The automation of feeling

by | Oct 31, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-10-31

Ideas in Circulation

The automation of feeling

Across outlets this week, a quiet consensus is forming that algorithmic and AI-driven systems are not just changing distribution but flattening the texture of lived experience itself.

Data scientist Lauren Leek’s argument, reported in the Times, is that predictive algorithms don’t just recommend culture, they homogenize it — pub menus, pop hooks, even conversational cadence start converging toward whatever the model predicts will perform. The Guardian’s CD-revival piece is the lived rebuttal: listeners explicitly cite algorithmic predictability as the reason they’re buying physical media again, seeking friction and finitude over infinite personalized scroll. Jean Garnett’s Paris Review essay on “AI emomercials” — skincare ads engineered to simulate maternal grief and self-forgiveness — extends the critique into emotional manufacture itself, naming a genre she calls “Purification Slop.” Melanie Challenger’s Aeon essay closes the loop philosophically: we are, she argues, shedding not just skills but modes of attention and sensation, outsourcing navigation, memory, and choice to systems that do it faster. Together these pieces sketch a genuine zeitgeist shift: 2026 is the year cultural commentary stopped debating whether AI produces good or bad art and started asking what human capacities — taste, grief, friction, boredom — are being quietly deskilled in the process.

The creativity myth, or the case for the dilettante

A pointed challenge to the decades-long gospel of “innovation” is surfacing from two very different directions.

Thomas Frank’s new book, reviewed by Jennifer Szalai, argues that the cult of “disruption” and creative genius has functioned mainly as cover for upward wealth transfer — a story elites tell about themselves that conveniently erases the working people who actually build things. Jay Miller’s Aeon essay arrives at a complementary target from the other end: in a hyper-optimized, hyper-specialized culture, the wandering generalist — the dilettante — becomes a kind of ethical refusal, a person who declines to be legible to any single metric of productivity. Read together, they form an argument against the entire apparatus of self-branding, side-hustle culture, and “innovation” rhetoric that has dominated discourse since the 2010s — a sign that the backlash to hustle culture is moving from TikTok burnout discourse into serious intellectual critique.

Institutional reticence toward catastrophe

Multiple pieces this week probe why major cultural institutions seem to flinch from depicting live conflict even as they eagerly revisit older traumas.

Julia Halperin’s reporting finds museums actively avoiding work about Ukraine and Gaza, citing donor sensitivities and institutional risk-aversion, even as artists struggle to get such work shown at all. Mark Harris’s companion essay observes the inverse phenomenon: nearly five decades on, the AIDS crisis is enjoying a wave of ambitious new films, books, and theater — catastrophe becomes usable material only once it’s safely historical. The Aeon documentary on Ukrainian civilians supplies the uncomfortable present-tense counterpoint nobody in the gallery world wants to commission. The pattern suggests an institutional appetite only for trauma once it can be aestheticized without active political cost — a dynamic worth watching as both wars grind into year four and five respectively.

Gravitas imported into genre

The retrospective week of Patrick Stewart tributes crystallized a long-building argument about what “serious” acting means when deployed inside science fiction, superhero franchises, and other historically disreputable genres.

Both the Times and the Guardian converge on the same claim: Stewart’s achievement was proof that classical training and genre entertainment are not opposed projects but mutually reinforcing ones — that a Shakespearean cadence could make a starship captain’s hope feel earned rather than cheap. This isn’t nostalgia; it’s a live argument about prestige culture’s current moment, as more classically trained actors move into comic-book and streaming franchises and critics continue to debate whether that constitutes slumming or elevation.

Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

  • A Few Good Men — reviewed independently by the Guardian as well, both finding Sorkin’s 1989 courtroom drama tactically inert on a Broadway scale it wasn’t built for.
  • The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg’s WWII football drama, draws matching verdicts from the Guardian: handsomely made, stuffed with cliché.
  • You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s unconventional documentary, is generating a genuine Oscars-category debate — is it even a documentary? — that a companion Times piece extends by tracing the footage its subject actually watched.
  • SCTV, the Canadian sketch show that shaped The Simpsons and launched Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, finally gets its due in a new documentary — essential context for anyone who thinks SNL invented American sketch comedy.
  • Skepta’s long-delayed new album arrives with a pointed, socially conscious interview about Britain’s drift toward racist immigration rhetoric — grime as political reportage rather than nostalgia act.

Essays Worth the Read

In praise of the dilettante makes an unfashionable case: that refusing specialization in an optimization-obsessed culture is not failure but a coherent ethical stance. Jay Miller writes with enough historical range — from Renaissance polymaths to modern gig-economy burnout — to make the dilettante feel less like an excuse and more like a diagnosis of what hyper-competence has cost us.

Martin McDonagh Says Art Can Change the World. Just Not as Much as Murder. is David Marchese at his best: a long, adversarial, genuinely funny conversation with the playwright-director that refuses to let McDonagh’s bleak worldview go unexamined, and ends up being as much about the limits of fiction’s moral authority as about McDonagh himself.

Murano Parsnips: The Unexpected Literary History of the Dildo is pure Paris Review pleasure — Izabella Scott tracing mock-epic verse about sex toys from Aristophanes through the Restoration with scholarly rigor and a perfectly dry wit, the kind of essay that justifies long-form criticism’s existence on style alone.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

Our Culture Worships Creativity and Innovation. Is It All a Con? Jennifer Szalai’s review of Thomas Frank’s new book is the single most useful frame this week for anyone trying to understand why “innovation” talk feels increasingly hollow across politics, tech, and the culture industry alike. Frank’s argument — that the celebration of creative disruption has mainly functioned as an alibi for extraction, dressing up precarity and consolidation as liberation — lands with particular force at a moment when AI companies, startup culture, and even museums market themselves on the same vocabulary of visionary novelty. Read alongside this week’s Aeon piece on the dilettante, it suggests a genuine turn: after fifteen years of TED-talk optimism about disruption, the intellectual tide is moving toward skepticism about who actually benefits when “creativity” becomes a civic virtue. It’s the rare review that reframes not just a book but an entire decade’s worth of rhetoric.