Turing by Day, Thompson by Night
(Continuing Praise for the Wild Ones)
As I wrote about recently here, I’ve been thinking about this strange double-life some of us seem to be living now.
Days plugged into the most democratized technology in human history, nights unplugged and scribbling like our lives depend on it. It’s almost comical: we hand our thoughts to a machine all afternoon, then run to a notebook the moment the sun goes down like fugitives escaping our own circuits.
But what if this isn’t cognitive dissonance?
What if this is the point?
AI has shoved every one of us into an unexpected role: co-architect of the future dataset. Every prompt, every idea, every story becomes a signal added to the collective canon. It’s messy. It’s thrilling. It’s wildly destabilizing. And I can’t shake the feeling that it’s doing something to us psychologically — something old, cyclical, something that echoes a very familiar pattern.
If you tilt your head just right, you can see the shape of it.
A New Dark Ages, But the Darkness Isn’t What We Thought
People talk about “the dark ages” like it was one long medieval nap.
But historically, the darkness wasn’t a lack of genius. It was a lack of connection. Knowledge locked away in monasteries, literacy limited to elites, creativity surviving in pockets instead of permeating the culture.
Then came the Renaissance, and everything exploded. Not because humans suddenly got smarter, but because they suddenly got access.
A printing press - mass literacy and distributed thought. A new relationship to knowledge. More than artistic, the shift felt psychological. People woke up to themselves.
Our modern “dark ages” isn’t medieval ignorance.
This time, I wonder if it’s something subtler: the autopilot era.
And, weirdly enough - TOO much connection… and constantly.
A decade-plus of hyperconnected dopamine loops, of hopping from notification to notification, mistaking reaction for participation. Maybe individual creativity atrophied not for a lack of ideas (I mean, we’re humans… we’re full of them!), but because we buried them under the constant urgency of other people’s signals. Bookstores emptied. Attention spans frayed. Even teachers started fighting to keep thirty seconds of focus in a classroom.
If the historical dark ages were defined by limited access, maybe the hallmark of ours is limitless distraction. (And we wonder why our mental health is suffering.)
AI — A Strange, Jarring Catalyst
So what happens when you introduce the most immersive, controversial, mind-bending technology we’ve ever seen… into a culture that’s been creatively underfed?
Something fascinating.
AI forces us to confront ourselves — our habits, our voice, our identity — in a way that earlier tech never did. The internet let us scroll. Social media let us perform. AI makes us reflect. It pushes our thinking back at us. It mirrors our contradictions and surfaces our blind spots. It asks us, loudly and relentlessly: “What’s yours?”
And the moment we log off, something primal rushes through the cracks.
For me, the deeper I go into AI collaboration, the louder my pen becomes when I’m nowhere near a screen. It’s like the machine presses on one side of my mind, forcing the other side to expand. I’ve been writing like someone set my subconscious on fire.
What if that’s not a personal quirk… but a cultural signal?
The Renaissance Pattern Starts With Tension
Historically, every renaissance begins with a disruption that makes people question:
Who am I?
What do I believe?
What does it mean to create?
AI is that disruption.
To be clear, it’s not the replacement, it’s the spark.
It confronts us with the question we’ve been avoiding: What if all the reactivity of the last decades wasn’t a permanent decay… but the darkness before the creative dawn?
Weirdness as the New Human Literacy
Maybe AI won’t trigger a creative collapse.
Maybe it will force us to reclaim the parts of ourselves we’ve been outsourcing to distraction: curiosity, originality, depth, unruly imagination.
The best part is, maybe we each get to choose.
Maybe together we can turn “AI” into the pressure system that cracks the shell.
How ironic would it be if the “soul-killing robots” — the ones everyone fears will flatten creativity — end up being the match that reignites it?
What if the tools supposedly designed to homogenize us are the very ones waking us from our reactive haze and reminding us:
You were weird once.
You were wild once.
You were capable of ideas that didn’t fit inside any algorithm’s probability curve.
What if the renaissance isn’t coming?
What if we’re already in the early tremors of it?
Because while the world debates whether AI will kill creativity, a quiet rebellion is forming at the edges. I’m thinking of the people who spend their days collaborating with machines and their nights unleashing the strangest, truest parts of themselves onto the page.
Turing by day.
Thompson by night.
And in that tension… something might be rising.
Now it’s up to each of us to stop waiting for permission to claim it.
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, the world will not have it.” ~Martha Graham