The article talks about AI, but I think it's interesting that Ted Gioia ("Honest Broker"), similarly, talks about the lack of a counter-culture [1]. I propose t

The article talks about AI, but I think it's interesting that Ted Gioia ("Honest Broker"), similarly, talks about the lack of a counter-culture [1]. I propose that the avant-garde has been synonymous with deconstruction / meaninglessness and the Enlightenment project of personal freedom. Now that we've come to the place where anyone can define their own gender, or, indeed, choose to identify as a completely different species from Homo sapiens, where is there left to go? The avant-garde has been completed. So if we want to look for the counter-culture or the new avant-garde, we're going to have to look somewhere else. I think that, in a culture that systematically stripped all meaning out of life by atomizing it--how can humanity have any meaning if even being human is up to each individual--I think things like religions which offer meaning are going to be very appealing. In today's culture, someone converting to, say, Eastern Orthodoxy (in the West) is very counter-cultural: they are old, odd, hierarchical, are insistent that truth rests not in ourselves but in God, and say that fulfillment comes from ordering our lives based on an external Other not our internal feelings; all of these are opposing current cultural values. Similarly, I think Jordan Peterson is part of the new counter-culture (not that he is E. Orthodox). However we aren't conditioned for "counter-cultural" to look like anything like that, because that has always been seen as "conservative" or "reactionary". But since there is nowhere else for the Enlightenment project to go, it seems like the only possible change is back towards the way we came, and hence, this is the only sort of direction remaining for the advance guard of the culture to go. [1] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-village https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-vil...