unoccupied, the thoughts or feelings of where you are and how you regulate that can be numbed immediately. There is no longer any need to be unstimulated. These social faux pas were a holdout against this flattened and flattening state of affairs - in the real world you can be pulled back into yourself and forced to confront your own understanding of reality when someone is brushing up against it in a way that isn't immediately compartpentaliseable. The ad is communicating quite clearly that you can avoid these impure moments of a real and proper life from occurring if you take a bite of the apple, and they promise to make those twinging cringing moments melt away. In the case of the family - we are told that we can simply outsource these difficult moments to Apple (What are the priorities of this family that the nurturing of Kristy in a moment of sadness and learning ought to be outsourced to a consumer electronic? What a dismal and undesirable way of life; at the beginning of the advert Kristy had an inattentive father, by the end of it we had a demonstration that she had an inattentive family).
What then is the price of these features? Apple need to be able to make a sufficient enough digital twin of you that they can use it to feed actionable information back to you. This demands data. Data for the "you-machine".
Here's the deal
Apple will facilitate this data-driven avoidant omnipotence if you ensure that you use an apple calendar, an apple mailbox, an apple phone, and apple storage. If you buy-in totally, then Apple can do the thinking and processing for you. This is very similar to the aforementioned design language of apple, save for one key difference: The scope. As mentioned, traditionally apple was focused on building an ecosystem of connected devices and services that don't meaningfully interoperate with outsiders - shunning or disincentivising devices outside of their private ecosystem. This new AI approach 'innovates' on this and asks you to buy-in totally to an apple facilitated 'lifestyle system', shunning non-apple means of planning, chatting, photographing, calendaring, and beyond. If you decide to meet a friend next Tuesday, you ought to pop it into your iCalendar using a descriptive title (one that includes your friend's name to tie them to the event), and don't forget to include the name of the place you're meeting. This voluntary reporting gives a copy of your plans to your iPhone so that is can use it to answer future queries and questions you may have.
This is the opt-in that gives the phone sufficient data to produce and maintain a digital twin of you - one that contains live access to your plans, events, geo-tagged photos, notes, messages, etc. It is this that is probed in those moments to provide an unerring account of everything that you've ever done, everyone that you've ever seen, every message ever read. Where possible, these applications and services must all be Apple's, the data must belong to them.
You'll be able to make better decisions about birthday presents for friends if you ensure the device has access to your entire conversation history, so you better make sure it's on iMessage and not on Signal or WhatsApp. And don't forget to sign in to your emails with Mail on Mac OS to ensure you never need to read another email properly again. Apple's native journalling app can summarise your mood last week far more concisely than if you needed to leaf through your physical diary, so perhaps just commit to using that.
This is the trade: Give them everything about you, so you don't have to feel anxious about being yourself anymore.
What future is this advertising?
I was reminded of an awesome article written by Sam Kriss back in April - where he reflects on a month spent without his phone. He observed what came back to him when he stopped relying on his phone so much - the different shapes of the nerves and the thoughts that bubble up when you don't have a constant reality escape hatch in the form of a connected device, and how this felt fruitful and whole for him:
A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive. This is what all its functions and features ultimately achieve: cameras deliver you from time, GPS abstracts you out of space, and an all-consuming screen that keeps you a constant safe distance from yourself. If there’s something you’re worried or upset about, you can simply hide behind your phone and it will all go away. One third of adults say they’re on their phones almost constantly. Their entire waking lives are spent filling time, plastering over the gaps, burning up one day after another, waiting for something to happen, and it never does.
The full piece is well worth the read. This AI facilitated socialising is an extension of this muting of the anxieties proper to being alive - AI intelligence will deliver us from interrelation with others as and when we see fit - expand that escape hatch to include our immediate interactions with others; I wonder about a future where this technology is completely metabolised into common use and what this means for us. Is it going to become rude or taboo when those of us who don't adopt the technology continue to make human errors? Are 16 year olds going to do 'networking prep' on their mobile phones before going to parties, making sure that they've got suitable talking points and social contexts set straight with their device before rocking up to a house party? Exploring fully the impact this will have in peer groups, the problem scales quite quickly.
Building on this, the system invites you to turn your friends into data-subjects; Zach doesn't know that his whereabouts are being processed by some random device from inferred metadata, nor does young Kristy arguably even have the ability to offer informed consent to allow her likeness to be processed and collated by an AI - because she is a child. We're being invited to literally capture more of our friends and relatives, to build a machine that ensures we know them and ourselves less and less. AI providers continue to cast these ethical questions by the wayside in an attempt to throw us irreversibly into a post-privacy world.
Zooming out
There's a lot of current media focus on the ecological and social impact that AI is having on the material world around us - ranging from the overuse of purified water to keep data centres cool, to the AI-enabled production and distribution of synthetic child sexual abuse material. AI also needs a lot of data to chew on to work effectively, and this data comes from our organic and semi-voluntary use of platforms that don't give us a functional means to opt-out. This is combined with the flurry of boosterism from AI magnates such as Sam Altman who suggest that all we need to do to solve these problems is offer up more computational power, energy, and data until the AI itself proffers a solution. It's a brazen strategy that asks us to step deeper into the flames to find the water - solve the data problem by giving it more data, solve the climate crisis by burning more of our fuel.
Apples new ad is an early example of what we're bound to see more of; We'll be offered consumer conveniences at cost to our data sovereignty, privacy, and authenticity of self. Apple are asking if we can be bought off while the VC-funded sprint to end the world the fastest carries on unchecked and unregulated.