Transcripts:
Everything might seem a bit doom and gloom at the moment. So, I'm here to give you some hope. In my last video, I talked about how we're going through a contracted version of the Middle Ages currently, but don't forget that a lot of good stuff happened during the Middle Ages.
Also, I think the 2030s have the potential for a true renaissance, and the historical parallels to the last Renaissance are already all around us. You've probably heard it said before, and most of you are old enough to remember, that the internet used to be a place. It existed on the big box computer on your dad's desk and you'd log on for an hour to play flash games after school.
Now the internet is literally everywhere and sometimes it feels like we live more of a digital life than a real physical one. What we need to do with the internet is bring back the Renaissance concept of the studio. What's a studio you ask? Why? It's the answer to all of our problems. In Renaissance Europe, it was common for the wealthy to build a specific room called a studio, which means little study.
It was a tiny enclosed space filled with books and scientific instruments and art. The most famous one is probably the studio of Franchesco I met, Grand Duke of Tuskanyany. Franchesco retreated into this little hiding place to tinker with alchemy and look over his collection of rare objects. The walls and ceiling were decorated with these insane paintings mixing real life and mythology.
In the center was a fresco of Prometheus receiving jewels from nature commenting on the interplay of the divine, nature, and humanity. the ultimate goal of both artistic and scientific pursuit. The studio is the summation of everything we need to stop our current cultural decline to fix our attention spans and fight back against the endless stream of algorithmic slop.
You went into the studio to connect with universal knowledge. And then once you were done reading and thinking and looking at maps, you left. You got on with your life. You didn't carry the studio around with you all day in your pocket. There was a high premium put on knowledge, but that knowledge was physically contained. With so much AI garbage being circulated online, and we're going to talk more about that in a moment, I think we'll see a cultural re-evaluation of the internet in the next decade or so.
If everything goes according to my plans, the status symbol of the 2030s won't be the newest iPhone. It'll be the absence of a smartphone altogether. In a way, this is already happening. Take the digital minimalism movement for example. Just judging from what I see on YouTube, the new trend is to be chronically offline.
There's the whole dumb phone thing where Gen Z is getting rid of their Androids and iPhones and switching back to flip phones and MP3 players. Physical bookstores like Barnes & Noble are flourishing again because people are desperate to hold something real in their hands and be entertained without a screen.
Just like the great minds of the Renaissance, the youth are sick of being told what to think and having truth filtered by some outside authority. The rallying cry of the Renaissance was ad fontes, meaning to the sources. Scholars at the time believed medieval commentaries had obscured the pure truth of classical texts.
They wanted to strip away what they saw as the clutter of the Middle Ages and get back to reading their classical forefathers directly. Petrarch even wrote a letter to Cicero in 1345 despite the fact that by that point Cicero had been dead for,300 years. In the letter, Petrarch wrote to his Roman hero as if he was still alive, and he expressed this deep emotional need for real connection over the dusty commentaries of his time.
That already sounds quite relatable to our present moment. One thing I see younger people on the internet being fed up with is reaction content, which is basically the modern version of what Petrarch was talking about. Nobody wants to watch a guy watching a video of another guy doing something crazy. Enough is enough. They want the source now, raw reality, which at first led to the popularity of 247 streamers like Kaisenat, but now has gone a step further.
It's looking like the increasing prevalence of AI and literally everything, no matter if you want it or not, is going to have a similar effect. In the Middle Ages, there was a popular system of theology and philosophy called scholasticism. It was a hyperlogical method of learning that focused on resolving contradictions and defining categories.
Scholasticism has gotten a bad rap historically because it was known for being pretty rigid and dogmatic. But also Thomas Aquinus, one of the greatest geniuses of all time, was a scholastic thinker. So take the historical reputation with a grain of salt. By the late 1400s, scholasticism had become exhausted. It was obsessed with abstract trivia like the infamous how many angels can dance on the head of a pin question.
And theyounger generation saw it as technical and dry and formulaic. Basically, just like AI, scholasticism was processing data without necessarily feeling emotion or considering real human nuance. It was this intellectual closed loop of books talking to other books. Large language models like chat GBT are the same way. They can't come up with anything truly new.
They can only regurgitate what they've been fed and predict the next logical token based on this massive data set. Let's keep going with AI here because I think we all sense that it will be the single biggest driver of change in the next 10 years. And it's already causing a massive real-time paradigm shift all around us. When COVID hit, I saw people comparing it to the Black Death in Europe.
But in my opinion, AI is actually going to be the closest thing to the plague that we have, at least until the next actual plague comes along. Let me explain what I mean. Before the Black Death, peasants are abundant. They're cheap. They're treated like interchangeable cogs in the feudal machine. Suddenly, almost overnight, 50% of the workforce is wiped out by this invisible pestilence that nobody truly understands.
Human labor is now scarce. You can't just replace a plowman. This scarcity forced the nobility to treat labor with respect and pay real wages. However, that didn't happen immediately. The rich fought tooth and nail to make sure peasants stayed in their place with kings like Edward III even introducing new laws to make sure that workers could only be paid what they had been paid before the Black Death. But it was too late.
The peasants realized they had more power and they understood basic supply and demand. This was the beginning of the end for feudalism, at least in Western Europe. Over the last few decades, we've treated human beings like cogs to do silly, repetitive tasks in a depressing office somewhere with fluorescent lighting and open floor plans.
I can personally attest to this as I've worked quite a few of those jobs. All of a sudden, AI arrives and floods the market with infinite free text and art and video. It can also fill out a spreadsheet and send an email and even write content. It's killing the value of generic work, wiping out this bizarre system we live in of copy pasting emails and moving data from one Excel tab to another while we pretend it means something.
Just like the Black Death made human labor expensive, the AI flood will make unsimulated humanity the ultimate luxury good. Right now, we're all worried that AI will replace us. But within the next few years, there will be inevitably a grand realization that AI can only replace the drudgery. we'll be left with the work that actually requires a soul and some real critical thinking.
It's going to be a movement from an economy of quantity to an economy of quality where we shift our focus to doing the things that the machine cannot. The thing here is AI can't try hard or risk failure. Only a human can do those things. There's another interesting direction we can go here with AI. In my last video, I talked about the fact that truth in the Middle Ages for most people didn't come from books.
It came from some guy at the local tavern passing along a rumor that he also heard from some guy at the local tavern. We like to think that when the printing press came along and people had more access to knowledge, all of this instantly cleared up. Wrong. It actually kicked off an information explosion. It created chaos and wars and confusion.
There were a lot of growing pains associated with the fact that suddenly anybody could write up a tract, print a bunch of pamphlets and distribute it as truth. However, and this is the important part, the printing press eventually led to the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. In her book, The Printing Press as an agent of change, the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that the press didn't just spread knowledge.
It actually forced people to develop new methods to separate truth from fiction. Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. That's right, folks. AI is our printing press. This massive step forward that's changing everything so quickly that we can barely keep up. So far, this has been chaos and probably will be for at least the next few years with deep fakes and the genuinely scary stuff that Sora is capable of making.
But at some point, there has to be a stabilization, which we could very well see in the 2030s. New institutions of trust will by necessity have to be established so we can navigate the information flood, which could theoretically lead to a new explosion of genuine scientific discovery. There are clearly a lot of beneficial use cases for AI, especially when it comes to disease research and detection.
But maybe we don't need to use it to put Charlie Kirk on Young Thug's album cover. One more thing about AI and then we can move on. Before we do that, just a quick plug. If you like my content, which of course you do, youshould definitely join my Patreon link in the description. You'll get access to the official Medieval Mindset podcast with weekly episodes, the Medieval Mindset book club, voting rights on topics and titles and thumbnails, the essential medieval history reading list, special videos that don't get posted on my main channel. So, sign up now. And if
you're not subscribed to this channel, go ahead and do that as well. Back to the video. In the Middle Ages, if you wanted to be taken seriously, you wrote in Latin. It was the universal language of the church and the university, but it was a dead language. Nobody spoke Latin to their children and it wasn't a growing changing organic language like English or French.
Along comes Dante Aligaryi in the late Middle Ages. You've probably heard of him and he was the intellectual giant of his time. He could have written his most famous work, the divine comedy in Latin, but instead he chose Tuscan, the dialect of Florence. He even whipped up an essay called on eloquence in the vernacular. in it.
He argued that the common tongue was actually nobler than Latin because it was natural rather than artificial and it actually had a soul. You might be wondering how this relates to anything in the modern world, but we actually have our own version of Latin now, which is this global corporate English. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
It's the language of emails where you say totally unnatural things like, "Please circle back regarding the deliverables." You hear it on YouTube. What's up, guys? Smash that like button. It's everywhere in media training, too. And any public statement these days is worded the exact same. We take these allegations seriously.
yada yada yada m- m- mdash. A lot of these public statements are written by chatbt. And in fact, AI is the ultimate master of corporate speak. It creates perfectly grammatically correct, safe, sanitized, hallucinated text. Because AI owns this artificial lane, it's only natural that we'll flee to the human and the imperfect.
Polished scripts will start to sound fake and trust will migrate to the vernacular. I guarantee we'll see a rise in creators who speak with thick regional accents and use local slang will value pauses and ums and weird phrasing because AI typically scrubs those clean. Maybe I'll even stop scripting and editing my videos and let my true Midwestern lilt shine through.
As a culture, we'll hopefully move from broadcast quality that pleases everyone and offends no one to narrow cast authenticity, which is real and vulnerable and raw. Back to the Renaissance. Enter Giovani Pico de laola, a flashy, brilliant, helplessly Italian 23-year-old who challenged the church to a debate on 900 thesis.
In his opening speech, he retold the Genesis creation story. He says, "God created all the animals and gave them a specific nature, as in dog must be a dog and a lion must be a lion." But here's the important part. When God got to man, he had run out of archetypes. So he gave man no fixed nature. Stay with me here.
Kiko then argued that because we have no fixed nature, we are the only creatures with the power to choose our level of existence. There is the vegetative level, a passive state where we just consume and sleep. There's the sensual level where we're like animals driven only by instinct and hunger. Then there's the divine level where we can be like angels, intellectual, creative, and transcendent.
I think we can all agree that the modern default setting is the vegetative level. You just do nothing and the algorithm feeds you. You can lay and scroll and consume for hours and hours. AI content is actually designed to keep you in this state. It's perfectly optimized for retention, and it's getting better and better at removing any friction between you and that sweet, sweet dopamine.
Call me an optimist, but I think the new renaissance of the 2030s will involve us falling in love with the human process again. Even human error. When you're at a concert and the singer hits the wrong note or the drum pattern is a little off, it proves that consciousness made a choice. AI can't do this. This humanism can even extend to our common spaces.
Maybe we'll finally get a splash of color among all the corporate white and millennial gray in the weird, sterile environments we've gotten used to. I want a ball pit at McDonald's again. Damn it. I'm aware they're really hard to clean, and I know I'm too old to play in there, but just knowing kids have access to something fun and real would put my mind at ease.
Also, if all of social media becomes AI slop, then maybe people will start putting more stock in human experiences and products again. But these things don't just happen. We have to actively choose them. The divine choice Pico talks about is the choice to be a creator rather than a consumer. He's not talking about you because you're consuming this video.
And this is good content. So, make sure to watch thewhole thing. I don't think the Renaissance of the 2030s is going to be about everyone becoming Michelangelo, but I do think it will hopefully be about normal people refusing to be fed by the algorithm and instead choosing to write bad poetry and sing offkey and go to the crappy local play.
There's another cultural shift that's perhaps a bit more subtle, but no less consequential. Last year, Timothy ShalamΓ© won a SAG award and his acceptance speech went viral. He basically said he takes his craft extremely seriously and he hopes to be one of the best actors ever. Makes sense.
What could possibly be wrong with that? The public reaction was actually mixed. Young people on social media either applauded him or more often called him cringe. You see, we live currently in an era of irony poisoning. Trying too hard or even saying that you're trying hard like Timmy did in his speech is to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is cringe, especially for a generation that has grown up with a fear of being recorded and posted online during their worst moments.
Younger generations now protect themselves with layers of irony and detachment because they're too terrified of being perceived as trying and failing. I think in the next few years, this is going to go the way of the dodo simply because it is unsustainable. If we look back to the Renaissance, it was the era of unapologetic ambition, what Makaveli called virtue.
Renaissance artists and thinkers were obsessed with fama fame and claos glory. They didn't have a word for cringe because the concept itself did not exist. They believed that great men should announce their greatness. Imagine Michelangelo deciding not to sculpt the pieta because he was too worried someone would trash it on Tik Tok.
We can look at the autobiography of Benvonuto Cholini as a great example here. Benvonuto was a goldsmith and a sculptor and an author. Basically exactly what you would picture when you think of the phrase Renaissance man. His autobiography was a massive book where he essentially said that he was God's gift to man, he made the best art and he was a genius, etc.
, etc. I don't think we need to go this far, but to me, the ShalomΓ© speech was maybe the first step towards the post cringe era. I think the 2030s will see a return to new sincerity, and we're already seeing cracks in the armor. People, myself included, are sick of the detached irony and having to be sarcastic about everything.
Just like what you like and do what you want to do with your whole heart. The 2030s will belong to the Benvonuto Cholinis of the world. The ones who are earnestly passionate, who try hard and risk looking stupid to achieve something great. If we can regain our passion, maybe we can regain our possessions and the quality of those possessions.
Maybe you've heard the term in shitification. Basically, you don't own anything and you just pay rent to a lord for access to a deteriorating product. If you paid for Amazon Prime in 2023, then you got unlimited access to the video streaming library. Now, for the exact same price, you get limited access to a much smaller library, and you have to watch ads in between.
They do this because they know you're going to keep using the service, so why not inshitify it a little bit and maximize their profit? All of this kills our optimism because it feels like we don't own anything, and therefore, the world around us is out of our control. We've actually got something in common here with our medieval peasant ancestors.
The Middle Ages were mostly feudal, so for most people, you work the land and you own nothing. The Renaissance was driven by the merkantile class who believed in ownership and quality. Guilds like the wool guild of Florence enforced strict quality control. If you made in shitified cloth, they burned your product and banned you.
Businesses grew by being the best, not by trapping users in subscriptions or selling cheap junk manufactured in sweat shops overseas. There was actually a really interesting article published in the New York Times just a few weeks ago titled Buy Better, Buy Less, Feel Smug About It. I'll link it in the description if you're interested.
The author Isabel Kristo writes, "Highquality things have always conferred status on their owner. Traditionally, quality and luxury were paired. High prices came with the promise of high standards." Okay, great. This is exactly what you would have seen at the height of the Renaissance. But Isabelle isn't finished here. She goes on to say, "Today, you can buy garbage at every price point.
Raw material and labor costs have surged, and many luxury brands appear to be cutting corners to sustain their profit margins." Aha. Textbook inshitification, which has been slowly happening to pretty much all consumer products in America since at least the 1980s. But now people are starting to wake up and reject fast fashion in the name of actual quality.
During the Renaissance, this conceptarose called civic humanism. Basically, making money and owning things wasn't seen as evil. It was seen as a way to improve the city. This was, of course, back when the rich felt some sense of responsibility to the world around them. But still, the optimism of 1490s Florence came from a tangible sense that things were getting better and that hard work resulted in ownership.
For us, the subscription bubble has to burst at some point because people are exhausted from renting their lives. Also, the continued economic downturn we're living through is going to leave people with less and less money to actually pay these subscription fees each month. The 2030s will see a return to ownership models where you actually buy things and own physical media and your clothes don't fall apart the first time you wash them.
Optimism returns when people feel like they have a stake in the future when they can actually own the house both literally and digitally rather than just renting the pod. If you're skeptical, let me remind you that this has all happened before. For a thousand years, Constantinople was the new Rome. It held the archives of antiquity, including the original Greek manuscripts of Plato, Homer, and the church fathers.
I think it's worth mentioning here that there's this historical myth floating around that scholars in Western Europe just didn't have access to these resources for the entire Middle Ages. I want to clarify that a monk in England in the 12th century, for example, would have known who Aristotle was. Anyway, by the 1400s, the Byzantine Empire had become a shadow of itself, and it was surrounded by Ottoman Turks.
In 1453, the walls of Constantinople were breached, an event that some modern historians consider the formal end of the Middle Ages. The silver lining is that when the city collapsed, Byzantine scholars grabbed as many scrolls as they could carry and headed to Italy. This injection of lost knowledge into the fertile soil of Florence was a massive part of what sparked the Renaissance.
In a way, we're watching a slow motion cultural siege of Constantinople moment in real time. are legacy institutions, the Ivy League universities, the Hollywood studio system, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Like the late Byzantine Empire, they're bloated, overly bureaucratic, and hemorrhaging money, and more importantly, relevance.
The alternative, as we all already know, is the internet. Most of your daily media consumption probably already comes from Tik Tok or YouTube instead of television and newspapers. Unless you're one of the 5% of my viewers who are over the age of 60, and if you are, shout out to you. The most influential people are realizing that this traditional empire is falling and they're starting Substacks and podcasts and fleeing LA just like Bisario and Gistus Pleth fled Constantinople.
To us, this might look like everything we've ever known culturally is falling apart. But it's clear that new, freer institutions are being built on the ruins of the old dinosaurs. People can finally say what they think. And while the algorithm currently weaponizes this to divide us, I see more and more commonality amongst the voices online in recognition of who is actually screwing us.
But let's land the plane here. It's incredibly important to recognize the problems that surround us, but it's equally important that we don't lose hope. The internet can make it feel like the world is this incredibly vast place full of so many problems that it's not even worth trying to get your head around them.
This isn't true. Like the saying goes, think global, but act local like the greatest minds of the Renaissance did. Become an active member of the community in your city. Use your home space to create things instead of mindlessly consuming. Accept that the only constant in life is change.
And you can start making small changes today to make the future a bit brighter. Also, and this is important, if you truly want to fight AI, try something new and risky. And don't be afraid to be terrible at it. AI literally can't do that. Now, things will probably get worse before they get better. Just like the chaos and calamity of the 14th century paved the way for the cultural rebirth of the 15th and 16th.
Things move much quicker these days and changes that once took a hundred years now happen in five. I'll get off my soap box here, but one more thing I want to say. I'm sure you remember during co when every commercial made some reference to these unprecedented times. I feel like that subconsciously taught people that we're living through some unique point in history that's never been seen before.
that we're charting new and terrifying waters. This just isn't true. Humans have survived before and will survive and thrive again. But what do you think? Do we have the potential for a new renaissance, or are things too far gone? Let me know in the comments. As always, I'm John. This has been MedievalMindset.
And remember, the past isn't gone. It's simply waiting to be rediscovered. Hallelujah.
