There is an energy out there, a strange tension in the air. It’s not jubilant or even hopeful, hanging just below the surface. Think when a band is between songs, time hangs for a minute, the amps hum, the mic crackles, and no one is sure what will happen next. The one thing you are sure of, something is coming. It’s not over, there will be another song.

Culture is dead, or dying in real time, is the narrative we are being sold. It’s a TikTok take; the doom scroll version of something more nuanced. Just spend some real time with music or books, find places where people still argue about poetry like life depended on it, and you find another story. The death of culture is more a metamorphosis, unsightly and awkward but inescapable, than the end of all culture.

This is the counter rhythm to the noise, rumbling underneath the algorithm sludge, uncanny-valley AI, and endless disposable content. It is fragmented, not a movement yet. Scenes. Rouge signals.

People are reading. Not the clout seeking “I Read 50 Books This Year” you see on Facebook, something deeper, slower, stranger. People stumbling onto Dostoevsky at 2 a.m. like a secret society was hiding. People arguing about Melville like he just dropped his latest masterpiece a week ago. People digging deep into Virginia Woolf not because some institution said it was cannon, but because the words feed your soul, the sentences oxygen when you come up from your screen.

This is how culture shifts start, in bedrooms and libraries, a little unhinged, obsessive, personal.

Writing is back too; nobody is waiting for permission. There are voices speaking everywhere, on Substack, in indie ‘zines, at readings in backrooms of bars and coffee shops. You can still see the gatekeepers holding on, but their grip is tentative at best, less gods and more a final vestige of the old way.

People are defiant, creating art not because anyone asked but because they refuse to be erased. They are making messy things, uneven things, human things. They are carving a space where none was offered.

That human part matters more than it has in a long time. The AI backlash is real and growing, but unharnessed. People talk about ‘voice’ like it is something that needs to be protected at all costs. The beauty in imperfection is what we crave. Remember disco, the inhuman polish, and everyone suddenly wanting distortion again? People wanted something alive and before long there was punk and hip hop.

People want meaning. They are starved for it and they look back to the things that have stood for centuries like myth and mysticism. Anything that carries weight in a world full of pseudo profundity and off the rails conspiracy theories. It is that desire to feel awe and that the world isn’t just content, that there is depth, texture, even mystery.

Even these three hour podcasts that seem completely self indulgent or essays that find a hundred side roads before coming to something like a conclusion is a rebellion against compression. They are refusing the mantra of easily digestible, quick, and efficient; against the idea everything needs to fit in a scrollable box. Take it as a sign people are willing to try stretching their attention spans and pushing their brains toward capacity again.

All it will take to bring all these pieces together is an artistic breakthrough, a figure who steps out of the noise and pulls it all into focus; someone to make the meaning of this moment obvious. We are still compiling half-formed ideas that may never land in late night rehearsals and scattered jam sessions. It is prelude.

And that is what a renaissance looks like if you rewind to the decade before it’s start. There is no inevitability. It’s confusion, false starts, and people trying things that don’t work. They are arguing about what matters, the sense the old ways are done with only a notion of what will replace them.

You can call it collapse because we are in that murky middle between that past and future. Or you can put down your device, take a deep breath and realize there is something completely different going on. Somewhere just below the noise culture is turning up; awkwardly, imperfectly, maybe even badly, but real. When that spark finally catches fire it’s going to matter.