Are We Entering a New Romantic Era?

Source: Are We Entering a New Romantic Era?, Kate Alexandra, 15:15, uploaded 2024-12-10, Watch Later position 639.

Kate Alexandra opens with a series of failed or exhausted technology promises. The metaverse was meant to become a virtual world for work and social life, yet its headsets and platforms never became ordinary. Apple’s mixed-reality headset has low sales, Web3 has failed to remake the world in the way its 2021 advocates expected, and artificial intelligence brings uncertainty about jobs alongside its promise. After two decades of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, Alexandra senses a loss of faith in the future that technology will provide.

She connects that exhaustion to an older period of upheaval. The first Industrial Revolution also changed work, communication, transport, and daily life at speed. Its disruption helped produce Romanticism, an artistic movement that turned towards imagination, spontaneity, nature, and intense human feeling. The historical parallel is the question that gives the video its title: could a similar response be forming now?

The first Industrial Revolution and Romantic feeling

Alexandra dates the first Industrial Revolution to around 1760, when factories, new forms of transport, and new energy sources spread from continental Europe into the United States. Mechanised textile work displaced labour-intensive jobs. The Luddites resisted this change through organised attacks on machines and factories. She stresses that they were skilled craftspeople defending their work from machinery operated by less-skilled workers, rather than superstitious enemies of progress.

The period also brought political upheaval. Revolutions took place in the United States and France, whilst Britain saw liberal ideas spread through pamphlets and the mass media that industrialisation had made possible. Parliamentary reform, suffrage, and atheism entered public debate. Romanticism grew within these radical conditions, as a way of feeling that valued what an industrial age treated as inefficient or secondary.

Wordsworth’s poems about the Lake District present nature as a source of wonder rather than a mechanism to be measured and controlled. They also helped send tourists into the landscape that inspired them. Alexandra describes the Romantic view of nature as a spiritual force threatened by cities and railways. The movement’s interest in older local cultures extended to medieval languages, Gothic stories, and the ghosts, abbeys, and knights that appeared in novels and poems. Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794, helped establish the Gothic novel as a major form.

This turn towards the irrational also shaped the movement’s view of science. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein reworked the myth of Prometheus into a warning for people who treat science as an automatic good, and Alexandra credits it with effectively inventing science fiction. Beethoven’s symphonies created a new emotional vocabulary for Western music. The movement also made martyrs of artists such as Thomas Chatterton, a young poet who died after poverty and despair drove him to drink arsenic. The Romantics read his death as evidence that a sensitive and gifted person could be destroyed by a cruel society, and later poets acquired similar tragic myths.

Alexandra pauses over the danger of historical parallels. She has spoken before about her suspicion of neat correspondences, since confirmation bias can make two periods look more alike than they are. The comparison therefore predicts no second Frankenstein. It identifies social conditions that might support a new artistic movement.

The exhausted present and its cultural signs

Alexandra finds the present conditions familiar. People feel wary of technology’s effects on work and media, whilst technology changes the way they reach both. She draws on Ross Barkan’s argument that the creative class has spent two decades watching digital technology cheapen music, television, and cinema. Barkan links this pressure to the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 and imagines a Romantic response as an unstable force whose eventual target remains unclear.

Alexandra thinks Barkan overstates the case when he treats every part of the media landscape as cheapened, though she accepts his point about cinema. The largest films often rely on sequels and remakes, which makes the period feel close to the end of an oversaturated intellectual-property cycle. She points to Saltburn and Challengers as mid-budget films that exceeded expectations through creative marketing and online discussion without depending on an established franchise.

Fashion offers a more visible historical echo. The New Romantics were an underground movement that formed in London nightclubs during the late 1970s and 1980s. They drew on glam rock and on the earlier Romantic period, with theatrical and eclectic clothes that made appearance part of the performance. Alexandra notes that Vogue and Dazed have begun to connect this maximalist style with current trends. The Dazed forecast she links describes a return to bows, blush, exaggerated hair, theatrical make-up, and a more playful relation to gender and artifice.

Spirituality supplies another correspondence. The early internet carried a new atheism that took its name in 2006, gathered around books and online spaces such as Reddit’s r/atheism, and treated debate as a contest in which one side could destroy the other with logic. Alexandra follows Pete Whitehead’s account of the movement’s later turn towards the political right and the identification of some atheist YouTube channels as gateways into the alt-right. Whitehead’s point, as Alexandra presents it, is that “rational” became an identity people claimed for themselves rather than a method they used to test a claim.

The spiritual mood online has since changed. Paganism, witchcraft, folk magic, and New Age practices have become more visible, and Alexandra describes witchcraft as one of the fastest-growing spiritual paths in America. The claim comes without a named study in the video, so it remains her report. She uses manifesting as the clearest example: the belief that the mind can shape reality through desire and magical practice.

Alexandra traces modern manifesting to the New Thought movement of the nineteenth century and to Neville Goddard, an early twentieth-century writer and mystic. Goddard drew on William Blake’s belief that imagination contains an inner divinity and has the power to reshape reality. The line between Romantic spirituality and contemporary online spirituality therefore seems direct to her. Both give the imagination a force that rational systems cannot fully explain.

The danger inside a Romantic revival

Alexandra refuses to treat a new Romanticism as an automatic good. Romanticism can turn away from community and the present in its search for an older, more meaningful world. Its defence of feeling can become a rejection of science, whilst its faith in individual creativity can become ego-driven. The movement’s taste for danger and hedonism also carries consequences that survive its art.

She locates one of those consequences in the modern habit of judging art through the life of its maker. Romantic poets wrote from their own experience and made the individual perspective central to the work. Lord Byron’s popularity grew after readers connected him with the charming, cynical, disillusioned hero of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He received love letters from admirers, and newspapers turned his affairs into public material. Alexandra calls him the first modern celebrity.

The personal myth could collapse under later scrutiny. Biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley revealed that the poet had abandoned his pregnant first wife, which damaged the image of him as an innocent angel. Alexandra uses this history to explain the current habit of placing an artist and their work on the same moral ground. Medieval art usually expressed the shared beliefs of its age rather than the private convictions of one painter. Romanticism made personal perspective part of artistic value, and contemporary media gives audiences an endless stream of posts and offhand remarks with which to judge the person behind the work.

Alexandra would prefer to let art exceed the morality of its maker. She worries that a new Romanticism could deepen the parasocial habit of treating the artist as part of the artwork, whilst celebrating individual genius as the main source of cultural value. The same movement that opens space for imagination can make the artist’s personality larger than the work and leave community outside the frame.

Cultural cycles and the place of art

The final turn returns to history. Alexandra describes Romantic tendencies as part of a recurring cultural movement. Hellenism followed the classical culture of ancient Greece, Gothic architecture opened the severity of Romanesque forms, the Baroque displaced Renaissance restraint, and Modernism reacted against Victorian Romanticism. Each swing takes a different form, so a future Romantic period would carry its own conventions rather than reproduce those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Alexandra still sees reason for hope. She mentions a recent Harper’s Magazine essay by Dean Kissick, who describes the contemporary art scene as stale. His conclusion, as she reports it, is that the unreality of the present gives artists who work with imagination an unusual opportunity. Alexandra wants art that opens consciousness through beauty or strangeness, that can move a person beyond explanation and into feeling. She treats this capacity as part of being human, a form of yearning that links present work to the art of earlier centuries.

Her answer to the opening question remains provisional. A new Romantic era may be forming through resistance to exhausted technology, renewed interest in spiritual practices, theatrical fashion, and art that values imagination. Its risks are equally present in the historical record: reaction, isolation, anti-scientific feeling, and the worship of individual personality. The useful part of the comparison lies in the possibility that artists can respond to an unstable period without pretending that irrationality itself supplies a politics or a truth.

Limits

The historical dates, examples, and interpretations belong to Alexandra’s account unless a linked reference is named. Her claims about Apple’s sales, the growth of witchcraft, current film performance, and the effects of technology do not come with full data in the video. The claims about New Atheism’s political trajectory draw on Pete Whitehead’s essay, whilst the fashion comparison draws on the Dazed forecast. The forecast itself treats New Romantics 2.0 as a beauty and style trend, so it provides evidence for an aesthetic analogy rather than for a broad social movement.

The video also treats the Romantic period as a fairly unified response to industrial rationalism. Romanticism contained different national traditions, political positions, and ideas about religion, art, and society. Alexandra acknowledges that a historical analogy can overstate continuity, and her prediction remains a cultural reading rather than a forecast supported by a defined measure.

Further reading / references

• The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms, Ross Barkan, The Guardian.
• Notes Toward a New Romanticism, Ted Gioia.
• A new Romanticism, Richard Nilsen.
• The Strange Online Legacy of New Atheism, Pete Whitehead, Theos Think Tank.
• Beauty forecast 2024: Girlhood-core evolves into New Romantics 2.0, Ellen Atlanta, Dazed.
• The Invisible College: Introduction, John Pistelli.
• Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, Northrop Frye.