The Internet Killed Mainstream Culture

The Oscars, Emmys, and Grammys are nothing if not vehicles for the stars who power the engine of pop culture. But the ubiquity of those stars is waning.

The fact that internet is vast, uncharted territory—anyone can take a hold and move culture—means that culture is becoming more diverse.

Back in 2014, Balaji Srinivasin wrote: An infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream now blossoms on the Internet—vegans, body modifiers, CrossFitters, Wiccans, DIYers, Pinners, and support groups of all forms. Millions of people are finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or ... See more

outside of superhero movies, there are few major cultural sensations anymore.

how Jack Conte of Patreon once framed online community: you may think your interests are niche—maybe only 1 in 1,000 people like the same things as you—but with 4 billion people online, that’s 4 million people who share your interests. On the internet, no niche is too niche.

There’s no such thing as a mainstream—rather, we have 4.5 billion individual universes of culture, colliding and intersecting and building on one another to redefine how we collectively think and live.

The pandemic accelerated our culture’s fragmentation: we all became more of a digital species, meaning we retreated into our own cultural silos.

in The Diamond Age, Stephenson introduces the idea of phyles. In the The Diamond Age, people live in phyles—cultural groups that have largely replaced nations. Phyles share values and interests, but often not location—they are, after all, digitally-native.

The diversity of modern culture is unequivocally a good thing. But that comes at the cost of more fragmentation, the loss of a cohesive cultural language. And that fragmentation can be interpreted in different ways.