In which I’m moved and other people are moved and I’m moved by them being moved.

Lay all your love right on my door

This music video (link below) found its way to me on LinkedIn just a day or two after its release, which means it had quickly burst the banks of the channels that usually contain the youth soup. Something was going on. Here’s what I think it was.

The film is transcendent. It’s over seven minutes long and I’ve watched it more than a dozen times from start to finish. Yikes, that means I’ve given it the best part of two hours, which actually feels like no time at all. I’ve been hooked by scenes that are taut, wanton, and savage. I’ve been captivated by set-piece tableau shots that could be oil paintings. I’ve been transfixed by choreography that has the supernatural beauty of a starling murmuration.

You can see the attention-holding impact of the choreography (it starts at about half way) in the viewing level graph below:

It’s a film in two acts, in which we see two sides of adolescent masculinity, set to two Gener8ion tracks: Storm I and Storm II.

Act I is lawless, violent, and nihilistic. There’s no order. There’s no respite. There’s a bully and a mob.

In Act II the same boys coalesce to perform as a single organism. It’s vital, graceful, and organic. The beasts make beauty.

The video contains swearing, drug abuse, and thuggery. To me the whole thing’s poetry, but I’m sorry if it’s not what you signed up for. See you in two hours.

Go take the darkness out my heart

People have reacted to the film with admiration and wonder. You’d expect that. It’s a work of art. But there’s also been a wave of relief and gratitude. That’s unusual. And it’s a telling response to a work of humanity.

Gavras* we love you, thanks to remember us what humans can do with art.

YouTube comment.

*The video was directed by Romain Gavras.

The heartfelt outpouring is a reflex response, triggered by AI anxiety and slop fatigue. This video is Made by People, which is way more relevant and reassuring as a badge of quality than Made in Britain ever was.

You can see in the comments that for every person saying “wow” there are several people saying “thank God”. Thank God there are still humans working in unison with other humans to conjure a piece of art into existence: imagining, casting, choreographing, rehearsing, lighting, performing, filming, editing. Thank God there was a crew behind this, not a prompt. This is work with soul.

In The Boy in the Bubble, Paul Simon tells us that “these are the days of miracle and wonder.” AI technology may seem like a miracle, but there’s no wonder to the output. It’s a soulless void. The void in the bubble.

People are clamouring to see a making-of film for the Storm promo. That doesn’t happen with AI-generated video. With so-called AI, there is no behind the scenes, unless it’s the copyright colonisation of the training material.

Art, and the meaning of art, is something that happens in human brains. It doesn't exist out in the world separate from a human brain. One of the things that changes our feelings about something is our knowledge of where it came from, how it came into being.

Brian Eno, Life With Machines, talking to Baratunde Thurston about art in the age of so-called AI

Like an empty fire, your desire

I’ve been reading about the psychology of longing in the latest book by Rob Hopkins: How to Fall in Love with the Future. He describes how imagining and aching for an appealing and feasible future is a stronger impetus to action than doom-laden truth telling about the present. And, in his view, therefore, artists, not activists, are best equipped to lead the way.

And the current edition (May 2026) of the Byline Times has a collection of features on ‘Machine Yearning’. A common reaction to the colonisation of work by so-called AI, and to the atomising effect of (anti) social media, is a yearning for human connection: “Funnily enough, what matters to people is other people.”

The Storm video has given people an outlet for this deep-seated yearning.

I see your love, your tears

What is work for? There’s a hierarchy of work needs. At the bottom is the basic need of earning money: bread on the table and a roof over your head. But there are higher levels where work is part of our identity.

We have an occupation. Work occupies us. It provides focus.

Work is business. Work is busy-ness. It makes us feel useful. It keeps us out of mischief.

We work in companies. Work provides company. At this basic level - people working together - every organisation is a social enterprise.

Someone asked me recently when I was happiest in my work. It was on film shoots. As an account director, I got to tag along and look after clients when we shot TV commercials. Whether it was on location in Utah or on set at Pinewood, a shoot was an intoxicating blend of creativity, competence, and camaraderie. Great people with great stories pulling together to make something.

People can tell that there’s this kind of collective joy and fulfilment behind the Storm video. And they know that so-called AI threatens to eradicate these experiences in the name of productivity.

Got a death wish

I wouldn’t touch so-called generative AI with your bargepole, let alone mine.

I understand that, for many people, this is the quaint opinion of a dinosaur in denial. But I was around in 2007 for the Wild West period of social media and digital marketing. I dived in then like y’all are today with so-called AI. I was smitten with the possibilities: the democratisation of creativity, markets as conversations, the support networks, the means for everyone to find their people. It was all good. We couldn’t imagine then the accelerated and exacerbated polarisation of society, the firehose of hate, the undermining of democracy, the industrialised surveillance, the brutal impact on mental health.

My gut tells me that the long-term effect of so-called AI will be far worse than that of social media. So I’m steering well clear.

And I enjoy my work. I enjoy working things out for myself. I enjoy getting lost in the research. I enjoy interviewing people to learn from personal perspectives that haven’t been harvested to train an LLM. I enjoy knowing how and why I arrived at a recommendation. Why would I abdicate that joy to a machine?

I’m all for AI in the realm of benign science. Fill your boots if it can accelerate a cure for cancer. But in the realm of work and in the realm of art, so-called generative AI is the cancer. It shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the humanities, and I include the world of work under that banner.

I know it may hurt.

All this from a music video.

Postscript 1:

I mean we fuck up again and again and again. Any piece of technology that we develop, we either got from or put to use in war. We fuck up again and again and again.

And yet, for every fuck-up, there is a writer who is grappling with the fuck-up and bearing witness to the pain and the suffering and the joy and the hope and the whole freaking shit show. I can tell you the whole story. Modernism comes from World War One. Beat America, Jack Kerouac, comes out of World War Two. Don fucking DeLillo comes out of Vietnam and the rise of the technology state from that. You can just see writers are there to address this flow of history. And I would say that the only thing, maybe, that humanity has ever really done right is bear witness to its own thing...

I think that anybody who is writing seriously from the heart is bearing witness to this blind genius being that is humanity. And that's the soul; the part of us that is willing to and, in fact, needs to bear witness to the truth, to ourselves, to God, all of it. That's the soul. And you see it. You see the soul do its work over the course of human history. And what I'm winding up into is a long anti-AI speech, because why the fuck would we ever want to give that up, the one thing that we can do, and the one gift we've been given? We've been given that gift. We’re driven out of Eden, man. And yet the soul is there at some sort of level to give meaning to this seemingly meaningless current of atrocity.

Journalist Tom Junod, talking about ‘the horrible shadow of AI’ on the How I Write podcast, 7th January 2026

Postscript 2:

Behind the scenes rehearsal footage posted on Instagram by the Storm video choreographer, Damien Jalet:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DX8jXTEkvkX/