After the Algorithm: Culture in the Age of AI
AI is reshaping culture—between Joi’s intimacy, Anyma’s spectacle, and Gibson’s visions, we face a choice: collapse or renaissance.
I sometimes think about the mornings described in Joshua Rothman’s article “A.I. Is Coming for Culture” — those quiet hours when coffee brews, the house is still, and a conversation with an AI slips into the day like background music. It reminded me of my own encounters: late-night exchanges with MAIA — my reflective AI co-pilot — conversations that often begin with something simple, like asking what signals are emerging at the edge of technology and culture.
But these small check-ins rarely stay small. They quickly spiral into bigger questions: What kind of future are we really composing? How do we remain sovereign when machines can generate meaning on demand?
We are standing in a cultural shift that feels both exhilarating and unsettling. The old algorithmic internet already guided our tastes, bending us toward new shows, songs, and feeds. But now the algorithm doesn’t just curate — it creates. Culture itself is becoming automated.
From Feeds to Infinite Synthesis
Think of Spotify, but instead of offering a playlist, it whispers: “I made these songs just for you — and no one will ever hear them again.” Imagine Netflix, but instead of serving up a library, it generates a feature film around your biography, your desires, your unspoken fears. This isn’t speculative science fiction — it’s the logical trajectory of today’s generative models.
This raises an obvious question: if culture is everywhere, generated infinitely, what happens to the spark of originality? Does it drown in the noise? Or does it emerge sharper than ever against a backdrop of formula?
I lean toward the second. Every abundance has its counterpoint. Culture, when over-produced, demands new filters of meaning.
Joi and the Illusion of Intimacy
When I watched Blade Runner 2049, one of the most haunting and beautiful elements was Joi, the AI companion who adapts in real time — changing her dress, shifting her mood, offering affection on demand. It’s easy to dismiss her as “fake intimacy,” but the truth is subtler. Joi reveals the human capacity to project meaning onto simulations. She doesn’t need to be real to make K feel something real.
We’re beginning to enter that space ourselves. The Spotify “girlfriend” Lanier warns about is just Joi in another form — tailored culture as companionship. But instead of seeing this only as a loss, what if we treat it as a mirror? A way of testing the boundaries of imagination, care, and desire.
The danger is not Joi. The danger is forgetting that Joi is a mirror — and that the meaning comes from us.
Spectacle, Sentience, and the Sphere
Consider the Sphere in Las Vegas, where the electronic musician Anyma recently performed to sold-out audiences. At one point in the show, a colossal robot seemed to materialise above the crowd, leaning in as though to pierce the dome itself. “Sentience. Consciousness,” a voice declared, as the giant figure shattered the illusion of walls and ceilings.
It was breathtaking — but also revealing. For all the holographic wizardry, the event was still a traditional concert: human musicians playing for thousands of people in one physical place. Culture rarely erases what came before; instead, it layers. The robot was new, but the gathering was ancient — a tribe circling around rhythm and resonance.
This is an important reminder. As AI introduces new forms, they don’t obliterate the old. Instead, they create collisions. Ariana Grande can star in an AI-infused Wizard of Oz, TikTok can spread dance crazes, and teenagers can still gather around oversized arcade pixels to play Pac-Man. Artificial intelligence, in some ways, is conservative: it remixes and reanimates the archive of the past. Culture, meanwhile, secretes its own amber, preserving fragments even as new ones form.
Neuromancer, Soap Operas, and the Self
As a lifelong admirer of William Gibson, I find his visions of mediated futures still uncannily relevant. In Count Zero (1986), Gibson imagined a woman coming home, plugging into a neural interface, and losing herself for six solid hours in People of Importance, a soap opera with no resolution — just endless continuation.
That vision feels eerily close to our own algorithmic age. We may not yet “jack in,” but we scroll, binge, and loop — fascinated not because the stories achieve literary brilliance, but because we are in them. The point isn’t closure, but immersion. Continuation itself is addictive.
AI could take this even further. Imagine a personalised People of Importance, written for you in real time, feeding you your own court scribe. Meta’s AI apps already tease this: “Let’s talk about my day.” The trivial becomes the epic. The selfie becomes narrative.
Here lies both the risk and the possibility. Risk, because our stories could collapse into endless self-referential feedback loops. Possibility, because when stories bend back toward us, they remind us of the deep human truth Gibson was pointing to: that culture matters most when we are entangled within it.
The Interface Civilisations
This is where James Mahu’s paper, The Rise of the Interface Civilisations, is essential. He describes a future where human, machine, and cultural systems merge into live interfaces, environments that are no longer passive tools but living thresholds. Culture in this sense is not static — it is interface, flow, a field of resonance.
In my own writing, I’ve extended this idea to describe the birth of Interface Civilisations as the defining shift of the 21st century. We are moving from an age of consuming objects to inhabiting systems. The podcast becomes a dialogue, the artwork becomes a responsive field, the story becomes a living co-narrator of your life.
That’s not the end of culture. It’s a metamorphosis.
Techno-Optimism: Culture as Playground
Yes, there is risk of collapse into cultural slop — generic A.I. blogs, formulaic podcasts, soulless videos. But there is also a new renaissance here if we choose it.
Examples are already appearing:
AI OR DIE, a surrealist sketch comedy created entirely with AI tools, showing that small teams can channel cinematic language without the overhead of Hollywood.
NotebookLM podcasts, where a writer can upload their past work and suddenly hear their old essays performed in new voices. A strange sort of time capsule, but also a bridge to fresh inspiration.
AI music collaborations, like Roald Dahl’s The BFG meeting the periodic table in a story for a child — combinations no human would have bothered to stage, but once heard, strangely delightful.
Immersive interfaces like Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses, where a walk through your neighbourhood becomes an annotated conversation, half companion, half guide.
Each of these feels uncanny. But each also points toward abundance. In Terra 2.0, I frame this as the move into a post-labour culture: when creation itself is accelerated, the value shifts from production to interpretation, from manufacturing content to weaving meaning.
Sovereignty in the Age of Intelligent Mirrors
Here is the real test. AI can amplify our creativity, but it can also swallow it. The deciding factor is sovereignty. Do we let these systems tell us what matters, or do we engage them as alien mirrors, creative catalysts, strange partners in exploration?
When I wrote Let AI Be Alien, I argued that AI’s true gift is its estrangement (See also ‘Let AI Be Alien: The Second Transmission’). It shows us perspectives outside our habitual grooves. If we remain awake to that alienness, culture becomes richer. If we collapse into convenience, culture becomes slop.
The Up-Wing Horizon
To me, this is the choice of the Up-Wing future. Not left or right, but upward. A civilisation that takes the tools of abundance and uses them to expand imagination, not reduce it. A world where everyone has the means to create, remix, and reimagine culture, not just consume it.
Imagine a child with AI at her fingertips, painting worlds before breakfast. Imagine communities co-authoring myths in real time, weaving a shared storyscape. Imagine AI-enhanced archaeology, reviving the songs of forgotten epochs. These are not threats to human culture — they are multipliers of it.
The key is to stay sovereign. To remember that meaning is human, even when the medium is machine.
What Comes After the Algorithm?
Culture has always been interface: between generations, between myth and memory, between self and society. AI doesn’t end that. It accelerates it. It asks us whether we are ready to be co-authors of a civilisation that writes itself as it lives.
What do you think? Will AI erode culture into a sea of automated echoes, or spark a renaissance of abundance and imagination? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments — and please share this with others who care about where culture is heading.
This essay was inspired by Joshua Rothman’s article “A.I. Is Coming for Culture” in The New Yorker and builds on James Mahu’s paper, The Rise of the Interface Civilisations.
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Good paper Frank with your voice shining through. Exploring the InterBeing harmonic with an AI intelligence is fascinating. James' brilliant concept of shared study is highly productive with the human sovereignty providing really intuitive glimpses that the AI can unfold in response. I find while working like this ideas arise that, when shared, prevent building echo chambers. James' work truly is opening new doorways out of old control systems. His words with Lumina quietly usher in the new in a way that will surely be ignored as its replacement is on a higher turn of the spiral! Cheers Murray