The Tower of Apple

Technoenthusiasm and the ancient promise of god-tier omnipotence are so back.

In my piece discussing Apple’s ad “Crush”, I made this passing comment:

The message [of the ad] is clear: this new tablet contains creative multitudes. It purports to grant unprecedented access to the brilliance of all these [creative] disciplines. There’s a Tower of Babel comparison to be made here somewhere but I haven’t quite worked it out yet. Perhaps that’s a future newsletter.

Here is that future newsletter, and the time to work it out is now. In this essay, I will once again address Apple’s ad¹ but this time using the frame of the biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel as a way of exploring what Apple thinks it was communicating and the kind of claim it was attempting to make, and I will situate this in a wider discussion of tool design and human virtue.

The Tower of Apple

Apple’s ad and others like it² that have been broadcasted through the years proffer a vision of the good life that depends, perhaps unwittingly, on a religious impulse, or at least one that is religiously shaped. It is a pattern of human cultures to connect, as the Latin verb religare suggests, to that which is beyond us. To others. To meaning. To ideals. To the supernatural. To reality. Perhaps we moderns wouldn’t be inclined to think of this as definitively or necessarily religious, but it is in this context that attempts at binding, at connecting, tend to happen. The human quest to bind to that which is beyond has often taken the form of grasping after deity. And if not deity, then deification, the eternal. We can look at what is recorded for us in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel for an archetypal example.

By Lucas van Valckenborch - Grandes énigmes de l'humanité - éditions Larousse, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4126824

In Genesis 11, nine of the Bible’s more than thirty-one thousand verses briefly tell of a city built in the plain of Shinar, in which city was built a tower. The purpose?

Alastair Roberts

sums it up nicely in his recent piece for Plough: to make themselves safe, to make themselves a name, and to make themselves eternal. The means? Construct a big ol’ honkin’ tower. Why is this the way? Why did the building of this tower mean safety, a name, and grasping hold of the eternal? We could answer through the lens of the theological and political as Roberts did and point to the Fall and this city and its tower as “language and politics wrenched out of the order they were meant to serve, used to serve grasped glory rather than the glory that is given,” which helpfully addresses all three of those projects; but I am focused on understanding the third—the eternal—so I am going to draw on Frs. Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen De Young in their conversation on The Lord of Spirits podcast to look briefly at the historical and anthropological.

For them the tower is a ziggurat, which translates to “high” or “raised place,” and is a fairly common location for worship in the ancient world, sometimes taking the form of a geographical feature like a mountain and at other times as a built structure like in the case of Babel. High or raised places play a significant role in the biblical narrative, usually as a reference to pagan worship³. But this is not exclusively so⁴. As God often did, He would allow forms or expressions of politics or piety cultivated in pagan states and religions to be imported into the political or religious structures of Israel. Kings are one example of the former; high places of the latter. The purpose of the high place is referenced in Deuteronomy 30:12 and corroborates what is said in Genesis 11— to go up into heaven. What did the people think they were doing by ascending these high places? Did they genuinely believe (as the text seems to indicate) that they could build a tower so tall it would put them on heaven’s front porch? That they could waltz into the realm of the divine? Was their cosmology that unsophisticated? Well, no.

The purpose of ascending into heaven was not to remain there or even to enter in in some spatial sense, but to bring heaven and its contents down. As God says to His people in the Deuteronomy 30 passage, His commandments are “not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, ‘Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it’” (Deut. 30:12, KJV; emphasis mine). To enter heaven is not to remain there, but to return to earth with heaven in tow. Our modern idea of “going to heaven (when we die)” shades the way we read the text, so we might be tempted to interpret a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven” as the misguided machinations of a people seeking salvation by superior material means. Rather, they were idolatrously enacting the capture of a god. The high places are where one would make sacrifices to a god, usually with an idol of that god present to indicate to whom they were sacrificing, and when that god would descend to receive the sacrifice they would be trapped in the idol, now under the control of the people, the deity’s power at their disposal to use towards their ends. The purpose of ascending into heaven, then, was to capture the power of the gods and use it. To turn gods into tools.

The power of deity, circumscribed; the power of creation captured, at our fingertips, made accessible to the gathered masses. Omnipotence. “Unlimited power!” as Sheev Palpatine bellowed, that famously virtuous and upright Senator-turned-Emperor from the Star Wars universe.

Roberts notes that the story of Babel did not actually begin with the building of the tower, but with the creation of a new technology: the firing of bricks. “The determination to build the city and tower,” says Roberts, “seemingly arises, at least in part, out of humanity’s intoxication with new technological potential.” Their imagination for what is possible was expanded by the capabilities of their new technology. New horizons of possibility opened for their mortal, earth-bound existence. Perhaps we can say that the intended effect of fired bricks, to build a city, resulted in an unintended effect, to become deified and omnipotently so.

It seems to me that it is just here that Apple has done a Babel. Not that they have explicitly preached a religious message of reaching heaven to bring God or the gods down, but they have promoted their product as effectively accomplishing a goal that would make Babylonian mouths water, of capturing the power of creation and putting it at the fingertips of anyone that holds their tablet.

Human Tools

The problem, of course, is that this simply isn’t possible. It wasn’t at Babel, and it won’t be now, and largely for the same reason: technologies, like humans, are at their best when they point beyond themselves. We are the etymology of our technology, as Andrew McLuhan has said with characteristic pith⁵. Our tools have in their design an imprint of the virtue or vice of the one designing them. As are we, so are they.

I admit that even as I write this I find myself straining to apply it directly to Babel’s bricks. A brick, after all, is very simple and small, without much moral surface area on which to imprint virtue or vice. Maybe this means no more than that even when tools are designed well, they remain beholden to the moral imaginations of their users. And it can mean no less than that there is more than one moral force at play when a tool of any kind is wielded, whether those forces are working with or against the other. Dr. Melvin Kranzberg in his 1985 address at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology agreed with historian Lynn White Jr. that technology “merely opens a door, it does not compel one to enter,” but then asks “who decides which doors to open-and, once one has entered the door, are not one’s future directions guided by the contours of the corridor or chamber into which one has stepped?”

technology’s interaction with the social ecology is such that technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves, and the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts or under different circumstances.⁶

As such, I think it prudent to remain aware not only of our own designs but those of the tools we use. How are we invited to use them? What thoughts are we invited to think? What imaginative horizons open to us? What virtues or vices are habituated through their consistent use? What social, environmental, human, or (I would add) religious effects are these tools having?

What we should want in a tool is something like self-effacement. I’m tempted to use the word “benevolence.” A tool that points beyond itself toward some further end and in some sense gives itself to the accomplishment thereof. I have written recently about Ivan Illich’s conception of the two watersheds in tool design, the first of which is the kind of tool I’m gesturing towards. I summed up Illich’s articulation of a tool in its first watershed as being “characterized by the increased effectiveness of producing desired effects in a domain of human need.” The purpose of the tool is found in its inclination toward human ends. It has no telos of its own beyond the one it is given by its designer, no self-direction, only its instrumental use in meeting some human need. We might even say that these tools are something like humble.

Tools and technologies that are in range of their second watershed, then, tilt the scales of virtue in the opposite direction. Rather than pointing away from or past themselves, these tools become nexuses of human activity. As Illich says, “tools are intrinsic to social relationships.” At the second watershed social relationships become subservient to tools, their users passively acted upon such that they do not master, but are rather mastered by them. Standards become set not by a “domain of human need,” but by the inner logic of the tool’s own design. The user must in some measure adopt and acquiesce to that logic in order to successfully use it. They become, in a word, manipulative. Human need is a secondary or tertiary concern at best, and humans are now instrumental in accomplishing the tool’s needs. The tool becomes its own center of gravity that bends the fabric of space and time around it, pulling human thought, action, and desire into its orbit. These tools have become self-referential. Inwardly focused. Reflexive. Is “prideful” too strong a word? Narcissistic, even.

Humility in humans is beautiful. Narcissism in humans is not only unpleasant, it’s downright repugnant. So too in our tools.

So, what of the iPad Pro as Apple attempted to advertise it? There is no mistaking the symbolic meaning of the advertisement. Physical tools of creativity are sacrificed on the altar—the hydraulic press—and received as an acceptable sacrifice, the power of the god to whom the sacrifice was made caught in the idol bearing its image: the hyper sleek, “thinpossible” iPad Pro. With this in one’s hands, one might sense that they have become deified, vast universes of creative power at their fingertips. Why stroke the strings of a guitar when one can fondle a flat glass screen? Why work with clay when one can skip the muck and the mess and create something that is ostensibly just as ornate and visually pleasing in digital simulacrum? Why create toys when one might make a killing creating hyper-addictive gaming apps?

Am I suggesting every iPad user is a narcissist heaven-bent on possessing omnipotent powers of creation? Of course not. Some may certainly meet that description, but none of this is to pass judgment on the type of person that would purchase and use an iPad. Rather, the focus is on what kind of world Apple thinks it is creating and to understand how our imaginations are being manipulated to think ourselves into and enact that vision of the world.

Photo by ZhenZhong Liu. Unsplash.

In this case, the iPad as it was depicted in the ad would form our imagination in a narcissistic direction precisely because as a tool, it is itself narcissistic. Samsung’s own ad—which must have begun filming within hours of seeing “Crush” hit the internet—brings what I’m attempting to describe in stark relief. A tablet from their S9 series is shown with sheet music on the screen while a woman sits on the press, still showing signs of artistic carnage caked onto its surfaces, and plays a guitar that appears to have slipped from the hydraulic maws. The tablet did not absorb her activity into itself, but served as a means for accomplishing her human need. And the iPad could certainly be used in this way too. The difference between the ads is that Samsung caters to the technocautious, while Apple shows the full breadth of the imaginative horizon towards which it is sailing, the winds of technoenthusiasm filling its sails.

Despite the way they have depicted themselves, they are both very similar tools that are habituating users in similar ways. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han says this about our tablets and phones in his book Non-things, “I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. I have the world firmly in my grip. The world has to accord with my desires. In this way, the smartphone amplifies self-referentiality. Through all my swiping, I submit the world to my needs. The world appears to me under the digital illusion of total availability.” If tools form the imagination, then—and despite the possibility of more virtuous, human uses—we begin to think like narcissists.

Bring Babel back to mind. The unity the proto-Babylonians had was fragmented by God, their order turned into disorder upon His arrival. Keep that in mind as you read the following passage from Han’s book, which I will quote at length.

For the frantically typing index finger, everything is consumable. The index finger that orders commodities or food necessarily transfers its consumerist habitus to other areas. Everything it touches takes on the form of a commodity. On Tinder, it degrades the other, who becomes a sexual object. Deprived of his or her otherness, the other becomes consumable.

In digital communication, the other is increasingly absent. … Digital communication rarely involve salutations; the other is not explicitly addressed. We prefer to write a text message rather than ring someone up, because in writing we are less exposed to the other. Thus, the other as a voice disappears.

Communication with a smartphone is disembodied and without a gaze. Community has a bodily dimension. Because of its lack of corporeality, digital communication weakens community. The gaze stabilizes community. Digitalization makes the other as gaze disappear. The absence of the gaze is partly responsible for the loss of empathy in the digital age. When a parent stares at a smartphone, the infant is deprived of the gaze. The gaze of the mother, in particular, provides an infant with stability, self-affirmation and community. The gaze builds primordial trust. Without the gaze, a disturbed relationship to self and others develops.

As it was at Babel, so it is and will be with us. We are habituated by narcissistic technology, which promises us something like omnipotence, to become narcissistic ourselves, leading to the fracturing of community and an increasingly atomized and decreasingly solid sense of self. In the final analysis, we are not left feeling safe, we find we have no name, and the eternal for which we have grasped eludes our grasp, sliding frictionlessly through our fingers.

If the Tower of Babel and all it represents failed, so too will the Tower of Apple.

1. Apple has since apologized for “missing the mark”. I agree with the many who have said they don’t think an apology was necessary. In my mind, the ad is only a symptom. It was a window into the underlying assumptions and worldviews that guide the designers. And, as I said in “A Nightmare Dressed Like a Daydream”, what was intended by the ad—a fairly clear message that there are many things creatives can do with the new tablet—does not change what is believed by the good folks at Apple.

2. Like this LG phone ad that is almost identical to Apple’s recent “Crush” ad. At the time, it was met with no observable backlash unlike Apple’s recent iteration. There is a lot to wonder at here, not least the shift of our sensitivity to the physical/digital divide and what it means to be human in the 16 years that separate the two ads.

3. Cf. Leviticus 26:30, Numbers 33:52, 1 Kings 11:7-8, 2 Kings 17:9

4. Cf. 1 Samuel 9:12, 1 Kings 3:2 and 4, 2 Chronicles 33: 17

5. Andrew McLuhan on X.

6. These quotes from Kranzberg were taken from

L. M. Sacasas

’ essay, “Kranzberg’s Laws of Technology”, found in his compilation of technology essays, The Frailest Thing: Ten Years of Thinking About the Meaning of Technology