Why Timothée Chalamet is wrong about opera’s place in our AI-ravished world

Timothée Chalamet drew widespread condemnation when he implied that opera is a dying artform, and said that “no one cares” about the medium anymore.

It was a dumb thing to say. And it’s also wrong.

Opera, like most performing arts, is still recovering from the pandemic. But the industry as a whole is actually growing–dramatically. 

Globally, opera is worth $3.4 billion, and is expected to grow to $5.33 billion over the next few years. First-time attendance has more than tripled since 2021, as more young people head to the opera house.

And opera’s resurgence is part of a bigger trend; in multiple ways and across age groups and formats, people are turning away from the digital and towards the analog. 

In a world ravaged by AI, people increasingly want things they can touch, own, and experience. They want reality, with all its messiness and drama.

Bring in the Jester

I saw this firsthand when I attended a performance of Rigoletto at the San Francisco Opera last year.

San Francisco is the most AI-obsessed place on earth. It’s the kind of city where one company put up entirely unironic billboards urging people to “stop hiring humans”, while another responded with competing ones suggesting that AI robots would sleep with your daughter.

At the performance of Rigoletto, San Franciscans indeed rolled up to the 1930s-era War Memorial Opera House in AI-driven Waymos, and stood in the lobby snapping photos on their iPhones (almost certainly with AI filtering) for sharing to every social platform known to man.

But once the audience filed into the main auditorium, all the tech immediately vanished. Anyone who so much as glanced at their phone risked being hissed at by angry neighbors (booing, hissing, and shouting “Bravo” are apparently all still things in the world of opera.)

One guy made the mistake of trying to take a photo as the show started, and another theatergoer waded through an entire row of audience members to personally yell at him.

This, in other words, was an entirely analog space–from the socially enforced norms of the attendees to the performance itself. 

As a total novice to the opera, I was shocked to learn that opera performers generally aren’t amplified. They fill a cavernous, multi-story auditorium using only the power of their voices.

Save for the presence of some modern touches—like translated subtitles above the stage for people who don’t speak 19th century Italian, and a guy in front of me dressed in head to toe leather (this is still San Francisco)—you could squint and think you’d been transported back to 1832 when Giuseppe Verdi wrote the show.

And as a form, opera has plenty in common with the grabbiest content of today. If you think the AI slop videos churned out by Sora and Veo are dramatic, you’ve clearly never seen Rigoletto. There’s kidnapping, cuckolding, magical curses and (spoiler alert!) child murder.

Opera even has memes, in the form of earworm musical phrases that have survived generations. 

I guarantee you’ve heard the signature aria of Rigoletto even if you’re as ignorant of opera as Chalamet. And once I remind you of it (Da-da-da-DUMPA-dum, Da-da-da-DUMPA-dum), you’ll have it in your head for a week (sorry).

Technology may have changed. But when it comes right down to it, the things humans find engaging (surprise, scandal, catchy music and a good story) were pretty much the same 200 years ago as they are today.

An Analog World

Opera is growing because it delivers those timeless, very human things in a medium that doesn’t require sitting alone in a dark room, hunching over a tiny metal square while unseen computers in a building in Minnesota churn through gigawatts of electricity to keep a deluge of content continually flowing to your brain.

And opera is hardly alone in its ascendence—as AI eats the world, anything analog is suddenly on a tear. Vinyl is now a billion-dollar industry, and even cassette tapes are seeing a resurgence.

In my own town, our local vintage vinyl store got so popular that they had to move from their quirky little storefront to a big-box space the size of a Best Buy.

Fed up with AI-powered dating apps, young people are turning to matchmakers and in-person speed dating.  

And so-called “Grandma Hobbies” like knitting, crochet and cooking–really anything that doesn’t require a screen and a mainline to a data center somewhere out in the ether–are suddenly on the rise. Even app-free flip phones are back in vogue.

Chalamet and other people carrying the banner of popular culture would be well advised to take note. The world of analog performance and connection isn’t fading in relevance–it’s surging.

Yes, people may be outsourcing much of their work–and an unhealthy amount of their decision making–to chatbots and AI agents. But handing all these things off to a computer frees up space. 

And it turns out, what people want to put in that space isn’t more tech. It’s a set of darning needles, a gently-spinning LP–or a tenor in a leotard standing in the spotlight, belting out arias.

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