This is the decade America’s common culture died. Cultural taste, affinity, and identity is shattered into a thousand distinct shards. This “tribalization” has become an obsession among social elites, whose economic model for maintaining their global dominance has been thrown into doubt. But only now are the fuller consequences of the rise of the multiculture rearing their ugly heads. As manufactured mainstream fare fades, Americans are right to begin to wonder whether any popular culture as we know it, a vibrant social sphere full of entertainers and highly engaged audiences, is going to replace what is lost. The same digital technology that empowered us to consume what we wanted, when we wanted it, is now sharply discouraging us from producing what we want, even at times and places of our choosing.
The world of digital entertainment and social media is increasingly suppressing both popular culture and elite culture, each of which depends on giving people incentives to pour their lives into art, media, music, film, and the news of the day. Whether it’s injecting creative works into the market, opinions into the maelstrom of the online discourse, or corrective lectures into raging debates, the potential payoff for all these sorts of activities is plummeting.
The culprit is not simply digital tech’s propensity to glut markets until demand collapses. In our era when just about anyone can write, record, produce, and release a single, a movie, a podcast, or a video show, the barriers to entry are so low that the market space has filled to the brim with content that’s almost totally inessential to nearly all would-be consumers.
What’s more, the death of the monoculture has destroyed a common conceptual framework for criticism. The result is that no matter how tiny your identity niche is, there will be another group primed to attack you, simply for being, in essence, yourself.
This is a sea change in Western civilization and in how nations and cultures will respond to globalization as a Western force. In early modernity, the Gutenberg Bible and the Declaration of Independence inaugurated a powerful political theology of free communication produced and consumed en masse. In modernity’s later period, automation and electricity democratized and secularized that social order to an extreme. Now as digital conditions make a common modernity obsolete, the demise of our common culture must be seen as just one part or phase in the erasure of the patterns of consumption and production that globalized secular Western culture. That means the eradication of the moral psychology behind that once-supreme form of economic life.
Political theorists, social economists, and cultural critics have a lot of catching up to do.
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Chin-stroking ruminations on the monoculture’s demise have taken up media airtime since, not coincidentally, the rise of the iPhone. “More than 40 percent of American households saw the final episode of ‘Seinfeld’ in the spring of 1998,” NPR reported a decade ago; “‘American Idol’ may be the most popular program on television today, but only about 16 percent of American households saw this year’s finale.” Now, as is well-known, even the most ritualistic and big-budget, must-see events are fading into oblivion. The country’s biggest musicians, who still attract only a niche audience, now skip their industry’s biggest awards ceremony, the Grammys, safe in the knowledge that their absence won’t hurt them and might even help. The Oscars, hostless and taking refuge this year in musical productions, just posted their second-worst ratings ever. At the Super Bowl, Maroon 5, the last of the “big” monocultural bands, earned jeers for its halftime show from those who even bothered to “engage” with that particular crumb of “content.” And the ads? Who bought what was pitched? Who cared?
The old calls to action, the old spells in our enchanted marketplace, are losing their magic.
Yet instead of some new mainstream rising to reconsolidate attention and effort, there’s nothing. Television is now so democratized and secularized that it has become little more than ammunition for cultural skirmishes, losing even superficial commonality. Social media, too, is faltering; influential “creatives” and creative “influencers” have begun to realize that posting their hard work for free brings them little more than fleeting attention, often of the hateful or irrelevant kind. And in the high-prestige, high-pay “knowledge work” industries that depend on mass participation in communications and culture markets, even the most expert of elites have very little idea what to do about it. They are accustomed to monetizing participation in an age when even the totemic power of the participation trophy is losing its luster. Partying itself is no longer seen as the most desirable thing to do, a dagger at the heart of stadium-driven industries ranging from popular music to professional sports.
Retreating from the real-life public square to the Internet, as so many people have done, has made things worse. Online discourse is routinely described as a dumpster fire or a hellmouth. Social media have made everyone a critic. More fundamentally, digital technology runs on biographical identity, not critical imagination. Computers communicate digitally by incessantly shuttling around packets of information, all of which must flash instantly recognizable credentials — think of them as “trust certificates.” It’s the ones-and-zeros equivalent of showing the military police your identity papers at checkpoints. Because, as students of Rene Girard, including Peter Thiel, will tell you, humans are fundamentally imitative creatures; in the digital multiculture, the one thing we all tend to do is ape our computers. Like them, we have begun to think of an instantly recognizable identity as essential to so much as setting foot online. Anyone who can’t be made sense of as a certain type of person is swiped away or plowed under. Nobody has the time to parse mysterious people or strangers. Nobody wants to risk winding up on the damaging end of an unfriendly parsing of their own identity.
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So where television and social media are all about broadcasting the fantasy, as devotees of “reality” TV readily admit, digital technology, including social credit, is all about narrowcasting the inescapable reality of who you are. That’s why we’re pushed so hard, sometimes willingly, to seek out our group, keep its head down or its castle walls strong, and rally around its protectors. Already social media is dominated by private chat, a medium of communication fundamentally different from that of the platforms’ look-at-me functionality.
Instead of accepting the new world as it clearly is, worried social theorists are trying to roust up a 1960s-style resistance. The private chat, we’re told, poses scary threats to democracy. While journalists who communicate confidentially are political heroes, these theorists say, ordinary people who do so are political villains, helping spread frauds and conspiracies outside the reach of smart censors. Too bad the latest report we have on some of those censors, Facebook’s traumatized employees tasked with grinding through the Internet’s most depraved and horrific content, puts safe and sanitized online democracy in a repulsive light of its own.
There’s no question the Western way of communication is crumbling under irreversible technological pressure. Resistance is futile. What-ifs won’t save us. Only a recalibration can.
The good news is that Americans still have relatively good access to a shared repository of cultural resources that can keep democratic life going in a robust, salutary way. In parts of the world that arrived at democracy late with wrenching revolutions, however, or where democracy never truly penetrated the social order, the future looks much bleaker. So we see China race headlong toward implementing its nationwide social credit surveillance system. We see the EU structuring its regulations against globalized tech companies and their post-intellectual-property business models. We see countries such as Russia and India giving serious thought to “nationalizing” their Internet and blocking “outside” content before it can corrupt the people. Goodbye World Wide Web, hello Nation Wide Web. In nearly every case, and these are clearly early days, our elite stand by, aghast but clueless and powerless to stop it.
In the new environment within which the digital technology is forming us, the monoculture cannot endure. Nor can any of the globalized Western culture industries as we know them. Just ask Bono, who went from the biggest rock star in the universe to the irritating old man you couldn’t get off your phone. But while Bono can one day just take his marbles and retire in style, most people don’t have that luxury.
Our task as American citizens is to weather the first great disenchantment in our nation’s history.
For Europe, that crushing moment came when the world wars beat Christianity out of the continent. Here in the U.S. that didn’t happen. But our historic winning streak as a nation, beginning with our wildly felicitous or providential birth in the cradle of democracy, has made our American identity, our Americanism, into something dangerously close to a religion. Dangerous because digital technology’s destruction of our monoculture can make us suddenly lose faith in Americanism, with soul-crushing results. Traditional Americanism has been closely associated with the monoculture for a long time. But now that the monoculture has so few ardent public defenders — nobody likes a loser — there is a disheartening pile-on online, where anyone and everyone can find their own niche reasons to cast aspersions on Americanism’s vision of itself as mainstream.
Still, letting religion be religion and Americanism be Americanism offers a way out of the wilds of the digital common culture that’s distinctively “us.” Both on the populist Right and the socialist Left, activists and thinkers are retrieving civic consciousness in a new and undoubtedly powerful way. While the differences between the new Right and Left are plain to see and won’t easily, if ever, be papered over, the overlap is probably greater than meets the eye amid the blinding dust of cultural disintegration.
Both sides, perhaps most important of all, appear ready to welcome a new nationalist politics, organized around safeguarding the general welfare of the people from the perils of a poorly made transition to the digital age. The faint outlines of new coalitions are visible around policy goals such as limiting what technology allows people to do in finance, pornography, surveillance, and artificial intelligence. Catholics on the Right and the Left have moved thinking on digital age governance toward both a greater role for the state and a more widely distributed base of goods, with the birthrate and family formation central to the plan. New generations of college students, weary of cynically regurgitating warmed-over, revolutionary platitudes to secure credentials for disappearing jobs, are poised to rediscover the promise of universities in the Middle Ages, where independent study combined with the culture of the patron and protector, the apprentice and the guild, to situate people coming of age in a dynamic but defensible corner of their world. The list of transformations to come goes on.
However great our fear of losing the common culture, we have good reason to ward off the waves of panic coming from our crumbling cultural hegemons. However scary it feels to step in a new direction, a fresh kind of nationalism and a fresh kind of humility can restore the social fabric that so many of us watched the institutions of the pre-digital age destroy.
James Poulos is the executive editor of the American Mind, an online publication of the Claremont Institute. He is a contributing editor of American Affairs, a fellow at the Center for the Study of Digital Life, and the author of The Art of Being Free.
