The New Formation

The original Renaissance required people who had been shaped by classical knowledge to pick up a new technology and do something worth doing with it. We are approaching a similar intersection, and the question is whether enough people will be formed deeply enough to meet it.

Let me start with the political situation, because this essay doesn't make sense without it.

Across the United States, public universities are losing funding, having programs cut, facing political interventions in what can be taught and researched. Federal grants are being frozen or clawed back. Diversity programs dismantled. Entire departments questioned not on academic grounds but on ideological ones. The assault is not subtle and it is not new, but it has reached a scale and a directness that makes it qualitatively different from what came before. The institutional infrastructure that has shaped critical thinkers for generations is being hollowed out in real time.

This is happening while, from a completely different direction, artificial intelligence is making individual production so efficient that the question of why anyone needs institutional formation at all is starting to sound reasonable. A single person with the right tools can now produce written analysis, visual design, software, research synthesis, and strategic thinking at a level that five years ago required a team. The one-person shop, the AI-enabled artisan, is becoming not just viable but attractive. Why spend four years and six figures at a university when the tools are available now and the institution might not survive long enough to hand you a diploma?

Two forces, converging from opposite directions, and between them a gap that neither force acknowledges: the question of how people become the kind of people who can use powerful tools wisely. How judgment forms. How taste develops. How someone learns to distinguish what is authentic from what merely performs authenticity. How the capacity for original thought survives contact with machines that produce convincing approximations of it.

That gap is what this essay is about.

The blind spot

The attacks on universities are driven by political calculation, not by a theory of human development. The politicians defunding higher education are not asking what will replace it as a site of intellectual formation. They don't care. The point is control, not cultivation.

The AI-enabled efficiency revolution has a different motivation but a similar blind spot. The technology community is asking how to make individuals more productive, more capable, more independent of institutional overhead. Good questions, practical questions, and almost none of them address what happens inside the person using the tools. The assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes just ambient, is that the tools themselves confer capability. That access equals competence. That if you can produce the output, the question of how you developed the judgment to know whether the output is any good becomes irrelevant.

Both forces share an indifference to formation, and that indifference is the crisis.

I use the word formation deliberately. Not education, which has become too tangled with credentials and institutions to carry the weight I need it to carry. Formation: the slow, often uncomfortable process by which a person develops the internal architecture to think clearly, judge carefully, and create something that bears the mark of genuine understanding rather than sophisticated pattern-matching. Formation happens through contact with difficult ideas, through the friction of other minds that disagree with you, through the experience of being wrong in ways that can't be optimized away. It takes time. It resists acceleration. And it is exactly what both the political and the technological forces are, in their different ways, making harder to come by.

The parallel that matters

The printing press arrived in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century and within decades the volume of written material available to ordinary people increased by orders of magnitude. Books that had been locked in monasteries, copied by hand at enormous expense, could suddenly be reproduced cheaply and distributed widely. The technology was revolutionary in the most literal sense.

But the printing press did not cause the Renaissance.

What caused the Renaissance was a generation of people who had been formed by classical knowledge, who had spent years in contact with Greek and Roman thought, who had developed the intellectual architecture to do something with the new distribution technology beyond reproducing what already existed. Petrarch didn't need the printing press to rediscover Cicero's letters. He needed the formation to recognize what he'd found and to understand why it mattered. The press came later, and what it did was amplify what people like Petrarch had already begun.

The technology without the formation produced pamphlets, propaganda, astrological charts, sensational accounts of miracles and monsters. An enormous volume of material that was technically sophisticated (printed, distributed, consumed at scale) and intellectually empty. The formation without the technology stayed trapped in small circles, brilliant but contained. The Renaissance happened at the intersection: people with deep formation using a powerful new tool to say something that could not have been said before, or said as widely, or with such consequence.

Every element of that convergence has a contemporary analogue, and I don't think the parallel is decorative. Classical knowledge is being rediscovered, not from monastery shelves but from the wreckage of an information ecosystem that buried it under algorithmic noise. A new technology is arriving that amplifies individual capability by orders of magnitude. Institutional authority is fracturing. And somewhere in the middle are the people who will either use the new tools to produce the contemporary equivalent of astrological pamphlets or will use them to initiate something genuinely new.

The determining factor, then as now, is formation.

What I found in my own practice

I should be specific here, because the argument I'm making is not theoretical for me.

I write essays on cybersecurity, systems thinking, and AI. I've done this for some time, long enough though to have a voice that I recognize as mine, shaped by three decades of working in technology and by the reading and thinking that accumulated alongside the professional work. When I began using AI tools in my writing process, which I do, openly and without apology, I noticed something that troubled me.

The output was good. Often very good. Coherent, well-structured, stylistically competent. And it wasn't mine.

Not in the obvious sense of plagiarism. The AI wasn't copying someone else's work. It was producing a plausible version of the kind of writing I do, assembled from patterns in the training data, and the result had the shape of my thinking without the substance of it. The right vocabulary, the appropriate structure, the expected moves. What was missing was harder to name: a certain friction, the places where my actual thought process resists smoothness, the moments where I change direction mid-paragraph because the idea I started with turned out to be less interesting than the one that interrupted it. The texture of a mind working, not the performance of a mind having worked.

I could have ignored this. Many people do, and I don't say that as judgment. The output was publishable. It would have passed any reasonable quality bar. But something in me resisted, the same instinct that makes me uneasy when a room full of people at a dinner party are all performing engagement rather than experiencing it. The Reality Hunger instinct, I suppose, applied to my own production.

So I built a framework. Not a set of prompts or a style guide, but a discipline. A structured, iterative practice for maintaining authentic voice inside machine-assisted production. I want to emphasize each of those words because they each do specific work. Framework: structured, codified, not left to intuition. Discipline: practiced repeatedly, refined through failure, requiring sustained attention. Authentic: mine, recognizably mine, bearing the marks of how I actually think rather than how a model predicts I might think. Machine-assisted: the human leads, the machine serves. Not machine-replaced. Not machine-only.

The process of building this framework taught me something I hadn't expected. The discipline required to maintain authentic voice in AI-assisted work is itself a form of formation. It forced me to understand my own writing more deeply than I ever had. To identify what makes my thinking mine rather than generic. To develop a conscious relationship with my own cognitive patterns, my tendency to self-correct mid-argument, my habit of distrusting conclusions that arrive too neatly, my preference for questions that stay open over answers that close. The machine, by producing convincing approximations of my voice, made me examine what my voice actually consists of. And the framework I built to maintain that voice became, unexpectedly, a tool for knowing myself as a writer in ways I hadn't needed to before.

This is what I mean by formation through technology rather than against it. The AI didn't form me. The discipline of working with AI while refusing to let it replace my thinking, that's what formed me. The tool was the occasion, not the cause.

The artisan and the pamphleteer

The AI-enabled individual operator, the one-person shop, the artisan with powerful tools: this figure is real and growing. I meet them constantly. Developers who build products that would have required a team of twenty. Analysts who synthesize information at a scale that would have demanded a department. Writers who produce and distribute work that would have needed an editor, a publisher, a marketing apparatus.

Some of them are extraordinary. They use the tools to amplify genuine expertise, deep knowledge, hard-won judgment, the kind of understanding that only develops through years of contact with a domain. The tools make them faster, wider in reach, more prolific. But the foundation is human formation: they know their subject, they know their craft, they know what good looks like because they've spent years learning to see it. The AI accelerates what they already are.

Others worry me. They produce work that is technically impressive and substantively hollow. The tools have given them the capacity to generate output that looks like expertise without the formation that expertise requires. Fluent analysis that doesn't quite hold up under scrutiny. Persuasive arguments built on patterns rather than understanding. Content that performs knowledge without possessing it. The contemporary equivalent, and I don't think I'm stretching the analogy, of a beautifully printed astrological pamphlet: sophisticated in production, empty in substance.

The difference between these two figures is formation. And the crisis, the one that the political attacks on education and the technological enthusiasm for efficiency both ignore, is that we are systematically undermining the conditions under which formation happens while simultaneously increasing the power of the tools that make formation necessary.

Why it will happen anyway

I said at the outset that a new renaissance is coming. Let me explain why I believe this despite the forces working against it, or maybe because of them.

The original Renaissance was not planned. No institution decided it was time to rediscover classical knowledge and integrate it with new technology. It emerged from individuals who felt the inadequacy of what was available to them and went looking for something deeper. Petrarch climbing Mont Ventoux and reading Augustine at the summit wasn't following a curriculum. He was following a hunger.

That hunger is visible now, and growing. I wrote about it in The Reality Hunger: the fatigue with synthetic media, the turn toward the unmediated, the craving for contact with something real. In The Presence Test I complicated the picture, arguing that the hunger isn't for physical presence per se but for authentic encounter, for experiences that respect you rather than extract from you. This essay extends the argument further: the hunger isn't only for authentic experience. It's for authentic capability. People want to be able to do real things, to think real thoughts, to produce real work, not to generate sophisticated approximations of these and hope nobody notices.

The political destruction of educational institutions will not kill this hunger. It will intensify it. When the official channels of formation are degraded or closed, people seek formation elsewhere. They always have. The Renaissance itself happened partly outside the established institutions, in workshops and studios and private libraries, in networks of correspondence between individuals who shared texts and argued about them across distances. The university system was part of the story, but it was never the whole story, and some of the most important formation happened in spaces that looked nothing like classrooms.

AI, paradoxically, will accelerate this. Not because the tools themselves provide formation (they don't) but because the gap between what the tools can produce and what a formed human can produce will become increasingly visible. We are approaching a period where AI-generated content is abundant, competent, and mediocre, and the work that stands out will be the work that carries the marks of genuine human formation: originality, judgment, the willingness to be wrong in interesting ways, the capacity to hold contradictions without resolving them into false clarity. The tools will raise the floor. Formation will remain the ceiling.

And the people who develop that formation, whether through traditional education or through the kind of disciplined practice I described in my own work or through means we haven't invented yet, those people will constitute the new renaissance. They won't reject the technology. They'll use it the way the Renaissance humanists used the printing press: to amplify what they already know, to distribute what they've genuinely thought, to connect with others who share the hunger for something more than sophisticated reproduction.

The question that remains

I don't want to end with false confidence. The conditions for a new renaissance are assembling, but conditions are not guarantees.

The original Renaissance required a critical mass of formed individuals who found each other, influenced each other, built on each other's work. It required patrons and institutions (however imperfect) that valued deep knowledge. It required a culture that recognized the difference between the pamphlet and the treatise, between the printer who reproduced and the thinker who created.

We may or may not develop these things. The political forces attacking education are powerful and they are winning in many places. The economic incentives favor production over formation, output over understanding, speed over depth. The tools themselves are seductive precisely because they make formation feel unnecessary: why spend years developing judgment when the machine produces something that looks like judgment in seconds?

The answer to that question is the answer to everything else in this essay. And it's the same answer the Renaissance gave, though it took a century to fully articulate it: because the human who has been formed can do something the machine cannot. Can see what the pattern-matcher misses. Can hold the contradiction that the optimizer resolves too quickly. Can produce work that bears the mark of a consciousness that has been shaped by contact with the world, not just by contact with data.

The hunger is there. The tools are there. The institutions are fracturing. Somewhere in the middle are the people who will pick up the new technology and do something with it that could not have been done before, because they brought to it something the technology could not provide for itself.

Formation is that something. And the renaissance begins when enough people decide it matters enough to pursue, with discipline, even when no institution requires it of them.

This essay continues the sequence begun with The Reality Hunger and The Presence Test. All three explore what remains irreducible in an age of synthetic everything, and what it demands of us.