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Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete This Revolting Apple Ad

A new ad for Apple says the quiet part out loud: the tech industry hates artists and wants to destroy their livelihood

Sonny and Cher sing "All I Ever Need is You" as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see: a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls. In the years since Netflix committed entirely to streaming and every other company followed suit, the "move fast, break things" mantra has broken the industry, and along with it, the layers of upper-middle, middle- and working-class artists that used to be able to (barely) support families by doing what they loved, even though nobody in the general population would ever know their name. We now have a world in which actors or musicians go on social media and display the twenty or fifty dollar residuals checks they received for work that aired dozens or even hundreds of times on a streaming platform or got millions of plays on Spotify, and that, in the eras of broadcast networks and vinyl records, or cable TV and compact discs, could have paid for a child's braces, or a semester of college.

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