There's a glazed expression that appears on human faces during The Scroll. A dissociative NintendoTok fugue state that anyone who's spent time observing the internet generation clocks instantly. The thumb glides with a render farm's animated precision: swipe, pause, double-tap, swipe. It's the metronome of our age, minus the crack of the piano teacher smacking knuckles for sloppiness, keeping time in a world that's forgotten what time means.
The machinery of attention has become our invisible god. We genuflect to "earned media" and "organic reach" like illiterate shamans 'reading' weather patterns in the digital clouds. But something fundamental is shifting: what if the algorithm, that opaque deity we've been worshipping, is actually in Stage IV? And what if its death rattle sounds surprisingly like... Burial, with fresh new dusty samples, dropping the soundtrack of an imminent renaissance?
The Flattening
Here's what you won't hear ad guys admit between the rosé and digital virtue signaling: culture has become a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox (I'll trust you can GPT the word if you don't know it). Campaigns look the same. Creators too. Mood boards 90% screenshots from Pinterest. Or rapid-Glommed by a 17 year old's n8n AI workflow in 14 seconds flat because her version actually works unlike the vaporware of many agencies and HoldCos. The paradox of our current moment is stark. Infinite tools for creation, yet it all feels exhaustingly... familiar.
The algorithm trained us too well. We learned to make our faces move the right way, to hit the optimal video length, to use the trending track of the moment. Not sure what I mean? OK, let's be specific about the training regime: TikTok's algorithm weights the first 3 seconds of watch time 4x heavier than any subsequent moment. Every creator becomes a dealer pushing pharmaceutical-grade attention stimulants, front-loading shock and beauty into an opening that detonates before thoughts can form. Instagram Reels takes a different sadistic approach. Prioritizing videos with 80%+ completion rates, which mechanically favors 7-second clips over 30-second thoughts. The math is brutal: make it shorter or die in the feed. Meanwhile, YouTube traps creators in an impossible paradox, simultaneously demanding consistency (to train audience expectation) while punishing "self-similarity." The result? Infinite variations of the same nothing, creators becoming slot machines that always pay out in the same denominations. Twee little dopamine Mario coins, perfectly circular, perfectly forgettable.
This is where Gurwinder's thesis becomes essential. The writer and cultural critic recently published a street-brawl tough analysis of how social media literally shortens our lives. Not just by stealing our time, but by warping our perception of it. Their research into "chronoception" reveals that digital platforms deliberately engineer experiences to speed up our sense of time, using tricks borrowed from casino design, those clever fuckers: infinite scrolls instead of endpoints, curvilinear paths that never force conscious decisions, mazes that keep us moving without thinking. The result? We're not just losing hours to the scroll. We're losing the very texture of time itself. Every moment online feels simultaneously urgent and forgettable, like trying to hold water with cupped fingers while running. The algorithm doesn't just flatten culture; it flattens experience into an endless, undifferentiated present.
This generation learned to perform personalities rather than inhabit them.
This generation learned to perform personalities rather than inhabit them. When you're trying to create something memorable in a world designed for amnesia, you realize the game is rigged. The "30-minute ick factor" of losing yourself to The Scroll isn't a bug. It's the entire business model.
The Maze and the Renaissance
The advertising secret not discussed: memorable campaigns emerge from chaos. The "1984" Apple ad? Made during the personal computer revolution. "Just Do It"? Born from 1980s fitness mania meeting corporate downsizing anxiety. The Barbenheimer marketing memes? Born from Hollywood's crisis. Streaming eating theaters. Franchises dying. Strikes looming. AI strolling in to the Darth Vader Imperial March leitmotif. When pink plastic met nuclear physics and accidentally saved the summer box office. Disruption doesn't destroy creativity; it liberates it from the Tyranny of Best Practices.
Which brings us back to AI, our newest beautiful catastrophe.
Watch a creative team use ChatGPT to generate 47 versions of a tagline in twelve minutes. They're all perfectly... adequate. They follow all the rules. They are, in Gurwinder's terms, "curvilinear". Smooth, frictionless paths to nowhere. But then something interesting happens. Freed from the grunt work of iteration, someone suddenly asks: "What if we just… didn't have a tagline at all?"
AI isn't going to replace creativity. It's going to expose it.
That's the revelation! AI isn't going to replace creativity. It's going to expose it. By automating the algorithmic. The formulaic, the predictable, the "best practice." AI can force some of us to locate what's actually human in what we make.
The Right-Angle Turn
Remember Gurwinder's casino mazes, designed to keep us moving without thinking? ‘Social media’ perfected this nasty digital architecture. But AI is accidentally introducing right angles everywhere. Every time ChatGPT hallucinates, every time Midjourney gives you a woman with 2 knees on the same leg, every time the smoothness breaks... that's a Corner. That's consciousness reasserting itself.
These glitches are becoming rare collectibles though. Beautiful failures: AI art that went wrong in ways that feel more human than human. A generated advertisement where the model's smile extends past her face. A poem that suddenly stutters into error messages. A strategy deck that recommends "embracing the void of consumer desire."
These aren't bugs. They're exit signs. Fire escapes. Off ramps.
Time as Material
Attention isn't currency. It's material. You can shape it, stretch it, compress it, shatter it. The algorithm taught us to make everything smooth and small, digestible chunks of nothing. But what if we made things sharp and strange instead?
The experiments are already beginning. Instead of optimizing for engagement, try optimizing for memory. Instead of creating content that slides past your eyes, make things that snag and papercut just enough to draw blood. A campaign that takes seventeen minutes to understand. A billboard that only makes sense if you see it three times. Imagine photographers weaponizing Instagram's own carousel format against itself. Posting 10-panel sequences where each image requires 30 seconds of staring before the next even begins to make sense. The platform built for instant gratification twisted into a forced meditation. The unscrollable scroll. An IG story that requires you to screenshot and think.
The old guard might call this overthinking. The TikTok natives think it's a midlife crisis of culture itself. But they're missing something crucial: we're about to witness the revenge of the weird.
The Coming Renaissance
The algorithm will lose its authoritarian grip not because AI is replacing it, but because AI is revealing its emptiness. Every generated image, every chat response, every automated insight is a mirror showing us what creativity isn't. And in that negative space, something new has a chance to grow and perhaps even bloom.
Look at the young creatives who use AI as a starting point, not an endpoint. Who generate two hundred ideas and then make the two-hundred-and-first by hand. Who understand that in a world where anything can be automated, the only value is in what can't be.
Gurwinder talks about making life feel longer through novelty, intention, narrative, and emotion. But these are also the ingredients of art that matters. The algorithm trained us to eliminate friction. But friction is where feeling lives.
The algorithm trained us to eliminate friction. But friction is where feeling lives.
The Algorithm's Last Dance at the Strip Club (aka Closing Time)
There's a campaign that tested perfectly last week. Every metric was traffic light LED green. The algorithm loved it. The client loved it. It would have won awards. But when the team was asked to describe it from memory twenty-four hours later, no one could.
This is the choice we're facing: keep feeding the machine its perfect, forgettable meals, or make things that refuse to be digested easily. Things with bones. And gristle. Things that take time to chew.
The renaissance isn't coming because AI will free us from mundane tasks. It's coming because we're finally sick enough of the maze to start looking for walls to punch through (choose your Fight Club or your kool-aid man from The Studio reference). Every generation gets the renaissance it deserves. Ours will be born from the exhaustion of optimization, the fatigue of perfection, the blessed relief of making something nobody asked for.
Every generation gets the renaissance it deserves. Ours will be born from the exhaustion of optimization, the fatigue of perfection, the blessed relief of making something nobody asked for.
Somewhere, a twenty-two-year-old art director is still scrolling from toilet seat to subway seat to humanscale ergonomic chair. But yesterday, she showed someone a hand-drawn animation that took three weeks to make with 3x5 cards. It's weird and wrong and completely uncommercial. It's the most beautiful thing they've seen all summer.
The feed's monopoly on taste is quiet-cracking. The algorithm is going to expire, and we're going to Soul Train on its grave. But first, we have to remember how to move without being told which way to step. We have to learn to waste time beautifully again. We have to make things that hurt to look at, that refuse to leave, that turn time back into something we can hold.
The only way out is through. Through the noise. Through the numbness. Through the endless scroll to the other side, where time moves differently and art feels dangerous again.
The kids are going to be alright. They're going to make things we can't imagine, in ways that will horrify us. They're going to reject everything they were taught about optimization and growth hacking and engagement rates. They're going to make art like they're running out of time. Because they finally understand that they are.
And maybe that's the real gift of the algorithm's tyranny: it taught us what we don't want. Now comes the harder, more beautiful work of remembering what we do.
The curvilinear maze is breaking. The right angles are appearing. It's Kane at the Nostromo dining table all over again with that grotesque pulsing before the Xenomorph claws its way out. And it's in those sharp corners where we suddenly wake up and remember we're alive. That's where the renaissance begins. Not in the smooth efficiency of AI-generated perfection, but in the jagged edges of whatever comes next.
Time isn't just speeding past us anymore. We're learning to grab it, shape it, make it strange again. The algorithm's last dance is a helicopter's awkward death spiral, and the music that comes after will sound nothing like what came before.
