“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold….The ceremony of innocence is drowned;…..The best lack all conviction, while the worst…Are full of passionate intensity.” (The Second Coming).
Then again, perhaps what W.B. Yeats felt then is what many of us feel now.
It is a matter of framing. Not what we are losing, but what is emerging.
There is an interesting report out from Anthropic on how AI is being used. The short version is that AI is increasingly moving from support to substitution, with businesses handing over whole tasks rather than using it as a tool alongside people. For most employees, this raises the risk that routine jobs will be automated away. At the same time, the benefits of augmentation, where AI works as a partner, primarily flow to high-skill sectors in wealthy regions. The divide is widening: those with access to rich contexts, education, and infrastructure are extending their capabilities, while others are left with narrower, more automated uses. Our obsession with the short term leads us to focus on jobs, yet that is a distraction - it is the systemic changes that will determine impact. AI is being deployed to make what we already do more efficient (or, more often, cheaper) when the opportunity lies in shaping what could be. We are encouraging paint-by-numbers rather than the art of work.
For artisans, this trend cuts both ways. On one hand, enterprise automation leans towards uniformity, threatening to flatten out differences and undermine the value of craft. On the other, it heightens the contrast and makes individuality, story, and human touch more valuable. The opportunity is to use AI not as a substitute but as an amplifier of creativity, context, and reach, extending markets, weaving in richer narratives, and offering something scale can’t. Craft becomes the counterweight to automation, the place where uniqueness still matters.
It presents us with a paradox. As humans, we want to be seen, heard and recognised. AI just acknowledges us, in a thin, “employee of the month” sort of way. When relationships give way to profit, the centre as we know it will not hold.
Calculation, rather than courage, is the hallmark of professional investment; guaranteed returns, not aspiration or exploration. We need to make the case for artisans and the generation of new value that inspires.
Chaos theory tells us that even in systems that appear disordered, there is a hidden structure beneath the turbulence. A strange attractor is not a fixed point like a pendulum at rest, nor a neat cycle like the orbit of a planet. It’s a dynamic pattern, a shape, around which the system organises itself in unpredictable but bounded ways. We’re accustomed to weather, ecosystems, and even economies displaying such behaviour. We are less used to cultures doing it. In this space, small changes can have a significant impact, and whilst we cannot predict exact paths, we know the system will orbit within a “strange attractor’s” shape and that beauty and coherence arise in what looks like disorder. I think that is where we have to place our attention - to frame what is emerging, not what is disintegrating.
I’ve often written about the role of artisans in change - it is this emerging space that they do their best work in. As Gal Beckerman shows in The Quiet Before, the most profound changes rarely announce themselves with noise or spectacle. They begin in hushed, marginal spaces, in pamphlets, salons, forums, or conversations that look inconsequential until, over time, they tilt the centre of gravity. What feels like turbulence or collapse from one angle is, from another, the quiet prelude to emergence. This is the terrain artisans occupy: small acts of craft, story, and experiment that prepare the ground for shifts that only later appear inevitable.
Artisans are, in many ways, strange attractors; their ethos, commitment to craft, and the stories they hold about what they do are invisible centres around which new ideas and ways of working form. They help shape boundaries, but do not follow blueprints.
They do not do it alone. As the rigid rules and boundaries of the established order fail, the new boundaries are porous and permeable. They are host to all manner of boundary crossers; heretics, trespassers, pirates and others whose efforts help bring a new order to what feels like chaos.
AI is just one example among many. Investors want it to play by the rules of the old economy, to be reliable and follow the story being woven around it, attracting eye-watering levels of investment. The thinking extends as we follow old rules and instruct people on how to use it, how to prompt, how to make obsolete models somehow less obsolete. The temptation is to use it like technology Botox, rather than recognise an ageing system. The heretics are out there, questioning everything from investment rationale to the orthodoxy that expensive large language, rather than much cheaper small language models, are where the real influence lies. Pirates abound, repurposing technology in ways that call into doubt the efficacy of traditional legal and governance structures.
Then, there are the alchemists, the neo-generalists, and the experimenters who utilise the power of technology to bring various disciplines and ideas into proximity. They are exploring what might emerge in the adjacent possible and transform the “base metals” of overlooked ideas into gold. The Artful Algorithms project (WVU) aims to enable AI to help decipher Maya glyphs by building datasets of annotated glyphs, combining art history, anthropology and computer science. In product R&D, AI is used not just to optimise existing designs, but to generate a larger variety of candidate designs (faster, more diverse), digging into previously discounted or unexplored combinations. In the Games sector, a tiny studio with three staff is showing struggling major studios the way home. And these are just the ones with PR budgets - who knows what is going on in the “garden shed” sector, as those with bright ideas no longer have to rely on those in their organisation to find ways of exploring them?
In my mind, artisans at this time embody all of these characteristics. They refuse orthodoxy and embrace paradox, and thrive in the energy of turbulence. They generate coherence through ethos, not control, and each in their own way acts as a “strange attractor” that draws others into new constellations of ideas and possibilities. Artisans are nodes in networks of generative heresy.
But they need somewhere to play outside the process-bound, rule-driven, wilfully blind performance theatres they currently work in. They are fed up with commentary - including mine - that points out the increasingly obvious.
Perhaps that is where our hope lies, not in the tired certainties of politicians or the rehearsed calculations of investors, but in the restless, experimental work of artisans, heretics, neo-generalists, and alchemists. They remind us that collapse is never only an ending; it is also the compost from which something new can take root.
If Yeats was right that “the centre cannot hold,” then maybe that is no tragedy. Perhaps the centre was never meant to hold forever. Perhaps our work is not to cling to it, but to notice the strange attractors already forming in the turbulence, to follow their patterns, and to cultivate the ethos that allows beauty to emerge from disorder.
Artisans know how to do this. They have always worked with fragments, edges, and the overlooked. They are skilled in dissolving the old, clarifying the essential, experimenting with the heretical, and integrating the new. They occupy the space where uncertainty can either energise the new, or resort to the aggressive defence of the old. It is a vital and dangerous space that feels very present right now. They are, in this sense, alchemists of uncertainty. We need them to succeed.
We feel perilously close to a time when our options could be closed down for us, so for this work to flourish, artisans need more than observation and commentary. They need spaces to play, to trespass, to recombine, to test what is possible without being strangled by orthodoxy or rhetoric. The future will not be secured by performance theatre and managed decline. It will be shaped, quietly but decisively, in the workshops, studios, and “garden sheds” where today’s generative heretics are already at work.
The task is simple, though not easy: to make room for them, to notice them, and to learn from them. In the turbulence of our time, they are the ones who can show us how to turn collapse into coherence, and how to transmute the lead of uncertainty into the gold of possibility.
This feels like the work I need to do now. To move New Artisans and Outside the Walls forward to create a space for creation as well as commentary.
I’m working on that, and will start no later than 1st October. I’ll keep you posted here, and at Outside the Walls.