Shared Rooms

We made shrimp and tofu soup for lunch the other day. My wife handled the broth and orchestrated the overall composition and timing of ingredients going into the pot. I chopped and prepped the veggies and proteins, and set the table. We’ve been cooking together long enough that there’s a rhythm to it now, a quiet division of labour where you stop having to ask who’s doing what. I know when to step in to stir. She knows when to take over the chopping. Much of the work is anticipation. Sensing the timing of the next move.

The soup came out brimming with flavour, colour, and texture, a meal we both thoroughly enjoyed. And it cost almost no stress to make.
It struck me later that this kind of effort barely registers as activity in any economic sense. Two people made each other lunch. Nothing was monetized, scaled, or optimized. Nothing was disrupted. Yet it was high value work for both of us.

After lunch we discussed the news. The Strait of Hormuz was still closed. I’d been reading about how the war in the Gulf is squeezing the global helium supply, which matters because it turns out helium is a critical coolant in the fabrication of the chips that power, among many other things, the AI data centres being built faster than the grid can support them. I made a joke about the price of party balloons spiking. We both laughed, then we both stopped laughing, because the joke was actually about an entire production stack that nobody really controls.

The conversation eventually went to questions about whether anyone is actually steering. The systems most of us depend on are running on inputs no one can fully verify, the institutions look more brittle every month, people are disoriented and anxious. So what gets people through stretches like this?

Back in the nineties, when the world had a different but recognizable feeling of imminent unravelling, the rave movement gave my generation an outlet. PLUR was our rallying cry. Peace, love, unity, respect. Warehouse parties organized by loose collectives, found through early online networks and hand-circulated flyers, scattered communities discovering each other, music as the unifying technology, gatherings providing a sense of belonging. It worked for a window of time. It’s reasonable to ask what the equivalent might be for this moment, when the threats seem larger and the hope slimmer.

The rave movement worked because of the warehouse. The physical rooms people gathered in. The presence of specific bodies in a specific space sharing a specific night. The internet helped scattered people find each other, but the experience itself was deeply local, and the moment it scaled past the room it lost its original meaning. What survived from the movement wasn’t the genre or the chemistry, it was the lesson that meaning is created in shared rooms, by people who chose to be in them together.

A few days ago, hundreds of people showed up at an art gallery in New York for an event called AI Pychosis Summit. A DJ played thumping techno. Interactive art installations lined the walls. Diet Coke and LaCroix were the only options at the bar. No corporate sponsors, no brand activation, no panel discussion, no networking app. Just a room, a sound system, and like-minded people who decided to be in it together. Sounds a lot like a rave. Same vibe, different decade.

One reason we keep looking for the next big wave is that we’ve been trained to. Nilay Patel has been calling it software brain, the habit some people have of seeing the world as algorithms, databases, and loops, scaling everything up until it works at population level. Software brain built a lot of what we now rely on to run our lives. It’s also the mindset that keeps insisting the answer to a civilizational crisis has to be a global movement, a unified theory, a single answer for everyone at once. It can’t imagine that the answer might be many small answers already happening.

Yet they are happening. Gen Z is currently leading a quiet, deeply unspectacular rebellion that the major media keeps mistaking for nostalgia. Flip-phone summer. Vinyl listening parties. The Luddite Club teens who meet in Prospect Park to read paper books in silence. The Offline Club, now in nineteen cities. Walking groups, knitting circles, dinner parties with phones in a basket by the door. Forty-seven percent of people under thirty are actively trying to reduce their screen time. They look like a niche to anyone measuring with software-brain instruments like engagement, virality, and scale. They aren’t a niche. They represent the most coherent value-shift of the past two decades, and the reason it doesn’t read as one is that it refuses to optimize.

This is, perhaps, the rave equivalent. Not a new movement waiting to be born. A movement already running, in shared rooms, by people who decided that presence is the technology. Historically, all movements have been started by small groups gathering in rooms, joined by a common interest. Since the COVID pandemic forced us all to experience life in physical isolation, we've developed a greater appreciation for being in the same room together.

There’s a point Dylan Patel made in a recent interview that’s relevant here. AI has made execution cheap. What was hard to build is now relatively easy. What remains scarce, what stays valuable, are high-quality ideas. Taste. Judgment. The kind of things that get made in a room with other people, against the grain of what the system optimizes for.

That tracks with what the Gen Z movement is reaching toward without quite naming it. If the machines are going to do more of the executing, the human work shifts. It becomes about which executions are worth doing, and why, and for whom. Those questions don’t get answered at scale. They get answered in kitchens, at dinner tables, in walking groups, in the small rooms where the people you live with and near can disagree with you and you can still be friends afterward.

We finished the soup. The dishes got done. I put on a record by Kruangbin, a soulful band we both liked to groove to. We danced together, socked feet gently sliding on the kitchen floor. The room we were in was where meals and meaning are made. Beyond it, the wars continued, the screens kept blinking, the people in charge kept arguing, the media kept guessing. Inside it, two people had made each other lunch and enjoyed each other's presence.