cultural convergence

“Song of the summer” is a much-contested term, more of a cultural myth or a shared hallucination than a hard-and-fast label.

after several conversations with happiness experts and psychologists, I’ve cobbled together a tentative theory. We’re seeing the international transmission of a novel Western theory of mental health. It’s the globalization of Western—and, just maybe, American —despair.

globalization and the internet may be flattening the world’s once spiky terrain of mental disorders

A simplistic explanation of Hong Kong’s anorexia surge—along with koro and hysterical fugue—would be that mental illness is always and everywhere a case of social contagion. That’s wrong. What we call worry and sadness are universal human traits, and many psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, show up around the world. Watters’s most interes

It is misleading then to argue that cultural circulation has been democratized. The means of circulation are algorithmic, and they are not subject to democratic accountability or control. Hyperconnectivity has in fact further concentrated power over the means of circulation in the hands of the giant platforms that design and control the architectur

how design has become mass user-centered, driven by rules of optimization, efficiency and engineering.

The cultural logic of the 2010s is best represented by the starter pack meme. In the starter pack meme, classes of people are identified through oblique subcultural references and products they are likely to consume.

What interested me was the way that different subcultures and brands were feeding off one another. Lifestyle brands and DTC needed to draw on these subcultural elements—they needed to be the products people buy in order to participate. And in the other direction, product imagery was beginning to play an important role in subcultural formation. In m