Would Walter Benjamin be part of the iPad generation? Photo by SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By PJ Grisar May 8, 2024

R.I.P., Walter Benjamin, you (probably) would have hated the new iPad.

A viral ad for the “thinnest product [Apple] ever created” shows an industrial hydraulic press squishing musical instruments, busts, cameras, paints and arcade cabinets into a sleek tablet with the immense power of an M4 microchip. 

“Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create,” Apple CEO Tim Cook enthused in a much-criticized post on X (formerly Twitter).

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The internet is appalled. As one poster on X noted, “I’m not sure ‘wanton destruction of all the good and beautiful things in this world’ was really the vibe you were trying for.”

To put it in other words, from the German Jewish theorist Walter Benjamin, the ad is engaged in destroying these objects’ “aura” for a technological facsimile.

In his seminal 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin, mostly opining on film and photography, wrote “even the most perfect reproduction of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” 

So it’s safe to say, by physically demonstrating condensing objects into a wafer-thin computer, the ad obliterates that physical presence in ways Benjamin could never have imagined.

“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” Benjamin argued. The act of reproduction — here with physical drums replaced by those in Garage Band and actual paints supplanted by digital pigment in the Paint S drawing tool on iOS — removes the object from “the domain of tradition” and saps it of its authenticity and authority.

But while Benjamin made no bones about copies (and copies of copies) draining creations of their singular qualities, as a Marxist he did see an opportunity in this new epoch.

Mass reproduction allowed for art divorced from what Benjamin called a “cult,” which would venerate objects ritualistically and ahistorically. Technology like film and photography democratized art, and that could be used to convey a message to a popular audience.

When you take the cult out of the art, it can be replaced with politics. By making art political, Benjamin thought, you could counter fascism, which strives to do the opposite: make the political aesthetic, which he said inevitably culminates in war. (Benjamin took a fatal dose of morphine during World War II, fearing capture by the Nazis.)

What, then, would Benjamin think of this commercial, which literally flattens the tools of creativity into a compact package?

Well, in addition to decrying futurism, Benjamin said that capitalism was a religion that led its adherents to a “house of despair.” 

He may have seen in the era of mechanical reproduction a chance to cast off the exclusivity of art, equipping the masses with the means to see it for themselves, albeit in a diminished form. But, with a starting price of $999 ($1,299 for the 13-inch model), it’s hard to imagine him believing the iPad stands for anything like accessibility.

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