I'd like to start with a set of non-controversial observations:

1. Technology and culture are in a dialectic relationship or as the spirit of Marshall McLuhan's work suggests: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us". Eric Davis, in Techgnosis, puts it more directly: culture is technoculture.

2. Throughout history technological progress has been accelerating. Furthermore, the technology and by extension culture have been growing more complex. This has been rigorously studied by Geoffrey West particularly in his lecture The Simplicity, Complexity & Unity of Life from the Biosphere to the Anthroposphere (also check out Sean Carroll's meditation on it on his Mindscape Podcast).

3. The reality we navigate daily is not the raw physical world but the shared cultural narrative that overlays it. Nations, currencies, careers, and markets - these are collective fictions invented to manage the complexity of large-scale human cooperation.

4. Humanity's primary tendency is generating coherent narratives about ourselves and our place in the world.

If we accept the above premises, it follows that constructing new coherent narratives is becoming increasingly difficult due to the volume of information we need to synthesize and the pace of change we need to react to. Meaning itself becomes ephemeral, slipping through the algorithmic feeds and perfunctory doomscrolling.

One measurable effect of this narrative breakdown may be our diminishing ability to forecast. After all, predictions are just forward-facing stories. If narrative coherence about the present breaks down, so too does our capacity to imagine plausible tomorrows. A scholar in 1525 may not have foreseen full consequences of the Reformation or the encroaching scientific revolution, but they could reasonably expect that the rhythms of daily life - in agriculture, labor, communication, and governance - would remain broadly familiar a century later. By contrast, the speed and breadth of change from 2000 to 2025 have rendered long-term cultural forecasting quite challenging.

Another symptom is the cultural stagnation, evident in the nostalgia fetishism and endless cycles of remakes and reboots in pop culture. So far the 21st century turns out to be a pastiche of the 20th, powered by AI. This latter concept has been well described by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism.

The cognitive fatigue induced by all this may compel us to increasingly rely on machines. Is it any wonder then, that one of the major worries about AI is how over-reliance on it may atrophy our creative thinking? Here we can play devil's advocate and recall that the invention of writing atrophied our memory and ended the oral tradition. I'm a prime example of this - give me a slightly-harder-than-trivial problem and I'll be helpless without pen and paper. Yet writing empowered us in other ways. New technology so far has always been a trade off. Is AI different? It certainly feels like it - AI is both a cognitive prosthesis and an non-stop narrative generator.

Playing with multiple frontier models I can't help but notice that while their outputs differ stylistically, they often converge substantively. This may be because they all represent the same thing: a compressed archive of human symbolic output (or at least its digitized subset). And if we outsource our creative thinking to machines, will it flatten the multiplicity of human thought into a machine-powered singularity?

This may sound dystopian, and my instinct says we are headed for a Neuromancer-esque future, but if I am to believe my own hypothesis, I shouldn't trust that instinct either. In a sense, our technocultural trajectory seems already mapped out. Win the AI race first; then use AGI to solve climate collapse, labor disruption, and psychological malaise later. But this doesn’t feel like strategy so much as submission to the inertia of progress.

If we are indeed accelerating toward a kind of singularity, it may not be the one originally imagined - the ultimate technological convergence - but rather a collapse of narrative plurality into a monoculture.

My response to all this is two-fold. First, we must begin to learn the tools and techniques of psychological resistance. For my part, I’ve turned to the Daoist tradition and its notion of existential ease - a posture of receptivity rather than control, of moving with the current without being swept away.

Second, I advocate carving out pockets of slowness and coherence - temporary sanctuaries from the turbulence of technoculture. A bubble of spacetime where we invoke the inner child: doing things for no reason other than play, wonder, or curiosity - not to impress "the general peer" or increase your market value.