The rising movement: Rebel Romantics Fighting Tech Feudalism
Image courtesy of Spur Magazine
The following article was originally published in SPUR magazine in my Tomorrow column.
Recently, I've been captivated by a recurring conversation among cultural critics and appearing in fashion. The emergence of what's being termed "New Romanticism" first came to my attention reading Ted Gioa. I'm calling them 'Rebel Romantics' because they represent a backlash against our algorithm-saturated existences. "The modern creative class is fed up with two decades of digital technology that has radically cheapened culture, design, music, television and cinema.
States of Yearning
We're facing a time of desperation in the face of AI and social media. In the piece "Hopeful Romantics", Sebastian Smee’s analysis of romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich's work states "Romanticism is about yearning”. We hope for something different in the distance because we're simultaneously hyper-connected yet profoundly disconnected from what feels authentic and meaningful. The Rebel Romantics viscerally long for unmediated experiences that can't be captured in engagement metrics. This yearning drives their rebellion against algorithm-saturated lives and a crisis of imagination.
Cultural theorist Mark Fisher identified our deep cultural impasse in his 2012 analysis for Film Quarterly: we've lost "the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live," trapped in endless nostalgia loops. It's as if we've surrendered to recycling aesthetics because we've lost faith in distinctly new futures, unable to imagine systemic alternatives.
History repeats itself
There is historical precedent in the late 18th and early 19th century when a visceral reaction against industrialisation and rationalism emerged in Europe called ‘Romanticism’. Two hundred years ago, people got fed up with Rationalism. The thinking had emerged from the 1st industrial revolution. Rationalism was about systematising all knowledge, maximising profit and industrial manufacturing at any cost, eerily similar to today's AI world.
In "the rise of the new romanticism ," Ross Barkan explains "Machines displaced the old craftsmen and the workers that remained were punished through all their waking hours, forced to meet savage productivity goals." Like today's tech bros, they ignored human cost. It wasn't called Silicon Valley but the equivalent. Romanticism was a cry against it all with Mary Shelley authoring Frankenstein and Beethoven unleashing radical and emotionally intense symphonies, all at the same time as the French Revolution. Out of this were also born the first anti-child labour laws.
Today’s Digital Exhaustion and 'Witherwill'
Today we may not face the same labour abuses as in the 1700s but the mental toll of digital lives is impossible to ignore. 'Witherwill', coined by The dictionary of obscure sorrows author John Koenig, captures this perfectly – a deliberate withdrawal from digital demands for slower, meaningful existence with fewer to-do lists and more connections.
The numbers are staggering: 42% of workers across major economies report burnout, according to Future Forum Pulse research. Gen Z, despite being digital natives, displays particular fatigue – 58% report burnout while 93% express desire to improve their mental health. The Guardian’s “Reclaim Your Brain” newsletter helps readers reduce screen time, while dumb phones like the boring phone claim big collaborations with legacy brands like Heineken who understand the tide is changing.
The Radical Act of Inconvenience
Inconvenience is being reframed as desirable. Brooklyn-based artist Laiyonelth Hurtado articulated it perfectly for the Dazed newsletter The Weekly Echochamber: "We need to be moving from convenience to inconvenience... We need to tap into the inconvenience of going to the grocery store, having to order food at a restaurant, and feel like we are connecting with people on a daily basis."
This sentiment echoes Gen Z's growing attraction to analogue experiences – vinyl records, film photography, handwritten letters. Literary scenes resurge too, with magazines like Heavy Traffic drawing hundreds of people to Manhattan gallery readings. These aren't fringe signals but mainstream responses to collective digital fatigue. The deliberate friction these activities introduce isn't a bug; it's the feature. Time investment creates meaning precisely because it can't be optimised away. It's a call to action to get off our screens and reclaim our lives.
Aesthetic Rebellion
In fashion and music, the original New Romantics that took the world by storm in the 1980s combined ribbons and ruffles with post-punk rebellion, embracing androgyny during the AIDS epidemic. The aesthetic came from club culture, art and music, but was also rooted in politics, reaction to Thatcherite austerity.
Today's version builds on this foundation. As Dazed Beauty notes in "New Romantics 2.0": it takes "the ribbons of ballet-core with the moodiness of soft goth... the messiness of indie sleaze with the theatrics of regency core." It rejects both algorithmic minimalism and hyper femininity in favour of gender fluidity expressed through maximalist performance. Make-up artist Julian Stoller observes this approach "marries elements of stage make-up and circus with established beauty standards in order to truly subvert." This theatrical expressiveness rejects digital flatness and algorithmic taste-manipulation.
Fighting Enshitification and Tech Feudalism
Rebel Romantic are also response to "tech feudalism." Just as medieval serfs worked land owned by lords and paid a fee, we now labour in digital fields – creating content, providing data, offering attention – while tech giants extract unprecedented value. This feudal arrangement has accelerated through what internet critic Cory Doctorow calls "enshitification" – the inevitable decline of platforms as they prioritise extracting maximum value while delivering minimum benefits.
Look at Spotify, "rife with knockoff AI tunes and easy listening playlists that entice the median listener to forget who the creator of the music might even be" as Ross Barkan states, fundamentally altering our relationship with music through "opaque algorithms." The Rebel Romantics are directly resisting algorithmic determinacy – the notion that our cultural and personal choices should be dictated by black-box formulas designed to maximise corporate profit. By embracing analogue experiences and non-optimised creative processes, they are establishing independent cultural territories beyond algorithmic governance.
Parting Thoughts
The Rebel Romantics movement seeks to reclaim human agency. As we outsource intelligence to machines, human agency becomes more important than ever. The Rebel Romantics, regardless of how long this movement might last, remind us that technology should serve humanity, not vice versa. Just as the original Romantic movement two hundred years ago didn't destroy industrialisation but regulated its worst excesses through labour reforms. The recalibration of our relationship with the digital world is inevitable it seems.
By Geraldine Wharry
