Tip-Off #210 - Dancing on Quicksand
"For in much wisdom is much grief, and those that increase knowledge increase sorrow." - Ecclesiastes 1:18.
In The World Was Flat. Now It's Flattened, music historian and cultural critic Ted Gioia argues we’re living through a cultural upheaval as significant as the Renaissance or Enlightenment—only in reverse. Where those eras celebrated humanism, innovation, and reason, our moment, which he terms “The Collapse of the Knowledge System,” drifts from art and insight toward distraction and addiction.
He calls it “dopamine culture,” driven by instant gratification and shaped by the profit motives of tech giants. This shift, he warns, is reshaping how we consume information, interact with creative works, and—more tellingly—what we value.
Where earlier generations had patrons and cultural gatekeepers invested in long-term potential, today’s patrons are platforms. Their algorithms reward the sensational, the digestible, and the instantly gratifying, fueling what Gioia calls a “race to the bottom.” Actual experts are brushed aside, facts dismissed as elitist or partisan, and credible knowledge drowned in a torrent of unfiltered content. In healthcare, as in politics, "weird" becomes the new normal, and irony the only acceptable currency of truth.
Gioia’s concerns are sharp, but not unprecedented. Cultural doomsaying has always shadowed innovation. From the earliest farming (disrupting nature) to artificial intelligence, the pattern holds. The printing press was expected to unleash chaos by putting dangerous knowledge into the hands of the laity. Novels were once feared for leading women astray and undermining virtue. The automobile was blamed for destroying walkable towns and giving rise to fossil-fueled sprawl.
Similarly, rock and roll was denounced as a corrupting influence, and even Plato grumbled about the youth of his day, who, he claimed, showed no respect for authority.
In each case, the feared cultural apocalypse materialized primarily in the nerves of moralists. What felt like a unique collapse was often the disorientation of a jarring, sometimes ugly, transition before the next order took hold.
Today's panic over AI fits the pattern. Students now fear being accused of using AI even in their original work as academic policies become increasingly stringent. Faculty, understandably, want to preserve integrity, but the response sometimes risks smothering curiosity in an atmosphere of suspicion.
As Princeton’s D. Graham Burnett wrote recently in The New Yorker, it’s madness to pretend “that the most significant revolution in the past century isn’t happening.” Since we “can no longer make students do the reading,” he argues, we should offer work they want to do—assignments that demand creativity and thinking machines can’t fake.
Seen more clearly, what Gioia describes may not be disintegration so much as a radical—and messy—democratization of creativity. Traditional gatekeepers are fading, and in their absence, countless new voices have emerged. This noisy flourishing represents not decline but redistribution—a shift in creative power from the few to the many. The "flattening of expertise" can be seen as a healthy skepticism of once-unquestioned authority; we may not be witnessing the end of deep thought, but rather its dispersal into new, less centralized forms.
This year brought hundreds of efforts to address energy, healthcare, and climate change—from sustainable school cafeterias to retrofitted urban EV chargers, AI that detects counterfeit drugs, and enzyme-based systems that renew synthetic textiles. Others have used AI to grow crops using fog-based systems in desert climates, recommend energy-efficient home upgrades, and redesign recycling platforms for trading industrial waste, including those that utilize plastic-degrading microbes.
These endeavors, requiring deep focus and long-term commitment, stand as a direct refutation of a culture supposedly lost to ephemeral gratification. This is the opposite of collapse: a stark contrast to the silence of an actual decline or the curated echo chamber of the past.
Progress has always been a two-edged sword. "Those that increase knowledge increase sorrow.” The disorientation of our moment is real. Yet Gioia’s critique of fake authenticity isn’t just a warning—it’s a spark. It challenges creators to find fresh ways to connect and build genuine value in a noisy world.
Creativity isn’t fading; it’s shifting ground. "For everything there is a season," and what feels like the chaos of collapse may be the turbulence of a new beginning. Everything is beautiful--"in its time." - Ecclesiastes 3:1, 11.
Notes and reading
Plato - The exact passage is: “The father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son to be on a level with his father, having no respect or fear of his parents — this is what the teacher fears and the students despise him.”— Republic, Book VIII, 562e–563e.
Context: This passage is part of Socrates' argument describing the decline of a democracy: an excessive desire for freedom leads to an inversion of social norms and a disregard for authority, ultimately creating the chaotic conditions that allow a tyrant to seize power.
Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett - “In the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.” The New Yorker, April 26, 2025.
For readers seeking tangible reasons for hope, see the World Changing Ideas Awards 2025, which bring attention to dozens of individuals and organizations reshaping the future. These projects don’t wait on governments; they act. See: Fast Company, “World Changing Ideas Awards 2025,” April 2025.
A Final Thought on Otherness: We often mistake difference for a mirror: aliens from another world look like us, astrology affirms us, AI thinks like us—because we made it so. True otherness may go unnoticed, too strange to recognize. The Truman Show ends with a man who dares to step beyond the curated world he once believed was real. The movie Arrival begins with beings so alien that they force us to relearn how to understand. Both suggest that what feels like collapse may be the shock of encountering something genuinely different.
Religious language can provoke the same shock. David Bentley Hart’s own translation of the New Testament, faithful to the rawness and subtlety of the Greek, can be jarring to the traditionally faithful because it exposes what smoother translations have polished away. By contrast, efforts to restore a triumphal version of history omit dissent, suppress diversity, domesticate difference, and offer salvation and patriotism tailored to preference.
Tip-Off #209 - Authorship and the Ancient Debate
Tip-Off #208 - The Burnout Gospel
"Where earlier generations had patrons and cultural gatekeepers invested in long-term potential, today’s patrons are platforms." Apropos of nothing in your post, part of me is drawn to the aristocratic project. My understanding is that a well-functioning aristocracy, though I've never lived in one, can culturally lift all boats. (Jefferson followed Harrington in drawing a line between merit-based aristocrats and "pseudo-aristocrats"; maybe patronage softened that line as the "pseudos" took on some of their talented clients' glory.) The difference between patrons and platforms may be a difference between aristocracy and oligarchy, aristocracy's corrupted cousin.
(Of course, "History is written by learned men, and so it is natural and agreeable for them to think that the activity of their class supplies the basis of the movement of all humanity." -- Tolstoy)
More to one of your points, I wonder if doomspeak occupies the space between innovation and the filters that eventually make it useful and even legible to more than a few. I suppose that those faced with the printing press's startling advent might not have foreseen our day, when we lament that only three or four houses seem to set the agenda for mainstream English-language book publishing. More odds and ends: thank you for the reference to Dr. Burnett's article, which I look forward to reading. And thank you for opening up Ecclesiastes 3:11 for me in such a fresh way.
Now my main point: thank you for this fascinating post. As a writing instructor (until this past year), I've struggled with my colleagues to swim in the academic tidal wave brought on by AI. The more interesting articles that have come out about it, of course, are those that suggest how AI may benefit writing instruction. But this post sends me in an even more interesting direction: "we should offer work they want to do—assignments that demand creativity and thinking machines can’t fake." From a classroom-as-community perspective, it will take teachers' openness to experiment and to work with students--not just as "guinea pigs" but as coauthors--in developing such curricula. Such openness would "get us there" faster, anyway, than just reading up on the latest and continuing to ignore the greater possibilities of the classroom as a learning community.