The hardtech era feeds hunger for faster chips, for denser data centers, for ever-larger models of AI. In this regard, engineers have worked wonders: self-driving cars (almost), protein folding predictions, edge AI in our pockets. But still, something remains unfulfilled. Perhaps the old adage applies: the machinery is humming, the screens are glowing, and yet our hearts hunger. We want meaning, narrative, and beauty.
Such yearning is the need for a New Romanticism in technology. Not romantic in the 19th-century way of flower crowns and melancholy poets but in the sense of reintroducing human-centered imagination into the heart of our technical revolutions, for faster transistors alone will not mark the second coming. Instead, it will be the stories we craft around our machines and the felt-sense futures we decide to forge.
Ask any VC about the "next big thing," and their stories will talk about model parameters and edge compute footprints and encryption schemes. These are vital but address the can of technology rather than the should. An engineer asks:
"Can we build a 1-ms neural inference engine on a microcontroller?"
A poet questions:
"How will it feel when I whisper to my device, and it whispers back my memories?"
An engineer works with measures, whereas poets look into the concern of meaning. Each of them is incomplete when taken alone:
The New Romanticism combines them: it insists that every technical specification follow an emotional one. Every API has poetry.
Consider Spotify's Discover Weekly. The backstage: collaborative filtering, deep embeddings, billion-point graphs. For the audience: it is a weekly poem, a collection of 30 songs just for them. Product poetry is the intertwine of engineering and emotional narrative.
Imagine now your new phone, your new AR headset, your new 'memory spine'... These will not win some hearts with framerate and petaflops but:
The poet-engineer couple does not just create software, they embed the software in human experiences that resonate in our bones and flesh.
Hardtech accelerates faster than our moral intuitions can keep up. AI systems deployed without ethical imagination cause bias, surveillance, and alienation. Poets and philosophers serve as ethical cartographers, they map the unseen contours of human values.
By elevating poets to the core team, you bake ethical reflection into every sprint. You don't add ethics as an afterthought; you weave it into the product's DNA.
Engineers ask "What market exists today for this widget?" Poets ask "What new world could we dream into existence?" The greatest companies create markets that never existed:
The next blue-ocean will be the world as a living memory, a place where every object sings its story, every moment hums with context. To craft that world, you need:
One without the other is half-baked.
Take Björk's Biophilia, a project that wasn't just an album, but a technological cosmology. Released in 2011 as the world's first app-album, Biophilia fused music, astrophysics, and touch interaction into a digital experience that felt more like a living organism than a product. Each track came with an interactive app that visualized planetary motion, biological patterns, or harmonic structures. She commissioned engineers to build new instruments, like a gravity harp, while simultaneously acting as philosopher, artist, and system designer. The iPad became her medium not for convenience, but for intimacy. Biophilia wasn't about delivering content, it was about invoking wonder.
Björk shows us what happens when the poet leads the technologists: tools become metaphors, and screens become portals. She didn't optimize for engagement metrics. She built a world. And in doing so, she embodied the future where technology feels, listens, and sings back.
We stand at a crossroads. One path doubles down on raw computation, efficiency metrics, and incremental optimization. The other path leads to a Renaissance of Tech, where the makers are not only engineers but also poets, dreamers, and existential cartographers.
The companies that master this fusion will not merely capture market share. They will capture imaginations. They will write the next chapter of what it means to be human in a world woven of bits and atoms.
Because in the end, technology is not just code. Technology is culture, and culture is poetry in motion. The New Romanticism beckons: will you hear its call?
The world is becoming bland and monotonous for some reason, it can be much beautiful, so much more, let's make it more romantic.