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.

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

The elites and intermediaries stand helpless before the flood.

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

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.”

After all, the point of culture is often less the content than the sharing of the content. Entire communities, substantial, lasting communities, spring up from shared shows to say nothing of the tribal pleasures of shared lifestyle. The failure of sharing comes from a failure of culture and that makes culture a problem.

Anyone with several decades left on the planet is obliged to wonder how bad things will get.

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

Our mutualities are fading.