25 Propositions about the New Romanticism
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Luddite
13 min read
The article directly references Luddites burning down factories as a parallel to modern tech resistance. Understanding the actual historical Luddite movement—their specific grievances, methods, and ultimate fate—provides crucial context for evaluating whether current tech skepticism follows similar patterns.
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Sturm und Drang
14 min read
This German proto-Romantic movement (1760s-1780s) directly preceded and influenced the Romanticism the article discusses. It includes Goethe's Werther, which the article mentions, and explains the intellectual bridge between Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic rebellion.
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Effective altruism
14 min read
The article criticizes Sam Bankman-Fried's approach of reducing human values to 'a kind of maximization problem.' This is a direct reference to effective altruism, the philosophical movement SBF championed. Understanding EA's actual tenets illuminates the 'New Rationalism' the author opposes.
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More than two years ago, I predicted the rise of a New Romanticism—a movement to counter the intense rationalization and expanding technological control of society.
This idea had started as a joke. Oh Beethoven, come save us! And give Tchaikovsky the news.
But when I dug deeply into the history of the original Romanticist movement, circa 1800, I stopped laughing. The more I probed, the more I was convinced that this provided a blueprint for countering the overreach of technology, the massive expansion in surveillance, and the centralization of both political and economic power.
It had worked back then. The Age of Romanticism had seen the abolition of slavery, protections for workers, prohibitions on child labor, a growing respect for human dignity, and a blossoming of the arts.
Industrialists wept. But somehow they survived.
Romanticism had countered cold profit-driven industrialization with human values. And economic growth had actually accelerated in response to this more balanced approach.
Could it happen again? I thought it could. And now, two years, later, I’m convinced that the shift is already underway.
Here’s how I described it back then:
...From “Notes Toward a New Romanticism” (November 2023)
I realized that, the more I looked at what happened circa 1800, the more it reminded me of our current malaise.
Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution—and people started resisting the forces of progress.
Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories—a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone.
Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism—Goethe’s novel about Werther’s
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