The World We Knew

I was sitting in an Uber with a friend in Accra, Ghana, when I noticed the music playing was AI-generated.

It was good too! Catchy, if only because it was so simple. It was good in that particularly ephemeral way typically reserved for elevator music and the knock-off copycat music cafes play when they want to play popular songs but avoid copyright complaints.

My friend and I were born in different countries. We spent our earliest years in different cultures, with different economic circumstances, in different worlds. But we both grew up in the 90s. So we both remember our first time listening to Michael Jackson's Thriller. Or 'I Believe I Can Fly', by R. Kelly. Every 90's kid growing up anywhere near the sphere of Western influence in that era, has those memories.

These songs arrived without our permission and embedded themselves permanently in our minds. We didn't choose them. Culture delivered them, and they became ours.

That's what music used to do. It happened to you. It hit.

The Music That Makes Us

There's a Drake album – Views – that I can place precisely in time. I remember the summer it dropped. I remember driving around the city with a friend, a senior associate at the corporate law firm where I worked, test-driving his new Porsche. The convertible roof down, wind blowing in the hair I still had. The specific feeling of that particular summer.

The album didn't just soundtrack those memories – it's inseparable from them. Twenty years from now I'll hear those songs and be immediately returned to that Porsche, that summer, and that version of my life.

You can trace a discography the way you trace a life. Adele's albums map onto her journey and somehow also onto yours. You know where you were for each one. The same is true of Taylor Swift, or Prince, or The Beatles, or whoever your favourite musician (in your lifetime) might have been. The music is a spine running through time that you can grab onto and feel exactly where you are.

I also remember listening to Boney M in the car with my father when I was ten. I was too young to own and keep the tracks I heard, but I can find that album today because millions of people listened to it and someone, somewhere, was smart enough to preserve it. It exists because it was shared widely enough to survive.

It persists in shared reality.

In the back of another Uber in 2025, on my first trip to Los Angeles, my driver told me about the AI music he makes for his kids. A blend of Christian rap and rock that doesn't really exist anywhere else.

His children are growing up with a completely personal soundtrack.

This is fine, as an individual parenting choice. But the second-order effects are likely bigger than you'd imagine, when you think it through.

Other kids like them will also have their own hyper-personal universes of music that they will never connect over, because the content was original to them and, if not deliberately saved, completely ephemeral.

Most AI music exists only within a three-month window of its first being heard. Unless you save it yourself, or share it widely enough that others make copies, it will simply not exist a year from now, let alone in 20.

You will not play it for your kids. There will be no way to find it. No way to return to it. No way to share it with someone who also remembers.

This is just music. But music is a window into something larger.

Windows of Shared Reality

Shared reality used to just happen to us. You didn't opt into Thriller or Boney M or Views. You didn't need to request it. Culture was a commons. A well that everyone drew from simultaneously, shaped by some intersection of nationality, class, generation, and geography.

What united 90s kids in Lagos may have differed from what united 90s kids in London, but there was influential overlap, and those wrinkles only added texture.

Algorithms began fragmenting shared reality through social media in the 2010s: when message boards flipped from being a shared chronological stream into a personalised feed aggregated for you.

AI seems to accelerate this fragmentation in a very different way.

When you searched Google, perhaps until the early 2020s (for the sake of posthumous review) you might have gotten personalised results. But the search engine was untethered to your worldview.

When you interact repeatedly with the AI in the late 2020s, however, each exchange narrows the next one. Like water through rock, the channel of your engagement gets deeper and more specific with each pass. Your information funnel becomes increasingly yours alone, and tuned to reinforce how you already think, what you already believe, and what you've already decided matters.

Turn and Face the Wall

If you've read a lot of my writing, this won't be the first time you've seen me reference Plato's famous allegory, but I find reflections of it everywhere.

Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners who've spent their lives watching shadows projected on a wall, mistaking those shadows for reality itself.

Crowds, and the consensus of shared reality can be beautiful and useful, but Plato's cave is a warning about confusing consensus for truth. I raise this here, as one of the downsides of over-prioritising consensus.

You see the disciples of 'consensus at all costs' among football hooligans, political partisans, scene kids, and other culture warriors.

The crowd's shared reality is a spectre akin to the shadows in Plato's cave. They create a form of reality but aren't the thing itself.

Trump's first election felt like a rude awakening to many people because they'd been watching shadows and assumed the whole cave looked the same. The shadows in their particular section of wall suggested one consensus. The actual cave contained something entirely different.

Pluralistic ignorance operates the same way — in studies of Muslim-majority populations, individuals privately often held more liberal views than they publicly expressed, because everyone assumes the group consensus is more conservative than it actually is.

This is how, in some worldviews, Iran seemed to bounce back and forth between a miniskirted liberal paradise and a veiled, despotic theocracy.

The majority don't deviate when everyone believes everyone else genuinely holds the dominant view. The shared reality becomes a cage of performed consensus that nobody actually holds.

But what the allegory doesn't address is that the absence of the cave wall isn't enlightenment, but a void.

The Way of the Bat

Bats navigate through echolocation. They emit sound and use the returning echo to build a picture of their environment.

I believe the cave wall itself, used well, can be a tool. Not because the wall itself is reality, but because bouncing signals off it can tell you where you are in relation to it; how close you are to certain walls and how far away.

Remove the wall, and the bat is lost; not because the wall was its truth, but because it was its orientation.

Shared reality works the same way.

The crowd isn't the world. The consensus isn't automatically correct. But crowds, used well, can be useful. Without walls to bounce off, you lose your bearings entirely. You need reference points to understand your own position.

Other people's realities, even when they differ from yours, tell you something about the shape of the space you're both navigating.

The danger isn't shared reality itself. It's mistaking it for the whole picture. Staring at the wall rather than using it. Absorbing the shadows rather than bouncing off them.

Which makes the dissolution of shared reality through hyper-personalisation not liberation but a different kind of imprisonment.

A boundless cave with no walls may seem like freedom, but can only deliver disorientation. In completely open space, with no reference points, no common touchstones, and no shared sense of serendipity or communion, you are simply lost.

Seek out the walls. Commune with the crowds. Not to stare at them, or get lost in them, but to find your bearings.

Seek communion — both accidental and deliberate. Dance with ideas, songs, poems and memories that can tie you to people you've never met and moments you haven't lived yet.

The world we knew was built from shared things that just happened to us. That world is getting harder to find, as we play more of an active role in what we encounter. Which means you have to go looking for it. Or surrender to the hyper-individual void.