What’s So Funny ‘Bout…

What We Talk About When We Talk About Romanticism

@cypher.jI got a bit wound up in this one but please remember your play is as important as the process in these times #Black #BlackTikTok

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There has been talk of a return to romanticism for almost two years now. Several have discussed it, but the most prominent proponents of the romanticism renaissance have been Ted Gioia and Ross Barkan. Discordia did a decent job articulating how our moment is not like the Romantic era but that is not my concern here. Though Gioia and Barkan refer to the capital-R Romantic era in their pieces, they are only doing this as a reference point. The actual Romantic movement refers to many things: Gothic architecture; Kantian idealism; Napoleon; the revival of Shakespeare; socialist utopianism; musical virtuosos and so on. ¹ Let’s trim the fat and cut right to the meat: what they are discussing is a backlash against an overly machinistic society.

Not only do I hope they are right; as far back as 2023, I said

Ross Barkan

was right when I linked to his 2023 Guardian piece also stating that we are in a Romantic moment. It really wasn’t until late 2024 that I had even the slightest doubt:

That’s the vibe I’m getting anyway. I do believe, like Ross Barkan Ted Gioia and others, that we are about to have a Romantic Renaissance. But first we need to muddle through the Age of Vibes. We are in too much of a cybernarcotic haze for feelings. Numb people feel vibes, not emotions. I do agree with the Guardian article I linked to that part of the reason we work with vibes is that it is a way to suss out all the false info out there. Since we are in the Age of Vibes instead of feelings, even something like the UHC CEO shooting seems to be devolving into ironic meme-ification. Luigi’s Mansion jokes, Brat Winter raves with his face onscreen, etc. From the late ‘70s, with New Wave music, until now, all counterculture has been stuck in ironic mode. Even the seemingly earnest hashtag activists had mugs that said “I Drink White Tears.” For every truly confessional mental health post, there were thousands that were lame mental health observational comedy, with a hint of Def Jam (videos with titles like “What it Be Like When U Have Social Anxiety at the DMV.,” etc.)

My next post after that, I was more skeptical:

Apologies to Ross Barkan, Ted Gioia, Jon Baskin, John Pistelli and any of my other Substack compatriots who believe that we may be headed into another Romantic age. Lovely and inspiring as that sounds, I fear that Katherine Dee is right: our defining conflict will be whether we will be replaced and/or ruled by machines.

For almost two years now, I have brayed like a jackass about a counterculture that might come, but never came. Shit, I did it a few paragraphs ago. “Dirtbags”? Ha! Maybe this is it. Maybe zombie media is all there will ever be. As human musicians sample the same songs, as human directors respawn the same IPs, as autofiction writers drone on about all the sex that leaves them empty (not so empty that they can’t write about how they hit, of course), perhaps watching Luigi Mangione in AI form give the Grinch a knee surgery is all that’s left. Is “brain rot” a side effect of the fatigue of…everything? Is our cultural impotence akin to our impotence in the face of assured environmental doom?

Closer but there are two things I want to add now. Yes there is a tech backlash but I am not convinced it is a big enough counterculture just yet. Tech Skeptics are just one fragment of Gen Z. Cozy Kids — what I call youths who primarily have AI companions and want to stay at home — are large enough that now there’s a trend of AI-induced psychosis articles flooding news feeds everywhere.

But let’s get to the heart of it: without communal love — or to be more precise, without an animating, guiding concern for the welfare of others — lowercase-r romanticism has no engine. Imagine Shelley defending poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world not because he was passionately moved to fight for humanity, but because he was on a “tech cleanse.” Ralph Waldo Emerson is not skeptical of overreliance on technology without believing humanity is connected through one large Over-Soul. The hippies of the sixties — the last big romantic age — moved into communes and preached ecological consciousness because they loved nature and sang “All You Need is Love,” not “Support the Green Market.” All this should seem obvious, which is most troubling: the lack of communal love — the indifference we have towards neighbors, strangers — is not only a recent phenomenon, but it’s not a natural one that’s baked into our evolutionary DNA. It’s a step backwards from our primate ancestry, back to our distant reptilian roots. Even now, AI skeptics who push for humanity to fight back against the machines are running on scripts from ‘80s blockbusters — films which had assumed that humans would fight for humanity given the choice.

Funny, though I respectfully disagree with Barkan (and as always pray I’m wrong) that we are about to enter a new romantic era, his novel, Glass Century, seems to² perfectly reflect our current loveless era; certainly our neoliberal, self-interested era. Glass Century works not only because Barkan loves New York, but because he knows it all too well. Love is never large enough to thwart ambition; sacrifice is pointless if it impinges on personal freedom. Much as I look at the past on here to comment on our present moment, Barkan writes about 1973-2020 here but gives us a mirror image of 2025. Currently, capitalist surrealism has left us without a society. From

Scarlet

, one of my new favorite writers:

The tenuous social fabric that we once had doesn’t actually seem to exist at all. There is no concept of a social contract. We don’t believe we have any responsibility to each other. We do not work together. We have no shared identity. We have no common goals. Simply put, we do not live in a society.

Without love as a guiding principle for communities to follow, would there even be a desire for any of these things?

What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding? And when did it get so funny?

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The beats were adept at turning established values against the society that enshrined them. Was this the era of worship, when families were supposed to “pray together” in order to “stay together”? The beats preached love, too, and spoke their own home-style Buddhist language of the spirit. Were the suburbs clannish about “togetherness”? The beats celebrated epiphanies of companionship in the form of their own selective and exclusive human buddyhood—a fragile community, for the buddies were always having lovers’ quarrels. To Joyce Johnson, drawn to them while a student at Barnard College, the beat world stood for the chance “to be lonely within a camaraderie of loneliness.” In their mythmaking imaginations, and in fugitive moments of reality, the beats were true brothers on the road together sharing wine, women, and mantras. Allen Ginsberg dreamed that the beat novelist John Clellon Holmes wrote him, “The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang.” To which the waking Ginsberg added, “Not society’s perfum’d marriage.”

— Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

As the excerpt above shows, the beats were not merely repudiating society’s values. They were turning them back on society, pointing out its hypocrisy. But keep in mind that regular, everyday American society in the fifties took for granted that communities were based on togetherness. What’s more, the beats’ message resonated because this suburban togetherness was trivialized due to mass society’s flattening effects. Yes, the suburbanites that went to church went home and watched TV, paranoid about their suspected commie neighbors. But the ideal of togetherness was one they would at least claim was important. What the beat movement did was expand the effusiveness and scope, outside the home and on the road; away from the family, towards random encounters in roadside diners, honky tonks and rest stops. Jack Kerouac is rightly understood to have been the leader of the beats, but Allen Ginsberg was the soul of the beat generation; the vital connection between their America and Walt Whitman’s America of “boatmen and clam diggers.”

Much like the concept of a “happening” was popular throughout the 1960s despite few Americans attending one of Allen Kaprow’s actual performance experiments, the beat generation’s influence on the sixties might prove more remarkable than the beat literature that came out of the period. Ginsberg’s disdain for “perfum’d marriage” was the topsoil that free love grew out of. The hippies were apolitical for a long stretch of the decade, owing to their apolitical predecessors. ³ By the time they started to get political, their rallying cry was “Make Love, Not War.”

Despite many differences between white and black youth culture during this period, the white hippie rock crowd and the black gospel-based soul movement both increasingly pushed the ethos of communal love as well as ratcheting up the ebullience of their performances. Black music moved from the coolness of jazz to Aretha Franklin catching the ghost. The Beatles themselves had moved from boy-girl malt shop classics to “The Word” on Rubber Soul. It was the first song where John Lennon wrote about love as an agent for world liberation.

What was startling about the hippie movement wasn’t their rebellion against society. Can’t even say their chart-topping music was off putting. It was the Dionysian revelry that was most shocking. Love and peace were words heard in churches the world over. It was the orgiastic states of the psychedelic light shows and rock concerts that shook worried onlookers to their core, much like white settlers were blanched when they saw native tribes and their joyful naked dancing. The timing couldn’t be worse for these onlookers: the signal boost of television and radio expanded this colorful exuberance in ways that undermined their opposition to the moment.

As soon as the early ‘70s, there was already a backlash against the peace and love movement:

Hard rock took the messaging out and left the propulsive militaristic rhythms and the screeching missile guitars. Southern Rock helped tie the psychedelic guitar noodling to down-home American family values

Neoliberal stagflation was no help:

In the ‘60s, LSD and a politics of consciousness were the order of the day. By the early ‘70s, with the Beatles broken up as well as Jimi, Janis and Jim dead, Led Zeppelin’s mighty, fantastical stoner hobbit rock and Black Sabbath’s militaristic horror sludge were the order of the day, especially with American teens. America’s dominance was not only undermined by the Vietnam War. The rampant stagflation led to a feeling of impotent rage among disillusioned Americans. Who had time to drop acid and explore consciousness? Joblessness was on the rise. If you were lucky enough to work, better to drink beer and smoke a plantation’s worth of weed after you punched out. On the ride home, why engage with the Jefferson Airplane saying “Up against the wall, motherfucker” when you could just spark a doob and get lost in Led Zep’s “The Ocean.”

The psychedelic light shows devolved into pure mindless spectacle. “Mindless” not in the Alan Watts sense, but in the brain dead one. Less Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable with The Velvet Underground, more KISS.

This is not to say that the message of love was out of style entirely. Soul music got more psychedelic in the early ‘70s and by the time disco came, the orgiastic states had moved indoors, with more cocaine (and more elitism). But the new wave rock of the late ‘70s was the first ironic counterculture — the only kind of counterculture that has surfaced from that point forward (other than hip-hop, the last sincere countercultural movement).

Irony’s ground zero of course was the ‘90s, which was when hope for common good was completely passé. As the unjustly unsung

briffin glue

points out, the World Wide Web, born in the ‘90s, was baked with nihilism inside:

And the 1990s remains dominant in the cultural imagination because its countercultural worldview coincided with the birth of the internet […] The only issue is that the worldview established in the 1990s, through the art from the period, was of a distinctly nihilistic sort—full of quick quips and sardonic jabs. Think of Tina Fey’s tenure at SNL, think of Seinfeld, think of The Simpsons; all these shows share a very similar worldview of nothing matters, a worldview that makes perfect sense when faced, lonely and isolated, against the contradictions of the modern world large enough to lose oneself inside. And that’s kind of where we are now. Lost in the machine.

Other things stirring in the ‘90s that affected the development of the web: the culture wars; male rage ; lowbrow culture. ⁴

But what can’t be overlooked is what replaced love in the ‘90s: cruelty. According to a new book by Sophie Gilbert, the cruelty of ‘90s Internet porn became the back beat of American — and of course global — culture going forward. As I’ve said before, the ‘90s was a bizarro ‘60s. While the ‘60s would be remembered for ecstatic communal orgies, the ‘90s was the beginning of lonely, rageful masturbation.⁵ Beyond the apparent problems of a society driven by cruelty, this addiction also formed the basis of our current attachment to thin desires.

Before we forget, we are not discussing how love itself was gone; we are looking at how the desire for communal, neighborly love went into the dustbin. During no time in history did we have an Edenic peace. But why on Earth would anyone want to save humanity if no one loves humanity? Why save the planet when the world disgusts you?

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So we’ve just looked at a timeline that charted how we’ve lost our way, but none of this explains how. The fear of public, spontaneous joy caused a lot of it, but not all of it. We can also chalk it up to the decline of the family (which started in the ‘70s), the disappearance of third places (the ‘00s, with malls closing worldwide, Starbucks seating less friend groups and more single laptop users and, of course, the beginning of social media) and of course the decline of spirituality (the ‘00s, with the New Atheism mania).

If you remember the role that the beats played in fanning the flames of universal, cosmic love, then you might have already figured out that the decline of the humanities is our smoking gun here. The significance of the humanities lies in their ability to teach us how to become more fully human.

“Poetry, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” Maybe you think it’s hokey, but it makes sense when you consider that, early in the history of the university, the purpose of an education was the edification of spirit and character. To seek knowledge for practical reasons was considered vulgar. May seem pretentious, but in our current context of men saying women will be extinct once AI porn gets good enough, of Studio Ghibli caricatures of crying migrants, of Vermont moms sipping wine and smugly typing into Bluesky “You could have just voted for Kamala” (as if “genocide” is not a good enough reason to withhold your vote), turns out, yes, we need to learn to be our best selves.

Make no mistake: I am not saying a humanities education is necessary. The beats were anti-academic. I agree with

Ted Gioia

when he says it is possible for a humanities revolution to happen outside the classroom because it already happened. I‘m not opposed to a humanities education of course. One of my favorite

Ross Barkan

pieces is the one where he calls for a “muscular humanities” movement. But I not only lament the financial ruin of humanities departments worldwide, I also bemoan the baleful specter of postmodernism in the humanities. Postmodernism, of course, being partly responsible for our descent into the virtual gossip trap (or, as I called it elsewhere, the Church of the Other) as well as our pointless balkanization into so many subgroups, at the expense of a shared humanity. “You can’t understand me because I am an Algerian nonbinary, neurodivergent, empath” and all that other jazz they hand me. That liberals still have a tough time challenging the narrative of cruel fascist technocrats has much to do with how there is still resentment over their decades-long online campaign of gossip and social exclusion.

Compared to, say, the late fifties, when being well-read was considered a mark of respectable, middlebrow intelligence (yes, middlebrow was a good thing then). Soldiers returning from the war took night classes with funding from their GI Bill. As suburban fathers now, they would read short stories in The Saturday Evening Post. Yes, yes, yes, the beats opposed this culture full-throated. Yet a readership was needed for their movement and without a healthy reading public, the mischief of the beats would have remained confined to a coffeehouse around the block from Columbia University.

Ironic how we seem obsessed with training AI to be human while we neglect to train ourselves to be more human, becoming more machine-like in the process.

A picture of AI Jesus

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Saying we need to put down the phones is like saying a junkie needs to stop shooting heroin; no shit, but just like we need to ask why someone would stab themselves with a needle, we need to ask why we withdraw into our phones like we do? You guessed it: we do not feel goodwill for our fellow man anymore. Which, again, is not at all normal. Not only is it abnormal, but we see an inverse, perverse version of this desire in the online realm. Instead of talking to others about our problems, people are now getting chummy with chatbots. An AI chatbot may start off as a sex fling and end up as a spouse. Why go through a litany of examples? Simply put, it is hard to believe in a romantic counterculture against tech when so many are using tech to shield themselves from humans. Gioia believes in a humanist counterculture. Woefully, I see the opposite.

There is some hope, yes? That so many seek all types of love online can be the source of the hope — it means that there is a desire for love, it has just been thwarted. We say we love friends and family, but how often do our friends and family scroll distractedly on their phones? Again, we have become more machine-like with each other.

The good news is humans can offer more to each other than AI can. Even the best AI therapist can only give us catharsis. Only a human therapist — or spiritual guide — can point us to transcendence. The road to transcendence is a rocky one, and if we know one thing about successful tech, it is that it is a frictionless experience. Love is about inconvenience; discomfort; courage; all the scary things we use tech to avoid.

@jasonkpargin @jasonkpargin ♬ original sound - Jason Pargin, author

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Though we can offer more than the machines, we have to learn not only how to love each other better (as Erich Fromm said, love is something we learn, like a craft), but how to appreciate each other and listen to each other as well.

The fuck, Diggs? I signed up for a newsletter about tech, media and culture, not this quasi-Christian drivel. You’re like the Creed of “hot take” Substack jockeys.

See? This squeamishness itself is the problem. As long as we run away from this and retreat into our shallow engagement islands of glibness, we will always lose to the ever-patient machines of loving grace. But I acknowledge that this is a hard pill to swallow. I, for this reason, argue, for now, that we are not in a romantic renaissance, but in a posthuman era. We always assumed we would fight for humanity, but it turns out that’s giving icky vibes.

FYI, that “icky vibe”? Let’s remove the mask — a-ha, why it’s the death drive! More than ever, this is why we need a revolution beyond politics. How is anyone supposed to care about genocide without a heart? How can we strive for an end to racism if we are all doxxing, antisocial misanthropes now? How are young men and women supposed to bridge the gender gap if heterosexual love can only scan as surrender? Hippies wanted to save the planet because they loved it. How can we be connected to the planet when we won’t even look up at it from our phones?

There is some fertile soil for us to plant seeds in. Last year, there was a trend for yearning memes. These were memes regarding romantic love. As even a non-practicing Sufi can tell you, romantic longing can be an excellent beginning to a spiritual path. I, for one, am missing so much more than Lisa. The youth in the fifties and sixties were yearning for so much more. The new great refusal is a symptom of yearning. Also, the new great refusal is political. When I say there must be a revolution beyond politics, I do not mean one without politics. That’s dumb and impossible. I mean one where politics is just one of the many priorities on the agenda.

We are not only under the spell of a frightening Trump regime, we are also imprisoned by feudal contracts from tech overlords that vomit cruelty back at us through our feeds. We feed it cruelty, but the algorithms amplify and recycle it back to us as AI slop. Funny thing about it: Silicon Valley began flowering during the sixties counterculture. The computer revolution that Steve Jobs fought in was spurred on in the context of communes that read (and wrote) The Whole Earth Catalog. Excited by Marshall McLuhan (and Terrence McKenna, who also loved McLuhan), they dreamed of a media-connected world where we all loved each other by connecting to each other, as a global village.

Yes, McLuhan did not write about the global village as a utopia. He warned the world would be so shrunken that we might revert to tribalist thinking. Tribes often had conflict and fear. To help with this, tribes often had rituals with joyous singing and dancing that led to heightened states. We will need to find our equivalent of that.

Consider yourself warned though: things might get icky.

1. This is just from a cursory glance of the chapter headings of Introducing Romanticism: A Graphic Guide.

2. “Seems to” because I am still reading it.

3. On January 14, 1967, the Human Be-In, also known as The Gathering of the Tribes, was meant to unite the New Left and the apolitical hippies. It largely succeeded, with the two fusing in 1968. For more on the liberal roots as well as the multimedia roots of the hippie movement, you must read Fred Turner’s The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties.

4. Clearly a fertile breading ground for AI slop

5. Rage ‘batin? Nah.