This video is a short work of creative art which brings to mind several allegories of first world desire. The automobile has been perfected and now serves far beyond its utilitarian purpose. Nevertheless the basic performance of transportation, even without style, is evident in the Ferarri. It executes transportation excellently. This Ferrari, however, like many others, is for the elite. It is performance yes, but it also speaks to other - shall we say virtues? - that the 20th century man aspires to. You can hear all that alluded to in the music, in the selection of backgrounds.
The Ferrari empowers. In the 20th Century, overcoming distance over snow, through deserts, in the rain, these were the abilities of the powerful man. For a price, Ferrari offers these abilities. That is what this marketing tells us. The Ferrari is a tool that helps us be all that we want to be. I deconstruct this slowly to remind us of what we already know. I only have to say 'red Ferrari' to me contemporaries and all the vision appears. So the video does not challenge, it invites us to luxuriate in what we already know we want; it serves to remind us that there is a tradition of power and greatness that we are invited to join.
There are, as we know, problems with automobiles. Not even Ferrari makes cars for consumers that are made of Titanium which would never rust. It still eats gas. It still takes up space. It still has too many bretheren on the road with which it still all to often collides with fatal results. It still pollutes. It still dominates the Western economies, but not as much as it used to.
There is another way to be empowered, and it is the way that the 21st Century will be marked for. It will be information technology rather than transportation technology that offers great abilities. The Apple may become the tool that helps us be all that we want to be. It won't be the desert road that daunts us so much as the area in the desert with no 'bars' - no signal. As we built the railroads so we have been building cell towers, and as once looked out at wilderness where no paved roads or telegraph wires existed, so now we define the boondocks as areas of the planet which are neither wired nor appropriately wireless.
Hands on the steering wheel with the flappy paddle shifters will be replaced by hands on the touch screen with high resolution. The engineers who today are building networks with Cisco will be forgotten as are the men who surveyed mountain passes to plot roads. Once the infrastructure is all there, it will be all about the vehicle, not the substrate. Sure, there will be perfected networks just like there are racetracks, but the average Joe will be stuck in network traffic.
I watch the Ferrari commercial. I watch the Apple commercial. I've always wanted and hoped that our world would turn virtual, that we would have access to the world's thought as we have mastered access to its four corners, five continents and seven seas. I'm just thinking now how appropriately luxurious it is that Ferrari's logo still bears the outline of a horse. Once upon a time in the 19th Century, it was the horse that empowered.
Progress is not what I'm evoking here, but change and the economies and cultures that attend such change.
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