The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 7

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This is a relatively brief post taking a recent Apple ad as a point of departure. I won’t rehash the criticisms that have already been offered elsewhere, but I did not want to pass on the opportunity to reflect on how we might better conceive of the relationship between our stuff and the good life. If you should reach the end of this essay and find that you’d like to read more on these themes, you can take a look at this 2022 installment: “The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self.” Cheers!

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Maybe you’ve seen the ad. Maybe you’ve already read a dozen critical essays about the ad. Maybe you have yourself publicly commented on the ad. Maybe you are among the blessed, and you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. And you would be blessed indeed if you cannot be made to care. Nevertheless, let’s talk briefly about the ad.

The ad in question was for the new Apple iPad, and it was shared on Twitter by the company’s CEO, Tim Cook. You can click that link above, or you can take a look on YouTube. If you’ve not watched it, please, by all means take a look.

Titled “Crush,” the ad features an assortment of creative tools and media artifacts—piano, guitar, metronome, paints, pencils, trumpet, games, television, record player, books, etc.—being crushed by an enormous hydraulic press. When the press retracts, we see in the place of those instruments and artifacts a slim, sleek iPad. We then hear the narrator’s voice telling us that “the most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.”

An artist’s human figure being crushed in the Apple ad.

There are a couple of things we might say for this ad. First, this was truth in advertising, although perhaps the ad spoke better than it intended. The ad conveyed the company’s incipient ideology with exquisite clarity: like the ring of Sauron, the iPad here appears as the one device to rule them all, chiefly by overthrowing and displacing them. Are you worried that digital devices will obsolesce the rich and multifaceted array of analog tools and instruments? Apple wants you to know that, yes, this is what it is aiming at. Are you concerned about the flattening of human experience under digital conditions? Boy does Apple have just the visual metaphor to confirm your suspicions.

Second, the ad brought people together, which is no small thing these days. It was met with almost universal scorn and contempt. I mean, honestly, what a remarkable achievement.

A sampling of headlines related to the ad.

I’ll spare you a summary of the various critical perspectives on the ad. You can find them easily enough. As Brian Merchant put it, “The ad was lambasted from so many angles — it failed to read the room, it celebrates the destruction of art and human creation at a time when lots of people feel those very things are in the crosshairs of tech companies, it was just bad, dour marketing — that the tech giant was forced to issue a rare mea culpa.”

I encountered some speculation suggesting that Apple knew precisely how this ad would land and deliberately chose to bring on the outrage for the sake of the attention it would generate. I’m not convinced. I grant that it is hard to believe Apple’s marketing team would miss this badly, but it is easier to account for the misstep as a case of blinding hubris and self-assuredness than as a cynical calculation about how to play the attention economy. Whatever the case, Merchant is right: “Apple came along and handed us a perfect visual metaphor for one of our most potent fears about big tech right now — namely, that it is crushing the arts and transmuting them into dull consumer products.”

Watching the ad, I mostly thought to myself, “I’m glad Albert Borgmann, may he rest in peace, is not around to see this.” (I understand, of course, that this is not what most normal people thought as they watched the ad.) But then I thought, “I don’t know, how good might it have felt to see your whole critical philosophy of technology, first articulated in the mid-1980s, so fully vindicated by both the tech company’s unwitting admission and the negative response it triggered?”

Borgmann, who passed away just over a year ago, was a German-American philosopher of technology. In my view, which you can take with a grain of salt, he was one of the giants of the field, and he has deeply informed my own thinking and writing. On the occasion of his death, I re-published an essay I’d written years ago, which serves as a decent introduction to some of the main themes in his work. The essay was titled, “Why An Easier Life Is Not Necessarily Happier.”¹

To keep us moving briskly along and focused on Apple’s implicit vision of human flourishing as conveyed in their recent ad, here are the core relevant concepts from Borgmann’s work.

In an effort to understand the dominant technological patterns of the age, Borgmann identified what he called the device paradigm. The logic of the device paradigm is pretty straightforward. It describes the tendency to hide the complex machinery of a technology below a slick, commodious surface that makes the output of a device available to the user with minimal effort. The goods a device offers its users are “rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” “A commodity is truly available,” Borgmann writes, “when it can be enjoyed as a mere end, unencumbered by means.” Apple products have long been leading exemplars of the device paradigm.

But this is only part of the picture. Borgmann opposed devices to what he called focal things. Focal things demand something of us. They require a measure of care, practice, and engagement that devices do not. Our use of them induces our focus, which they invite by design. “The experience of a [focal] thing,” Borgmann also notes, “is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.” There are, in other words, embodied and communal dimensions to the use of a focal thing. They involve our bodies, and they involve us in relationships to a degree that devices do not.

Consider just one of many possible examples: musical instruments. To learn how to make music with a guitar, for example, requires time and effort. Mastery of the instrument will take a great deal of time and effort. Your body may literally be marked by the effort with calloused finger tips. But the rewards are great, too. The pleasure of making and not merely consuming music, and of sharing it with others.² In short, focal things are characterized by the kind of engagement which they invite and sustain. Or as I’ve put it elsewhere, in relation to devices we tend to be relegated to the status of a user, who may more often than not be the one being used. But no one would describe a musician as a user. Yes, they use the instrument, but the richness of the relationship between the musician and their instrument demands a different term, one that signals the degree to which a skill is cultivated in relation to the focal thing. We speak of musicians and not “users of musical instruments” because the musician is characterized by a set of skills they have cultivated in order to make something with the instrument.

So, then, one more thing I can say for Apple’s ad is this: when explaining Borgmann’s work, I can now simply say “watch this.” The ad amounts to a compelling, visceral depiction of a device crushing an array of focal things and thus eliminating the corresponding focal practices and their attendant skills and pleasures. It is a visual depiction of the triumph of the device paradigm.

The near universal response to the ad, which was heartening, also demonstrated another of Borgmann’s core claims: our experience tends to be enriched by focal things and diminished by devices. A good life is supported by a diverse array of focal things and practices, which tend to reward us with deeper, more meaningful experiences; a gratifying measure of bodily skill and competence; and possibly even a stronger fabric of relationships. Alternatively, a life characterized merely by the consumption of virtual goods mediated through devices, and the subsequent dependence and isolation such a life necessarily entails, will not be conducive to our well-being.

Granted, it is hard to resist the promise of ease, safety, efficiency, and convenience, particularly when many of us may already be operating with some degree of burnout and exhausted by what is demanded of us to simply get by day to day. This is the trap set for us by our existing social order. When society is built to run like a machine for the optimization of profit and productivity with little regard for the constraints inherent in the embodied human condition, then we are tempted to embrace the device paradigm as a matter of survival or because we have been conditioned by the machine and have internalized its values.

The point, to be clear, is not that you and I must cook every meal from scratch or listen only to music we make for ourselves or never use a device that may facilitate the completion of certain tasks. The point is that we ought to resist any vision of the good life in which we are reduced to mere consumers of readily accessible digitally simulated goods or in which human flourishing is indexed solely to the sheer quantity of our techno-economic system’s outputs without reference to their kind and quality. Implicit in Apple’s ad is the idea that virtually unlimited access to such goods is the summum bonum of human existence.

I have the good fortune of being able to walk to a farmer’s market most Saturday mornings. Usually, some local musicians will be performing. The acts vary from young, solo artists to duos or groups of various styles and compositions. Last Saturday, I listened as an older couple, easily in their seventies if not their eighties, played and sang together. The old man played guitar and his wife played the fiddle as they sang an assortment of classic American folk songs.

I do not know their story, of course, but they appeared to be enjoying themselves and for a few moments they enriched my life. I can imagine the tale their instruments could tell, and I can imagine how much those relatively simple instruments must mean to them. Ordinarily, the user of a device is only all too ready to part with it when a newer model arrives or when it loses its novelty or functionality. The reaction to the Apple ad reminds us that focal things are not so readily parted with. They are deeply valued and even treasured.

If the Apple ad was a graphic depiction of the triumph of the device paradigm and the crushing of focal things along with the forms of life they sustain, then this couple playing their instruments together after many long years embodied the joy and satisfaction focal things and practices bring to our lives.

These appear to be the two paths presented to us: one in which the device paradigm colonizes more and more swaths of our experience and we are increasingly reduced to swiping along a glassy surface of endless content, or one in which we refuse the lure of limitless and meaningless consumption and reclaim focal things and practices along with the skills, satisfactions, and community they generate.

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1. For more on Borgmann, you can also read these earlier installments of the newsletter: “What Do Human Beings Need?: Rethinking Technology and the Good Society” and “Baking Bread, Finding Meaning.”

2. I say all of this as someone who very much regrets not learning a musical instrument (but who may still do so one day!).