The Gravity Well Effect

Once as tidy as a Koi pond, culture now floods like the Nile. Great riches. Precious little order. This “too much” culture is a concussive, confusing culture.

There is too much culture for culture to have manners, method or modulation. Things don’t cohere. They don’t line up in the beautiful diffusion waves running vividly in from the margin. This means it’s much harder to figure what and when culture will reach us. No more taking a position in the diffusion stream, as an innovator, early adopter, or lat

Even good things are bad. Take the cult of wellness. This was supposed to be a way to improve health in all of its dimensions, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. It hasn’t always turned out that way. Many people say wellness proves to be trying and diminishing. It’s become “you are not good enough” theater. One respondent captured the prob

This is too many things. The chances of finding someone prepared to chat about something mutual (like, baseball) are small. When we stop chatting round the water cooler (and its social media equivalents), our world gets less clear, less organized, less cooperative, and less mutual. This threatens the American “we.”

Our competitors are looking not just to beat us but baffle us. So, yes, the new American culture makes even business more changeable and chaotic. And culture, those underlying assumptions, are the culprit.

In our culture, trends die young.

“Apps monitor you. They report on you. They shame you.” At the extreme, apps make somethings a little like a police state.

But categories are now less clear. They have multiplied and in some cases collapsed. And this makes the world buzz with imprecision. A FTL teenager looks into the social world and goes, “Oh please. I’m supposed to navigate that? What do I aim for? If there’s an identity waiting for me out there, I can’t see it.”

Our culture no longer acts as a cultures should. It now creates more noise than system. It is too heterogeneous to have a center. It is too voluminous to organize. It is too rapid to mature. Once reliable diffusion “delivery systems" are broken. This means we cannot find the talented people, good ideas, and big solutions that once came to us n

When our heroes are failing, what hope is there for the rest of us?