Zero

Smashing phone skins, dragonflies and dreams of glass.

… in aerem …

( … into air … )

I smashed my phone the other day.

Oh cool, you’re thinking. She hates her phone, she did it on purpose, she’s so angry. Smashing phones like the patriarchy. I don’t need this, I’m going back to a flip phone. Woo! Yeah!

Nope.

Actually, I just dropped it and it just smashed.

It happened the same day Apple dropped its latest ad. You know the one: for the new iPad.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s a hydraulic pump smashing all of human creativity—trombones and toys, paint and pianos—into a little glass cuboid.

Joel showed it to me and I couldn’t believe Apple could be so tone-deaf and so misread the zeitgeist. People are trying to escape their shiny screens, Tim, not dissolve into them. Don’t you know that? Or have you lived too long in your own glass cuboid echo chamber?

Apparently it was the first time Apple ever apologised for one of its ads. Tim Cook actually admitted, boy howdy, did we mis-read the mood. That was tone-deaf as fuck.

When I watched the ad, I had the same feeling I had in the cinema, watching the bomb-dropping scene in Oppenheimer.

This feels disgusting to admit. These are not comparable things. It feels cheap to even write it. Some things shouldn’t be written about, should remain a great void in which words fail.

But honestly? It feels like the nerve Apple were trying to touch.

The music, the slow motion, the destruction. The empty holocaust of the final shot. Watching the pump smash the tools of human creativity felt like an intentional, wanton violence. It felt wrong in a deeply uncomfortable, anti-human way.

I wanted it to stop. No, what are you doing. Stop. This is wrong. Cartoon horror, and revulsion.

And it worked, because everyone hates it.

At the end of the ad, all that’s left is a desert of reflective surfaces, a wasteland of stainless steel.

All we have left is the reflection of ourself in a glass screen.

And all I can think is: what if the glass screens were all we had, and there was nothing else?

How fragile is humanity if that’s where it lives. If it can all be contained in a glass screen. If it can be dropped and smash in an instant. Back to nothing, reset to zero, in an instant.

We’re already so awash in gen-Ai filler that we don’t notice when it’s showing us something that isn’t real.

Samsung got into trouble last year for gaslighting its users by inserting pretty pictures of the moon whenever it detected a moon in shot.

The lens of a smartphone camera? They’re not big enough to capture the moon. Those craters and aesthetic shadows? Totally made up, gen-Ai filler, in the outlines of an Ai-detected moon.

What about all those gorgeous photos people posted lately of the northern lights? I can’t help but wonder is that what was really there—or is it filled-in colours in a detected ‘night sky’?

Odds are if you can only see it through a phone, it’s not real.

So, back to my smashed phone. How did I drop it?