cultural convergence

When too many people try to adopt the contrarian position at once, it’s no longer contrarian. Mavericks become the new consensus-following herd. If everyone tries to outsmart each other by adopting novel or obscure contrarian positions, it leads to player-versus-player environments where the froth and chop of memetic war makes winning even harder.

If you’ve never heard of MrBeast , he has somehow become one of the most famous people in the world without really affecting any part of it outside of YouTube

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.

Across food, across fashion and accessories, legal cannabis products, beverages, athleisure, skin care, supplements, and other permutations of consumer packaged goods and apparel, every manufacturing and last-mile strategy has become possible, from dropshipping to just-in-time, from small-batch to make-on-demand. Products begin their life as an unb

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.

all of today’s so-called subcultures are being routed along the same paths, like a Waze-induced traffic jam clogging the streets of a quiet subdivision

less globalised (and less nationalised) cultures tend to produce highly localised, more divergent styles

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