“Techno-Logic”: The Genre We Can’t Escape

Sleep didn’t even audition tonight. My eyelids have declared mutiny while the devil checks his watch. I’ve given up and handed the reins to whatever mental stallions feel like showing up.

This is the unglamorous edge of creation, the tension between exhaustion and breakthrough. Algorithms don’t visit this place. It can’t grasp the sudden flash born from fatigue, or the silent surrender before the muse returns. This stretch of raw, involuntary attention is where whatever’s left of human creativity lives.

As AI accelerates into creative terrain, we’re left with a dizzying proposition: Can something without memory, pain, or pause truly create? If the answer is yes, then what are we doing? And if the answer is no, then what, exactly, is happening to the old, flawed, very human ritual we used to call making?

Where Poetry Crawls Back In

There’s no poetry in a cold screen. Or maybe that’s exactly where poetry crawls back in; when no one’s watching, when nothing’s curated.

In Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin shares a letter from a typist who transcribed her erotic stories. The woman wrote:

“There are things one reads that make you aware that you have lived nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing up to that time... How can I begin to feel, to feel?”

That ache (to feel, not just function) is the true start of making anything worth remembering. And it’s precisely what’s at risk when algorithms replace intimacy, and vision gets flattened into urgency. Meaning gets traded for metrics.

Digital Dementia & the Illusion of Control

Truth, memory, control; they’re all on the no-fly list in this era of digital dementia.

We are making things. Constantly. Stories, reels, voices, identities. Sometimes with intention, sometimes as collateral. At this point, creativity is being redefined by systems that never sleep. Systems that know our patterns better than we do. Systems built on datasets, not doubt. AI, image generators, text spitters. Models with memory but no nostalgia.

What looks like a glitch is actually a rewrite of how creativity lives and breathes. This shift is structural. It’s psychological. The decay is economic, and the collapse is systemic.

Creativity used to be tethered to something: audience, craft, value. That tether has been chewed through by the gig churn, the platform drag, the steady replacement of gatekeepers with gate algorithms.

The Cost of Seeing

A photographer friend told me recently that he’s considering quitting. “Clients want content now, not vision,” he said. “They want it faster, cheaper, and don’t care who made it.” With a single prompt, the darkroom’s slow magic is buried under presets. No more stalking that “golden hour.” No more negotiation with the tangible world.

Walter Benjamin clocked it decades before Silicon Valley convinced itself it invented disruption. In The Arcades Project, he traced modernity's seductions (glass, light, spectacle) but also its fractures. Later, in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he introduced the concept of "aura": the charge between a thing and its beholder, the fragile space that made an object sacred. He named what we now risk losing: the uncopyable, lived connection between art and viewer. Photography, he argued, would begin its slow decay. He was ambivalent: intrigued by photography's power to democratize art while simultaneously horrified by what it would do to authenticity and how we actually see things.

AI just hits fast-forward. We’re not copying life anymore; we’re grinding its bones into the mill.

Creativity, in its purest form, is a way of making sense. A negotiation between chaos and care. The camera was once a threat to the brush. The printing press almost outshouted oral tradition. But painting endured. Storytelling held up. The human remained central: the eye, the hand, the hesitation.

What’s different now is the possibility of creation without encounter. No process. No friction. No dance. Just prompt, process, publish.

But history has a longer memory than we give it credit for. Illustration didn’t vanish. Photography still insists on itself. Video didn’t actually kill the radio star.

The impulse to hear, to feel, stays.

Still, industries wavered. Jobs vanished. Creative worlds bent or broke. That aftermath rings now as AI tilts the ground; not killing the impulse, but shaking how it’s weighed, reached, and rewarded.

Seduction > Conspiracy

And then there’s the interior wreckage. Minds, rewired. In a Psychology Today publication, innovation theorist John Nosta said something that hasn’t left me: LLMs don’t need ideology to change cognition; they just have to exist. And in doing so, they rearrange the mental furniture. Quietly and permanently.

What starts as a convenience (“correct this sentence,” “summarize that idea”) becomes dependency. We forget how it felt to sit with the mess, to chew through half-formed ideas. Ambiguity becomes a threat as imagination gets manicured. There’s less wild wood and more curated garden.

It’s not villainy; it’s irresistible seduction.

LLMs offer access, clarity, speed; they democratize thought. They flatten the terrain, which sounds like progress. But at a cost: diminished depth, lost friction, eroded uncertainty. The spark that only comes when you don’t know what comes next. That edge is the one AI can’t reach.

So this isn’t just about collapsing creative economies. It’s about collapsing the very conditions in which original thought is born.

Offices are packed with talent, but the air is thin. Many folks struggle to think beyond templates. Short-form addiction (our new epidemic) slows cognition, dulls reflection, and starves the deep thinking essential for original work. Every swipe is cognitive junk food, and we're training ourselves to be intellectually malnourished.

This isn’t just a drift in thinking; it’s a drought of depth, of process, of presence. And the drought doesn’t end there; it seeps into how we measure what’s worth making.

Mispriced by Design

What would our great visionaries make of this terrain?

Would Richard Avedon survive the scroll? His fixation on presence, would any of that even register through an algorithm tuned to pastel sameness? Would Hamaguchi’s slow-burning storytelling hold up against the tyranny of the skip button?

Here lies the knife’s edge: vision vs. velocity. Thought vs. feed. Depth vs. dopamine.

A recruitment churn, obsessed with speed over fit, spits talent out like a slot machine. Wages slide. Careers buckle. It's a slow choke on creative root systems. Resumes are scanned like spam filters. Keywords over quirks. Conformity over curiosity. Self-taught and unconventional thinkers, often the ones with the real heat, are ghosted before the first interview. The algorithm can’t read the margins. The irony? That filtered list rarely includes the thinkers we actually need.

So the market cycles on, chewing and ejecting. Talent becomes noise, and outcomes get flatter. This process becomes a relentless game of whack-a-mole: constant, impersonal, exhausting. There’s downward drag on wages, creative fragmentation, and lost potential.

Some fracture their focus and go rogue. Others spread thin. The core work, the thing they came to do, gets drowned in admin, in hustle, in keeping up. Mastery is diluted, AI undercuts gigs, freelancers lose to prompts, and grads burn up their best years in debt.

The market’s lost its measure.

Creativity isn’t dying. This is creativity being mispriced.

Maybe it’s not about price at all, but about what gets valued in the first place. The fundamental distortion: when speed becomes the metric, value and integrity get pushed out of the frame.

Now, value doesn’t sit nicely on a conveyor belt. Fast isn’t the same as felt.

And when creation becomes a system of speed, what gets produced might look like everything, but feel like nothing.

This Isn’t Binary

“We need a standout story for this client, but it must look like every other reel out there!”

That’s the brief now.

Writers are looped and fed back their own words through remix engines. Designers are handed templates with all the cultural nuances sanded off. Craft is replaced by convenience. And with that, the emotional residue, the soul of the work, burns off.

We’re left with a choice. And it isn’t binary: it’s not “human good, AI bad.” I’m writing about memory, intentionality, and emotional stakes.

Use the tools. Understand them. Let them assist, even surprise you. But don’t hand over the wiring. Don’t confuse output with origin. Don’t trade intimacy for scale. Tools are mirrors. They reflect back what we prioritize. And right now, we’re prioritizing speed, scale, and sameness.

Yes, many creatives are using AI with values: sharp satire, critical insight, and structural innovation. Carlos Bañón is a worthy mention. This Spanish architect, co-founder of AIRLAB Singapore, partner at Subarquitectura Architects, and professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, blends AI-generated visuals with hand sketches to preserve the human eye in technology-aided design. He emphasizes that AI should elevate foundational skills, not lobotomize them.

The real question isn’t whether AI can hold values. It's whether the systemic design of generative tools risks flattening those values, and whether we stay conscious of what we carry into the work.

The Beautiful Glitch: Irreplaceable Flaws

There’s a split-screen we’re all watching now. On one side, machine precision. On the other, "human glitch."

In a candid piece published by Creative Boom, Jon Cockley, co-founder of illustration agency Handsome Frank, stares directly into this tension. He acknowledges the inevitability of AI infiltrating every corner of life, creative or otherwise, but zeroes in on what it still can’t replicate: flaws.

Mistakes, experimentation, comebacks, and happy accidents are the very “imperfections” that make creativity deeply human.

Cockley asks, “Who wants to watch a robot that’s better at football than Lionel Messi?” This analogy has become widely cited in conversations about AI and creativity. The novelty of flawless execution may catch the eye momentarily, but it lacks the emotional arc of struggle, failure, and triumph that captivates us. No one watches for perfection. They watch to feel.

Even when machines create, as in the case of Ai-Da, the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist (with a website and media kit, naturally), what results is more provocation than connection. Her portrait, Algorithm King, of King Charles III, unveiled at the UN, was technically… fine. High-res cameras for eyes. Steel arm guided by cold code. An uncanny likeness of a man steeped in legacy, rendered by something that will never know what lineage means. Ai-Da is the test case. Her creators don’t claim she’ll replace anyone. They want the question to sting: What happens to art when the maker has never been a person?

Cockley reminds us that art isn’t pixels or pigment; it’s a profoundly human transaction. When we engage with a painting, a song, or a film, we enter the artist’s psyche, their story, their soul. And that story is increasingly visible and valued. That mess is the medium. Audiences want to see the false starts, the abandoned ideas. They want the human behind the work.

Context is everything. And AI doesn’t have one. Not really. It mimics syntax, not stakes, prompts, not pain.

Paradoxically, as AI-generated art floods the market (cheap, instant, ubiquitous) may end up reaffirming the value of the flawed, painstaking, human-made original. The labored and the real. The Rothko or the Basquiat, not the print.

Remembering Why We Create

In some creative and digital circles, there’s a return to the idea that making things is social. Not performative, not viral; social. It integrates empathy, slowness, and collaboration.

This isn’t new. In Japanese aesthetics, traditions like wabi-sabi and ma have long honored slowness, imperfection, and the space between. Beauty isn’t in control, it’s in attention; in care, in the willingness to let something unfold rather than force it into being.

And now, this ethos is resurging.

London. Elsewhere. Creatives are pulling away from the algorithm’s chokehold, opting out of the endless scroll and leaning into something far more radical: control and ownership. They’re checking out of the metrics casino, prioritizing real-world connections over digital vanity metrics.

Glastonbury's Shangri-La just pulled the digital equivalent of going off the grid to find yourself. While every other festival was screaming into the social media void, they axed their entire online presence. Pure marketing nihilism disguised as spiritual awakening.

They launched one newsletter called "Sign Up for Joy!" (a title so aggressively wholesome it hurts) and pulled in over 3,000 subscribers. That's a 50% open rate in an industry where most brands would sacrifice an intern to hit 25%.

Here's the beautiful irony that Tom May captured in this Creative Boom feature about Shangri-La: In a landscape where everyone's fighting for attention by being louder, Shangri-La won by going silent. They turned digital silence into the most coveted commodity at a music festival.

While competitors burned cash on influencer deals and algorithm worship, Shangri-La showed that scarcity isn’t just about limited editions. Sometimes you just need to ditch the algorithms and treat people like they actually matter instead of data points in your engagement metrics.

It's a recalibration away from extractive, pay-to-play promotion and toward something slower, truer, more human. Organic reach’s collapse shakes the ground beneath complacency. This is something stubborn against amnesia. Against the forgetting of how we feel, how we remember, how we imagine. You can swap out tools, reinvent form, or outsmart the system. But values? Those don’t reboot.

And that’s the genre we can’t escape.

Maybe it isn’t whether AI can create, but whether we’re still willing to remember why we do.

That young woman’s words still linger: “How can I begin to feel, to feel?”