New Romanticism and the Wild Boy Dilemma

There are social consequences for abandoning technology and culture

Peter the Wild Boy

A friend of mine who lives in San Francisco and works in tech messaged me recently:

Burn it all down. Civilization isn’t worth it. I just want to climb trees and throw my feces.

He wrote this in the context of discussing the “New Romanticism” movement. This movement is part of the general backlash against the tech era. It’s a call to delete your social media accounts, put down your phone, and go outside. To reject algorithms and reconnect with nature.

Although my friend was being facetious about climbing trees and throwing feces, I think this depiction raises an interesting question: How many layers of technology and culture do we really want to strip away? And if a person were to really abandon technology and shed their culture, what would they become?

I’m reminded of the story of Peter the Wild Boy, the feral child who, in 1725, was discovered in a forest and became a "human pet" at Kengsington Palace in London. Jonathan Swift famously wrote about this incident in his essay “It Cannot Rain but It Pours, or, London Strewed with Rarities.” According to Swift, Londoners technically acknowledged that Peter was “a Christian like one of us,” but by all appearances he was treated more as a point of curiosity than as a respectable human being. Peter was a “savage” who “behaveth himself like a dumb creature.” (In addition to being feral, it’s likely that Peter was also mentally handicapped due to a genetic condition, but that was not known at the time.)

For humorous effect, Swift writes as though he finds a certain superior quality in Peter’s uncultured behavior. For example, Swift writes:

He expresses his joy most commonly by neighing; and whatever the philosophers may talk of their risibility, neighing is a more noble expression of that passion than laughing, which seems to me to have something silly in it; and besides, is often attended with tears.

Of course, Swift doesn’t really consider neighing to be superior to laughing. But that’s the joke. Peter’s behavior is so uncultured that to frame it as having some relevance within the broader culture is absurd, which is funny. Swift makes this joke over and over in the piece, with regard to how Peter eats, how he speaks, how he interacts with the ladies… As for how he sings, Swift really leans into the absurdity, writing:

He sings naturally several pretty tunes of his own composing, and with equal facility in the chromatick, inharmonick, and diatonick style; and consequently must be of infinite use to the academy in judging of the merits of their composers, and is the only person, that ought to decide between Cuzzoni and Faustina.

Peter the Wild Boy is an extreme case, but it serves to make a point that’s rarely made: If you fall sufficiently out of step with cultural advancement, you lose the ability to meaningfully interact with your contemporaries. At some point, you become a mere point of curiosity, a novelty item, a kind of “human pet” to society.

I recently stumbled on a news segment where an anchor was interviewing geriatric hillbilly-types about Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The segment was incredibly entertaining because the hillbillies were so ill-informed and out-of-touch that the interview quickly stopped being about what these people had to say and shifted to being a sort of comedy skit. It’s no wonder that an entire genre of comedy has risen up around highlighting the ignorance of the populace. When you find the right subject, it can be an endless trove of cheap entertainment.

A lot could be said about how the desire to reject technology and culture is a bit of a siren song that one should be wary of. It’s easy to romanticize the past, but the past was full of problems too. Even in the 1990s—which everyone seems to agree was a great decade—part of the excitement of the day was the whiff in the air of the amazing technologies that we were just about to start tapping into. And now we have them! In a sense, we are still culturally in the ’90s but with the technologies that everyone at the time desired. And 100 years from now, people may very well look back on this moment as the true golden age of humanity, so why not enjoy it?

Arguably, part of our fate as humans is that we’re called to participate in cultural advancement, whether we like it or not. In contemporary America, that means a minimum of 12 years of schooling followed by 50 years in the workforce, where pressure is put upon you to continually advance in your chosen profession. To avoid this life trajectory is to risk being ostracized by society, if not to become homeless and face starvation.

Notably, advocates for New Romanticism (who, incidentally, all seem to be highly educated and already successful middle-aged cultural commentators seeking validation from online communities they’ve carefully curated—but that’s another story) are really talking about extraordinarily minor tweaks to their own personal use of certain specific tech platforms and devices. Which I get: Being any sort of modern person involves trying to limit our consumption of overly-readily available treats. To eat fewer Oreos, as it were.

But, to the most ambitious proponents of the tech backlash, I will say this: Sure…go ahead and climb trees and throw your feces. The satirists will appreciate the material.

For more on New Romanticism, check out my conversation with

Naum Milyavskiy

on my podcast

Team Futurism

: “New Romanticism: Dissecting the Backlash to the Tech Era.”