“I don’t think I could ever be convinced to use an iPad as a replacement,” said Elisabeth Dorion [1], a songwriter, composer, and musician based in Toronto, in response to Apple’s ‘Crush’ advertisement[2] (Dorion 2025). Elisabeth’s reflection on the physical pain of seeing pianos, sacred tools of artistry, smashed into oblivion in Apple’s flashy tech advert was a raw gut-punch: “It hurts me physically to see these things being crushed.”
The ad, intended to highlight the new, ultra-thin iPad Pro, featured a large hydraulic press methodically destroying a collection of beloved creative instruments—from a piano and a guitar to paint cans and cameras—before revealing the new device in their place. Actor Hugh Grant and others criticized the advertisement as a “destruction of human experience” (Grant 2024), prompting an apology from Apple. The fact that a team of Apple employees failed to foresee the fear and anger this ad could incite among its audience signals a psychological divide between the mainstream audience and technology-first Apple team’s perception of what counts as progress. While Apple’s controversial ‘Crush’ advertisement is framed around technological progress, this article argues that it represents a form of “digital colonialism” (Kwet 2018), where the compression of diverse, culturally significant creative tools into a single device reflects a historical pattern of devaluing cultural heritage in the name of a standardized vision of innovation.
Elisabeth Dorion performing in Toronto. Image provided by Elisabeth Dorion; used with permission.
When One Culture Defines “Progress” for All
Let us remember what we have lost because one dominant culture decided the standard for us all. The historical pattern of erasure has taken many forms: chief among them are settler and cultural colonialism. Settler colonialism aims to displace and replace Indigenous populations, seizing their lands and systematically dismantling their traditions to establish a new society (Wolfe 2006). This logic is evident in how indigenous kids were ripped from their families and forced into schools where their language, traditions, and even their names were erased—because “being civilized” meant being more like colonizers (Enochs 2025, Sayej 2024, McChesney 2025). This process, a direct assault on cultural survival, continues today, with some United Nations estimates suggesting that an Indigenous language is completely lost every two weeks (Kurtz 2021).
Complementing this physical displacement is cultural colonialism, the imposition of a dominant culture’s values, beliefs, and practices onto another, often through education, media, and technology (Coutts-Smith 2002). The objective is to establish the colonizer’s worldview as the standard. The colonized people across Africa and Asia were told that their gods, their music, and their ways of life were primitive (AAEP n.d., Conklin 1997, Flint 1978, Logan 2016, Macaulay 1835, Stiebel 2002). Over 80,000 Herero and Nama people were lost because colonizers believed that they had the right to wipe out the “unfit” (FacingHistory 2016). Every time, the message was the same: your way isn’t good enough. These forms of colonialism, whether they operate through physical removal or cultural reprogramming, share a common goal: to replace diverse, historically-rooted ways of being with a single, standardized model of “progress”.
What Do We Lose When Creativity is Crushed into a Single Device?
This colonial logic of replacement finds a new expression in the digital age as digital colonialism. Is this drive to crush what came before about technological supremacy? Technological supremacy refers to the ideology that progress moves in only one direction, where new technologies are presented not just as an alternative but as an inevitable and superior replacement for what came before. In his foundational essay, technology scholar Langdon Winner argues that technologies are never neutral; they are designed in ways that enforce specific values and forms of power (Winner 1980). Obliterating creative tools to an iPad in an advertisement overtly signals that a single high-tech device is better and should replace these tools with thousands of years of history and meaning attached to them. We’ve seen this sales pitch before: that a new, standardized product is inherently superior to diverse, traditional tools. Colonial policies and markets systematically undermined Indigenous beadwork and textiles, which remain deeply tied to identity and storytelling (Canadian Press 2018, Yukon News 2023). By crushing a grand piano, for example, the ad symbolically flattens its centuries of cultural history and unique craft of playing it into just another app. It feeds into the idea that progress only moves in one direction. But creativity isn’t about erasing what came before; it emerges from the unique interplay between a creator, their tools, and their traditions (Latour, 2005; Haraway, 1985). Indeed, technology can amplify creativity. But when the same technology tries to flatten the entire landscape of human creativity into a one-size-fits-all device, we do not gain innovation—we lose choice.
An Industry that Compresses Human Creativity into a Rectangular Shape
The process of creative art is not about efficiency. Historically, artists refined their craft through rigorous practice, learning under masters, and developing an emotional connection with their tools. Today, however, the compression of creative expression into sleek, minimalist devices like the iPad risks erasing these human aspects of artistry. Apple’s design philosophy was once inspired by Japanese minimalism, which values simplicity and intentionally empty space to enhance focus and clarity (Isaacson 2012). But when all creative tools are compressed to a single device, we lose the joy of making, the tactile sensation, and the meaningful struggle that fosters true artistic growth. Minimalism, when taken to its extreme, does not just remove clutter—it removes depth (Steffens 2024).
A product’s value cannot be solely defined by its form factor. The way water blends with paint, the vibration of a guitar string, the way light shapes a composition—these experiences cannot be truly replicated digitally. Why does the marketing portrayal of technological advancement need to be a zero-sum game where older tools are crushed into obsolescence? Apple once stood at the intersection of technology and art, advocating for creativity rather than constraining it. Why not return to its roots, celebrating how digital and traditional tools can coexist rather than replace one another?
Consider an aspiring pianist who uses an iPad for sheet music. When an ad depicts the iPad as replacing the piano, it sends a troubling message: only certain kinds of creativity “belong”. Such narratives reflect a broader industry pattern —excluding diverse artistic expressions and reinforcing a narrow understanding of technology’s role in human creativity (Dourish and Mainwaring 2012). By portraying creativity as something that can be contained within a single sleek device, tech companies implicitly privilege artistry that is digital, efficient, and standardized while relegating artistic practices that depend on physical tools and embodied skills to the margins . In an increasingly fragmented human society, art fosters well-being and meaningful social connection. When tech companies erase that human element, they misrepresent their products and undermine how people engage with creative tools. Innovation should expand artistic possibilities, not quietly dictate who gets to be an artist and which practices are deemed worthy of survival.
In our rush for the new, we risk scrubbing clean the very essence of human creativity. The irony, as musician Elisabeth Dorion explains, is that even within the digital realm, the highest artistic goal is to hide the machine. When producing music, she says, the aim is to “remove the computer from the equation and to just give people the impression that they’re actually sitting in a room with all these instruments around them.” Her words reveal a fundamental truth: technology can be a powerful tool, but its ultimate purpose in art is to connect us to a human experience, not to replace it. In this relentless march of “progress,” isn’t it time we asked what—and who—we are leaving behind?
Notes
[1] The authors interviewed Elisabeth Dorion, a Toronto-based musician, composer, and producer to witness an artist’s reaction to this advertisement. They thank her for generously sharing her time and insights.
[2]TODO: SOme context about the Crush Ad and a link to it
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Shreyasha Paudel.
References
AAEP (Asian American Education Project). n.d. 1904 World’s Fair: Exhibition of the Igorot Filipino People. Accessed August 6, 2025. https://asianamericanedu.org/1904-worlds-fair-exhibition-of-the-igorot-filipino-people.html.
Canadian Press. 2018. Study of Indigenous Canadian Arctic People’s Textiles Reveals New Culture. Phys.org, August 29. https://phys.org/news/2018-08-indigenous-canadian-arctic-people-textiles.html.
Conklin, A. L. 1997. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Coutts-Smith, K. (2002). Cultural colonialism. Third Text, 16(1), 1-14.
Dorion, E. 2025. Elisabeth Dorion. Accessed August 6, 2025. https://elisabethdorion.com/.
Enochs, L. 2025. ‘I can still hear their words’: the fight to save the Hǝn̓q̓ǝmin̓ǝm̓ language. The Guardian, January 21. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/21/i-can-still-hear-their-words-the-fight-to-save-the-hizaqv-language.
Facing History & Ourselves. 2016. Imperialism, Conquest, and Mass Murder. Accessed August 6, 2025. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/imperialism-conquest-mass-murder
Flint, J. E. 1978. Frederick Lugard: The Making of an Autocrat (1858–1943). In African Proconsuls: European Governors in Africa, edited by L. H. Gann and P. Duignan, 290-312. New York: Free Press.
Grant, H. 2024. The Destruction of the Human Experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley. X, May 8. https://x.com/HackedOffHugh/status/1788183871504204257.
Haraway, D. (2010). A cyborg manifesto (1985). Cultural theory: An anthology, 454.
Isaacson, W. 2012. How Steve Jobs’ Love of Simplicity Fueled a Design Revolution. Smithsonian Magazine, April. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-steve-jobs-love-of-simplicity-fueled-a-design-revolution-23868877/
Kurtz, C. 2021. The Death and Revival of Indigenous Languages. Harvard International Review, January 24. https://hir.harvard.edu/the-death-and-revival-of-indigenous-languages/.
Logan, J. 2016. Songs in the Key of Colonialism. The UCSB Current, March 29. https://news.ucsb.edu/2016/016408/songs-key-colonialism.
Macaulay, T. B. 1835. Minute on Education. Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1835macaulay-india.asp.
McChesney, R. 2025. Alaskans have a message for Trump on Denali: ‘It’s not your mountain to rename’. Politico, January 26. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/26/alaskans-trump-denali-mount-mckinley-00200625.
Sayej, N. 2024. ‘Breathing new life into our language’: Duke University adds Cherokee to its curriculum. The Guardian, September 21. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/21/duke-university-cherokee-language.
Steffens, M. 2024. After Marie Kondo, the return of Japan’s ‘joyful clutter’. The Guardian, October 17. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/oct/17/after-marie-kondo-the-return-of-japans-joyful-clutter.
Stiebel, L. 2002. Of Famous Men and Great Works: The UMS ‘African Classics’ Series. Alternation 9 (2): 218-231.
Winner, L. 1980. Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus 109 (1): 121–36.
Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409.
Yukon News. 2023. Métis Artist Decolonizes Western-Style Clothes with Beadwork. Yukon News, November 22. https://www.yukon-news.com/entertainment/mtis-artist-decolonizes-western-style-clothes-with-beadwork-6998513.
