There’s a concept from the early days of nanotechnology called grey goo. The idea was that self-replicating nanobots, left unchecked, would consume all available matter and convert it into more nanobots — an exponentially expanding mass of identical, purposeless material that would eventually cover the earth. Colorful apocalypse scenario. Never happened with nanotech. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately in relation to AI and culture.

I came across the phrase “mid mid technology” recently — the idea that some technologies promise a lot, disrupt a fair amount, and then turn out to be just… mid. Not transformative, not useless. Somewhere in between, permanently. The important qualifier is that things don’t go back to normal. The disruption is real even if the revolution isn’t. The world after a mid mid technology is different from the world before it — just not in the ways anyone predicted.

Social media was probably the first mid mid technology at cultural scale. It promised connection and democratized voice. It delivered both, and also delivered engagement-optimized outrage loops, the collapse of local journalism, and an epistemological crisis that we’re still figuring out. Not grey goo exactly — but the mechanism was similar. A self-replicating system optimizing for the wrong thing, producing exponentially more of something that looks like content but functions as noise.

AI is doing this to culture faster and with less friction than anything before it.

I’ve been a DJ since college. I care about music the way people who have spent decades digging through crates care about music — as something that requires a human being to have had an experience, processed it, and found a way to express it that resonates with other human beings having their own experiences. That’s what makes a great record. That’s not what’s happening when an AI generates a song in the style of a genre by averaging its training data.

What AI produces isn’t bad, exactly. It’s competent. It’s plausible. It covers the surface features of the real thing without containing the thing that makes the real thing matter. And because it’s cheap and fast and infinitely scalable, we’re going to get a lot of it. Exponentially more of it. A grey goo of plausible, competent, deeply hollow cultural product spreading across every medium.

Here’s what I find genuinely interesting about that: it might create a market.

We already see it in food. Industrialized agriculture gave us cheap, abundant, nutritionally adequate calories. It also gave us a generation of people who will pay a significant premium for something that was actually grown by someone who gave a damn about it. The farmers market is a direct reaction to the grey goo of industrial food.

I think something similar happens with culture as AI content floods the zone. Not immediately — the grey goo phase might last a while and it won’t be pretty. But on the other side of it, I think there’s a meaningful market for bespoke cultural work: music made by people who lived something, films where a human being made choices, writing where you can feel the friction of someone actually thinking. The premium product in a grey goo world is the thing that’s irreducibly human.

Which is either a reason for optimism or a very expensive consolation prize. I haven’t decided which.