The Beige Series Pt.II

The Beige Loop: How Technology Killed Culture

AUG 17, 2025

Remember when things were great? When they were organic, natural, unfiltered. We had real bands playing real music to real fans who showed up in real venues. Sweat dripping from the ceiling of a club, amps blowing out, voices breaking. It was chaos, it was alive. We had films that felt like they belonged to us—raw actors, cracked voices, messy stories that weren’t workshopped by a corporate board. Writers bled into paper books, their words smudging your fingertips with ink and truth. And there was the magic of holding it, the smell of pages, the permanence of something that couldn’t be swiped away. The stuff mattered because it was real. Because it couldn’t be replicated by a server farm in California or spat out by an algorithm trained on old clichés.

Now everything is shit. Plastic and polished, predictable and soulless. Every song sounds like a template: click-track drums, a fake build, a drop made by some guy hunched over a laptop in a bedroom that smells like Monster Energy. Every film feels like a reboot of a reboot, stories embalmed in corporate safety nets so no one feels offended or surprised. Books are engineered for virality instead of originality, written with hashtags in mind rather than heartbreak or rage. Authenticity has been traded in for algorithms. Creativity replaced with recycling. Originality strangled in the crib by market-tested safety nets. We gorge on it anyway, knowing it’s hollow, but too numb to spit it out.

The other night I watched Get Back—the Beatles documentaries. Not just for the music, though that was mesmerising, but for the humanity of it. Four men, a few hangers-on, huddled in a square of chairs. Smoking, drinking tea, eating toast. Talking, laughing, bickering. Not one phone in sight. No devices interrupting, no algorithms eavesdropping. Just presence. Flesh and blood and crackling chemistry. I felt sick with yearning, almost dizzy, watching it. To be in that room, in that moment, when art was still born of boredom and conversation, not from metrics and machines. It was proof that genius happens not when we’re plugged in, but when we’re left alone. Silence, cigarettes, and toast—that’s the formula for greatness, not ChatGPT and engagement metrics.

Technology was supposed to liberate us, to fling open the gates of imagination and let us run riot through infinite fields of possibility. But instead, it’s suffocated us with its own abundance. Every algorithm, every feed, every AI-generated half-thought is a mirror held up to the past. Nothing new breaks through. The machines recycle. We consume. The wheel spins. This is not progress—it’s stagnation dressed up in neon.

There was once a time when culture meant risk. Punk wasn’t born in a focus group, and cinema didn’t need to consult a trending hashtag before rolling the camera. Artists carved their own spaces, movements clashed and collided, originality wasn’t just an aspiration—it was survival. Hip hop came out of block parties, grunge from damp Seattle basements, rave from illegal fields drenched in sweat and bass. These weren’t products. They were eruptions.

Here’s my hot take: civilisation runs in loops. We get a massive technological leap, we convince ourselves it’ll save us, then—bang—we hit the wall. War, famine, plague, collapse. Out of the rubble, art and music and raw human creativity drag us back to life. Then, inevitably, we sleepwalk into the next advancement, blind to the fact we’re starting the cycle again.

Take the late Middle Ages. The Black Death tore through Europe, emptying towns and gutting societies. Out of that devastation came the Renaissance—Michelangelo, da Vinci, Shakespeare, art and thought exploding as if to remind us of what it means to be human. Then came the Enlightenment, fuelled by scientific discovery and the printing press, a technological leap that toppled monarchs but also set us up for industrial carnage.

The Industrial Revolution brought smog, child labour, and empire. But in its shadow bloomed Romantic poetry, Turner’s storm-lashed paintings, Beethoven’s symphonies—artists railing against the machine by creating something that still breathed. The nineteenth century gave us Dickens and Dostoevsky as moral counterweights to coal and steel.

Fast forward: the First World War obliterated a generation. Out of the trenches came the jazz age, surrealism, Dadaism, the Lost Generation bleeding into literature. Then the Great Depression and the Second World War, followed by a mid‑century renaissance: rock ’n’ roll, modernist architecture, cinema exploding with urgency. The sixties, seventies, and eighties were the cultural payoff for decades of trauma: counterculture, punk, hip hop, films that burned with experimentation—all of it born out of post‑war exhaustion.

By the nineties we swaggered into one last gasp of human‑made optimism. Britpop, grunge, rave, indie cinema—it was messy, it was alive. Then the 2000s arrived with the tech boom, sedating us into the glossy stupor we’re still stuck in today.

Then came the internet, the supposed great democratizer. A wild frontier of creativity, yes, but also the first warning sign of saturation. Suddenly, everyone had a voice. The volume was deafening. The quality—variable. Yet, it was still human. Magazines became blogs, mixtapes became mp3s. There was chaos, but it was honest chaos. The 90s held a messy optimism, a belief that technology could amplify creativity instead of consuming it. We thought the web would give us more Velvet Undergrounds, more Nirvanas, more weirdos building movements from the margins. Instead it gave us influencer houses in LA and TikTok dances.

Now? We outsource imagination to machines. AI systems can spit out symphonies, novels, and portraits, but only by rearranging the bones of what came before. No genuine spark. Just statistical regurgitation masquerading as inspiration. A Frankenstein of influence with none of the sweat, none of the gamble. It’s not creation—it’s karaoke with a hard drive.

The artist has been replaced by the influencer, the gallery by the algorithm. Value is measured in clicks, not in depth. Viral moments overshadow years of craft. A painting doesn’t need to move you, it needs to be shareable. A song doesn’t need to be profound, it needs to fit into 15 seconds. Art isn’t about daring anymore—it’s about appeasing the feed, about not being scrolled past.

AI promises us a future of infinite novelty but delivers only echoes. It remixes the past until we’re numb. Its very nature—trained on what already exists—makes it incapable of breaking through into true innovation. It can only feed us what it knows, and what it knows is yesterday. Tomorrow never comes, it just loops back around, reskinned and resold.

Worse, it crushes the human spirit. Why bother sweating over originality when the algorithm rewards conformity? Why risk failure when the safe route is the one guaranteed to trend? The creative burns out, reduced to a content mill for the machine. The spark dies quietly, strangled by metrics. You don’t write for truth anymore, you write for SEO.

The more AI we consume, the more everything starts to look the same. Music blurs into background noise, films recycle endlessly, literature chokes on its own clichés. Culture collapses into a sludge of recognisable, market-tested comfort food. It’s like living in an endless airport lounge soundtrack—pleasant enough not to notice, insidious enough to destroy the soul.

We’re hooked. Reliant on the machine to make sense of our boredom. The more we lean on it, the less we create. The less we create, the more we lean on it. Stagnation becomes self-perpetuating, a trap disguised as convenience. We’ve built ourselves a padded cell and called it progress.

But there is still hope, a flicker if you look closely. It’s in the kids forming bands in garages, ignoring Spotify’s analytics. It’s in the filmmaker shooting grainy reels with no budget and no plan but fire in their lungs. It’s in the writers stapling together zines, giving them out in pubs, scribbling poetry on the backs of receipts. It’s in the rebels who dare to ignore the metrics and create something raw, untested, unmarketable. I don’t know if any of this is actually happening, but I really hope it is. True innovation always feels strange at first. It isn’t safe, it isn’t predictable—and that’s the point.

Support the unpredictable. Seek out the voices that don’t fit the algorithm. Pay for originality. Honour the struggle of human creation before it’s too late. Because once we hand it all over to the machine, we’ll never get it back. The Beatles didn’t make Let It Be by asking a bot what was trending. They made it by showing up hungover, arguing, laughing, eating toast, and stumbling into beauty.

We stand at the paradox: infinite tools, but nothing new. A future overflowing with data but starved of originality. If we let technology dictate art, then art as we know it dies. And when art dies, culture follows. The machines won’t mourn it—but we should. Because if we stop caring, if we stop fighting for the raw and the real, then maybe we deserve the beige, looping hellscape we’re building.

-Ray x

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