Grandmas sit in chairs and reminisce
Boys keep chasing girls to get a kiss
The cars keep a-goin’ faster all the time
Bum still cries, “Hey, buddy, got a dime?”~ Sonny & Cher
On January 13, I wrote a post called “What Keeps You Up At Night?” Not long after it dropped, one of my friends remarked, “Your blog is getting a little AI heavy.”
I guess he was right. It didn’t go over well. I know I lost @ least one sub over it. But why? Is it because people are just bored by the “impressions” of Drag City in photo-realistic mode? Or is it something more reactive, more visceral? I find myself asking: are we in the middle of a great upheaval…or a great revival? As always, the truth is liable to be somewhere in between…
The Renaissance didn’t spring out of nowhere. It grabbed the bones of Greece and Rome and built something new on top of them. Romanticism looked backward too — myths, ruins, folk tales — and turned them into a new kind of electricity.
Even the 1980s, our decade that people still argue about like it’s religion, was full of borrowing: old sci-fi dreams, mid-century modernism, noir lighting, the chrome-and-neon future that started in the 1950s and finally got the budget to go all the way.
So when people clutch their pearls and say, “AI is just throwing our past back at us,” I want to say, “Yeah. So did we.” AI doesn’t invent the impulse to borrow. It just makes the borrowing easier. And that matters, because there’s something psychologically stabilizing about it — something a lot of us feel but don’t quite articulate.
When change gets high-velocity, people don’t just want novelty. They want continuity. They want anchors.
Cars.
Music.
Film.
Cultural memory.
Shared references that confirm you’re not crazy and you didn’t hallucinate your whole youth.
When everything is updating itself every six minutes — jobs, norms, technologies, rules, prices, language, identities, the whole operating system — the human brain reaches for something steady… something that still makes sense.
And that’s why the past gets louder when the future gets faster. It’s not regression. It’s grounding.
Here’s the deep irony, and it’s hard not to admire it even if you’re nervous about where all this is going:
The same technology that may destabilize institutions also lets you recreate the feeling of 1987 in 4K with perfect audio.
It accelerates the future while thickening the past. Call it dystopian if you must….but its also strangely poetic. Because it means we’re entering a weird era where the past isn’t fading the way it used to. It’s becoming… accessible. Callable. Revisitable. Remixable. Like a place you can return to, not just a story you tell.
The danger isn’t that people will go back. The danger is that they’ll go back and stay.
Because nostalgia has two modes:
Nostalgia as energy — a home base you can refuel at.
Nostalgia as anesthesia — a sedative you use to avoid the present.
And I get why people want the anesthesia right now. The present has been running pretty hot. The future looks like a blender full of buzzwords. We’re all expected to be adaptable, resilient, rebranded, re-skilled, re-optimized, and smiling through it like this is all normal. And sure, I get pissed off and even scared about that…
But…you can’t build a life out of sedation. You can’t build art out of avoidance.
Your humble blogger is a storyteller by nature: I say that straight-up in my “About” page; its a big part of what this site is for. I am a car enthusiast, a music lover, a technician, a mechanic, a historian, and a philosopher. There’s room for all these things on this blog. Often, I write about the nuts and bolts of Thunderjets and Hot Wheels, but just as often I write stories about the world I’ve built with those toys, a world that recaptures some of what I knew in my youth-and probably some of what you knew, too!
So yes, I’m using AI to reach back and grab the texture of the past. I don’t think that’s dangerous. I don’t think it’s cheating. I think it might be one of the more human responses to this moment. I am cognizant of overdoing that-of letting thunderjetheavencom devolve into a patchwork of computer-generated imagery…but when the images augment the stories I’m trying to tell and the mood I’m trying to invoke, that, IMHO, defines the proper use of a tool.
Just don’t confuse the home base for the destination. Use the past like a garage, not a bunker.
Go in there. Restore something. Tune it. Steal a part. Learn what made it work. Get your hands dirty. Remember who you were — and what mattered.
Then come back out and put that energy into something real, now!
Keep the past.
Ride the future.
Build something in between.
And the beat goes on
The beat goes on….