Two hundred years ago, people got fed up with algorithms. And they went to war against them.
That’s a prototype for what we need today. And we will get it.
Buckle up, my friends, it will happen again! That’s because people now see the sterility and human waste created by a culture of brutal algorithms—imposed by a consortium of billionaires operating without accountability or constraint.
The backlash is already underway, and will gain momentum with each passing year—maybe even with each passing month.
This is the new Age of Romanticism that I predicted more than a year ago.
Since I made this bold forecast, several other thinkers have joined with me. This is no longer a hypothesis—it’s an actual movement.
Here are some of the participants:
In the old days, movie villains were mobsters or crime syndicates. Nowadays they are tech innovators. This kind of shift in the popular imagination does not happen by chance.
That’s a prototype for what we need today. And we will get it.
Buckle up, my friends, it will happen again! That’s because people now see the sterility and human waste created by a culture of brutal algorithms—imposed by a consortium of billionaires operating without accountability or constraint.
The backlash is already underway, and will gain momentum with each passing year—maybe even with each passing month.
This is the new Age of Romanticism that I predicted more than a year ago.
Since I made this bold forecast, several other thinkers have joined with me. This is no longer a hypothesis—it’s an actual movement.
Here are some of the participants:
- Ross Barkan has taken a leading role in defining the New Romanticism. He wrote about it in The Guardian shortly after my essay was published. Barkan shares my sense that it represents an inevitable backlash to overreaching tech, but he adds several new twists drawn from his own experience on the media frontlines. He revisited the subject a few days ago, in a smart assessment of how this emerging worldview is reflected in a wide range of trends and attitudes.
- Dr. Anjan Chatterjee followed up a few months later with his article “The New Romantics” in Psychology Today. “Like two centuries years ago, an unlikely group of people are converging to combine science, nature, art, and aesthetics,” he declares. They are committed to the “ideas that nature can be restorative and the arts can be transformative.”
- Megha Lillywhite offered her endorsement in January in an essay entitled “Rx: Romanticism.” She sees this new attitude as a valuable way of dealing with pressing problems “without devolving into the simplistic dichotomy of bipartisan politics. It addresses a “longing for the human” in an age of degrading and manipulative digital technology.
- Campbell Frank Scribner added to the conversation one week later with his article “Romanticism and the Soul of Learning.” He also see Romanticism as a pathway out of current deadlocks in society. He believes that conservatives have typically opposed Romanticist worldviews, but argues that this might be the time they reconsider allegiances—especially when educating the next generation.
- Kate Alexander released a video on the momentum building for a resurgent Romanticism in December. And it got almost a half million views. So clearly this is more than a fringe attitude among demented Substackers. (...)
Now let’s revisit the (even older) history.
Back in the 1700s, ruthless algorithms had a different name. They called them Rationalism—and the whole Western world was under the sway of the Age of Reason. But like today’s algorithms, the new systems of the Rationalists attempted to replace human wisdom and experience with intrusive and inflexible operating rules.
It didn’t work.
“This rationalistic philosophy, which had been expected to solve all the problems, had failed to rescue society from either despotism and poverty,” explains Edmund Wilson in his masterful study To the Finland Station.
“The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable,” he continues.
(By the way, it’s no coincidence that recent tech overreach has been accompanied by a New Rationalism, championed by crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried and his many fellow travelers. But that subject deserves a whole article of its own….Now let’s return to history.)
The Rationalists of the 1700s (and today) put their faith in three things—and they all backfired.
(1) The most obvious failure was the attempt to impose rational rules on the political system. This led to the French Revolution, which soon collapsed in terrible bloodshed, and resulted in the dictatorship of Napoleon.
Millions of people died because the dominant algorithms didn’t work.
(2) The second obsession of the Rationalists in the 1700s was the total systematization of all knowledge. (Does that sound familiar?)
They didn’t have ChatGPT back then. But they did the best they could with the immense efforts of the French Encyclopedists and German taxonomists.
Everything got classified, codified, quantified, named, and placed on a chart. Foucault later mocked this as an “archeology of human sciences.”
That’s because this way of understanding the world failed to grasp anything that evolved or grew or changed or lived. Like the tech-gone-wild ethos of the current day, the messy human element was removed from the Rationalist systems.
(3) But the Rationalists of the 1700s made one more mistake—and it reminds us again of our current situation. They let a brutal technocracy destroy people’s lives—driven by dreams of profit maximization, and ignoring the human cost.
It wasn’t called Silicon Valley back then. The name given to the technocracy in the 1700s was the Industrial Revolution.
We don’t fully grasp the horrors of the factory sweat shops today—because the Romanticists worked on fixing the problems of industrialism in the 1820s and 1830s. This new generation of artists, humanists, and compassionate critics of the technocracy passed laws against child labor, unsafe working conditions, abusive hours, and other exploitative practices.
In other words, the Romanticists replaced the algorithm with humanist values. Rationalism on its own would never do that.
I want to emphasize this next point—so I am putting it in boldface.
The last age of Romanticism did not destroy the technology—it merely prevented technocrats from abusing people in their pursuit of profits.
Back in the 1700s, ruthless algorithms had a different name. They called them Rationalism—and the whole Western world was under the sway of the Age of Reason. But like today’s algorithms, the new systems of the Rationalists attempted to replace human wisdom and experience with intrusive and inflexible operating rules.
It didn’t work.
“This rationalistic philosophy, which had been expected to solve all the problems, had failed to rescue society from either despotism and poverty,” explains Edmund Wilson in his masterful study To the Finland Station.
“The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable,” he continues.
(By the way, it’s no coincidence that recent tech overreach has been accompanied by a New Rationalism, championed by crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried and his many fellow travelers. But that subject deserves a whole article of its own….Now let’s return to history.)
The Rationalists of the 1700s (and today) put their faith in three things—and they all backfired.
(1) The most obvious failure was the attempt to impose rational rules on the political system. This led to the French Revolution, which soon collapsed in terrible bloodshed, and resulted in the dictatorship of Napoleon.
Millions of people died because the dominant algorithms didn’t work.
(2) The second obsession of the Rationalists in the 1700s was the total systematization of all knowledge. (Does that sound familiar?)
They didn’t have ChatGPT back then. But they did the best they could with the immense efforts of the French Encyclopedists and German taxonomists.
Everything got classified, codified, quantified, named, and placed on a chart. Foucault later mocked this as an “archeology of human sciences.”
That’s because this way of understanding the world failed to grasp anything that evolved or grew or changed or lived. Like the tech-gone-wild ethos of the current day, the messy human element was removed from the Rationalist systems.
(3) But the Rationalists of the 1700s made one more mistake—and it reminds us again of our current situation. They let a brutal technocracy destroy people’s lives—driven by dreams of profit maximization, and ignoring the human cost.
It wasn’t called Silicon Valley back then. The name given to the technocracy in the 1700s was the Industrial Revolution.
We don’t fully grasp the horrors of the factory sweat shops today—because the Romanticists worked on fixing the problems of industrialism in the 1820s and 1830s. This new generation of artists, humanists, and compassionate critics of the technocracy passed laws against child labor, unsafe working conditions, abusive hours, and other exploitative practices.
In other words, the Romanticists replaced the algorithm with humanist values. Rationalism on its own would never do that.
I want to emphasize this next point—so I am putting it in boldface.
The last age of Romanticism did not destroy the technology—it merely prevented technocrats from abusing people in their pursuit of profits.
by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: uncredited
