The Beige Series Pt.II
Updated: Jun 9
The Beige Loop: Is Tech Killing Culture?
AUG 17, 2025
The Beige Series Pt.II
Remember when things felt more alive?
I don’t even know if that is true. That is the danger with memory. It edits. It flatters. It puts better lighting on the past. It takes the smell of fags, sweat, damp carpet, old paperbacks, cheap lager, cold pavements, record shops, cinemas, rehearsal rooms, pubs, football terraces and turns them into a kind of private religion. The past becomes holy because it cannot answer back.
Maybe culture was never pure. Maybe that’s the first lie nostalgia tells us. There were always chancers, manufactured acts, bad novels, plastic films, rich kids with guitars, and marketing men trying to bottle rebellion. But something feels different now. The fake has become faster. The copy has become smoother. The machine has learned the shape of soul without having one.
That, I think, is what bothers me.
Not simply that modern culture is bad. That would be too easy. There is still great music. Still great writing. Still films that make you sit forward in your chair. Still people in bedrooms, garages, back rooms, rented studios and forgotten corners of cities trying to make something honest before the world gets its hands on it.
But there is a beige mist over everything now.
Everything feels visible before it has been lived. Everything feels branded before it has been understood. Songs arrive already formatted for the clip. Books arrive already thinking about the pitch. Films arrive already protected from danger. Artists are asked not only to make the thing, but to become the advert for the thing, then the documentary about the advert, then the social media strategy for the documentary about the advert.
It is exhausting.
There was a time, or at least I imagine there was, when art had more room around it. More silence. More boredom. More waiting. More human friction. Bands had to be in rooms together. Writers had to sit with themselves until the thing came or did not come. Filmmakers had to burn money, time, relationships and nerve on the chance that something might happen. Not because the past was noble. It wasn’t. But because the process had more resistance in it.
And resistance matters.
The other night I watched Get Back, the Beatles documentary. I watched it for the music, obviously. Who doesn’t want to watch the Beatles pulling songs out of the air like men stealing fire? But that was not what got me in the end.
What got me was the presence.
The Beatles were not innocent boys by then. It was 1969. They were in their pomp and already coming apart. They had fame, money, women, drugs, lawyers, managers, mythology, resentment, exhaustion and every possible excuse to be anywhere else. Yet there they were. In a room. Instruments in hand. Facing each other. Listening. Bickering. Laughing. Smoking. Drinking tea. Eating toast. Waiting for something to happen.
No phones on the table. No feeds. No metrics. No invisible audience leaning over their shoulders asking if the moment would perform well. Just four men and a few others in the orbit. A square of chairs. Guitars. Cables. Cigarettes. Cups and saucers. Human beings trying to make a song.
It made me feel sick with yearning.
That is the only way I can put it. Sick with it. Not only because it was the Beatles, although of course it was because it was the Beatles. Who does not, at some childish and unkillable level, yearn to be in the Beatles? But it was more than that. It was the world around them. London in 1969. The clothes. The guitars. The cups. Those luminous green cups and saucers. Lennon sitting there in battered Converse and a fur coat like he had fallen out of bed and into history. George with those mad furry boots. Ringo in a red PVC coat, looking like the coolest man at a bus stop on another planet.
It was not just music.
It was atmosphere.
It was culture as texture. Objects with weight. Rooms with temperature. Clothes with personality. People with time. Even the boredom looked better. Even the waiting had style.
And maybe that is shallow. Maybe there is a part of me that is still just a boy staring at album covers, wanting to climb inside them. But I do not think it is only that. I think what I was really yearning for was camaraderie.
Writing is lonely work. You can dress it up as discipline, vocation, solitude, the sacred labour of the artist, all that noble nonsense. Some of it is true. But there are days when it is just you, a screen, a kettle, and the vague suspicion that you are wasting your time.
A band is different.
A band is bodies in a room. A band is volume. A band is someone else’s timing ruining your perfect idea and making it better. A band is a drummer speeding up because she can feel something you cannot. A bass player finding the pocket you didn’t know was there. A guitarist hitting a wrong note that becomes the hook. A singer mumbling nonsense until the real line appears. It is mistakes made communal. It is boredom shared until it becomes electricity.
That is what I miss in so much of modern culture.
The room.
We have never been more connected and yet the room feels emptier. Everyone is available. Everyone is broadcasting. Everyone can be reached, seen, tagged, shared, measured, searched, saved and summoned. But being contactable is not the same as being present. Being visible is not the same as being there.
Maybe the great cultural sickness is not artificial intelligence. Maybe it is artificial presence. Everyone visible. Everyone contactable. Everyone performing. Nobody quite there.
That is the thing technology has done to us. Not killed us outright. Nothing so dramatic. It has made absence normal. It has taught us to sit with people while being elsewhere. It has trained us to half-live the moment while preparing its later display. A gig becomes footage. A meal becomes proof. A thought becomes content. A face becomes a brand. A private feeling becomes a caption in search of agreement.
And art suffers from this because art needs privacy before it can become public.
It needs the stupid stage. The ugly stage. The boring stage. The stage where nobody knows what the thing is yet. It needs people wasting time properly. It needs false starts. It needs failed takes. It needs silence. It needs someone staring at a wall. It needs a notebook full of rubbish. It needs rehearsal rooms that smell of weed, damp jackets, old amps and bad decisions.
But now the machine wants everything early.
Show the process. Build the audience. Feed the algorithm. Stay visible. Stay relevant. Stay in the conversation. Let them see the sketch before the painting. Let them hear the demo before the song. Let them into the room before the room has done its work.
And maybe that is why so much feels beige. Not because there are no talented people. There are millions. Maybe too many for any sane culture to hold. The problem is not a lack of voices. The problem is the endless pressure to turn every voice into content before it has deepened into art.
The artist has not been replaced by the influencer exactly. That is too simple. But the artist has been forced to learn the influencer’s dance. Smile. Explain yourself. Build your personal brand. Be authentic in a way that photographs well. Be vulnerable, but not too messy. Be political, but not too costly. Be original, but not confusing. Be dangerous, but safely packaged. Be yourself, but make sure yourself is legible to the feed.
This is where artificial intelligence enters the room, or perhaps more accurately, enters the room and quietly removes the room.
AI is not the whole problem. It is too easy to point at the machine and pretend we were all doing brilliantly until the machine arrived. We were already half-gone. Already scrolling. Already optimising. Already measuring our worth in little public numbers. AI did not invent the beige loop. It simply gave it a brain.
Or something that looks like a brain.
The machine can write songs, stories, poems, scripts, essays, jokes, love letters, apologies, manifestos and prayers. It can generate images of things that never happened. It can mimic style. It can rearrange influence. It can make something that looks, at a glance, like the thing.
But it cannot want.
That matters.
It cannot sit in a room with three other people and feel the air change. It cannot be embarrassed. It cannot be jealous of the better line. It cannot fancy the girl at the bar and go home wounded enough to write a chorus. It cannot hate its father, miss its mother, fear death, desire God, regret the thing it said, or laugh at a joke so stupid it breaks the tension and lets the song arrive.
It can learn the shape of soul.
But it does not have one.
Still, I do not want this to become another man-shouts-at-machine essay. The tool is not the enemy. The surrender is. The danger is not that technology exists. The danger is that we hand over the difficult part too early. The staring. The failing. The boredom. The private wrestling. The part where the human being is changed by the act of making.
Because that might be the real purpose of art.
Not output.
Transformation.
The song changes the writer before it changes the listener. The painting changes the painter before it hangs on the wall. The novel ruins and rebuilds the novelist long before anyone buys the thing. That is the secret no algorithm can market properly. Art is not only something humans produce. It is something humans go through.
And this is why old cultural moments still haunt us.
Punk was not clean. Hip hop was not clean. Rave was not clean. Grunge was not clean. Britpop, for all its swagger and nonsense and lagered-up mythology, was not clean. These things had commerce in them, ego in them, stupidity in them, posers in them, drugs in them, bad politics in them, terrible haircuts in them. Of course they did. They were human.
But they had rooms.
Basements. Blocks. Clubs. Fields. Bedrooms. Pubs. Record shops. Rehearsal spaces. Places where people gathered before they were flattened into data. Places where something could begin as a rumour, a noise, a look, a shared boredom, a private rebellion. Places where you did not yet know what it was called.
Now everything is named too quickly.
Every scene becomes a trend. Every trend becomes a market. Every market becomes a template. Every template becomes a nostalgia cycle. The wheel spins. The machine watches. The copy improves. The soul thins.
And still, I know I am not innocent in this. None of us are. I use the tools. I chase the platforms. I want people to read the work, hear the songs, see the covers, find the books, come to the gigs. I want the very thing I distrust to carry the work beyond my own small room. That is the contradiction. That is the trap. We cannot simply walk away from the modern world and pretend we are monks with guitars.
But maybe we can protect something inside it.
Maybe we can keep a room somewhere.
A real one or a private one. A place where the thing is allowed to be useless for a while. A place where nobody asks what the content strategy is. A place where nobody is performing authenticity because they are too busy making a racket, writing a sentence, boiling a kettle, arguing over a chord, ruining a draft, starting again.
That is what I saw in Get Back. Not purity. Not perfection. Not even happiness. There is sadness in it too, because you can feel them drifting apart. You can feel the end approaching in the gaps between jokes. But perhaps that makes it more beautiful. They are still there. For a little while longer. In the room. Together. Making something.
Maybe that is what culture needs most.
Not better technology. Not more access. Not infinite novelty. Not another platform. Not another tool promising to liberate us from the burden of being human.
Maybe culture needs presence.
People who are actually there.
People willing to be bored. People willing to be awkward. People willing to make bad things on the way to making better things. People willing to disappear from the feed long enough to hear themselves think. People willing to risk making something unfashionable, unoptimised, unmarket-tested and alive.
I don’t know if technology is killing culture. That might be too easy. Maybe culture is still there, buried under convenience, waiting for us to get bored enough, brave enough, lonely enough, human enough to find it again. Maybe the next great thing is not hiding in the machine at all. Maybe it is in a room somewhere. Someone with a cheap guitar. Someone with a notebook. Someone with no plan. Someone making tea. Someone wasting time properly.
And maybe that is what I miss most. Not the past.
The possibility of being left alone long enough to become real.
-Ray x
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