Culture feels chaotic right now. The times of communion over music videos on MTV are officially over, and our lives are split across millions of screens and streams. It’s the year of brain rot, AI slop, and #2016. But, if culture is a reflection of society, this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. AI is going to take your job while ads are built into every crevice of the Internet (hello, ChatGPT). So, is this online, fast, and kind of unpleasant reality the new monoculture?
This question matters because every few years, someone announces the death of monoculture. Not only are we unable to agree on whether it is alive, but among hardline sceptics, like The Economist in 2011, monoculture is a flatout myth. Today, we’re more likely to argue that 2011 was actually the beginning of the latest version of monoculture, one that would peak — as per the most recent consensus — in 2016. And history might be repeating the same pattern now: declaring monoculture dead from within what later will be considered monoculture.
But what even is monoculture? Much of the debate comes from the fact that no one really knows what this term means anymore. Taking inspiration from the agricultural practice of planting a single crop over a large area, the term was initially used to criticise cultural uniformity and exclusion under mass media and globalisation in the 1960s. More broadly, it describes a set of shared cultural references, which, until recently, were instated by broadcast media: blockbuster weekend releases and TV programming that forced us to watch Friends after school every day. This created the impression of a collective cultural experience by giving us something to talk about the next day. Even subcultures were created against the backdrop of monoculture, establishing communities at the margins of the mainstream by those who felt it did not represent them.
Now, this system, in which millions consumed the same thing at the same time in the same place, is dead. Killed by the rise of social media and streaming platforms, we have embraced our freedom to choose what to consume among billions of others online through our own personalised feeds outside of the grips of multimillion production budgets. The idea of monoculture is easy to dismiss because culture has never been that uniform. But once you realise that even your parents know what a Labubu is, it becomes hard to argue that monoculture in some form does not exist today. Although our timelines are still defined by the physical borders of nation states (or a VPN), memes continue to translate across borders and languages. You won’t necessarily like them, but you will not be able to avoid them.
Breaking away from its original use as a criticism, that the term “monoculture” has recently started to be invoked nostalgically adds to the confusion. Those who speak of its death often refer to it as a loss – something to be missed as our experience of culture has gone from collective physical spaces to individual digital echo chambers. This allows us to separate two concepts: monoculture as shared references, but also as shared experience.
In the broadcast era, the two overlapped – we watched the same shows and listened to the same music at the same time, often in the same room. Today, these have become separated as we’ve retreated online, and we find ourselves in a period where culture is being produced in ways that it never has before while no longer being experienced collectively. Beyond the simple dead/alive binary, the challenge is to diagnose what is forming in the absence of monoculture’s role as a meeting point – and who is calling the shots since the retreat of broadcast monoliths. Because what has really changed is not the existence of monoculture, but its scaffolding.
Once transmitted through broadcast schedules and physical media, much of mainstream culture today is created online and consumed out of sync through our phones. Now, as both producers and consumers of culture, we have more power than ever to shape what matters. And yet, this also creates an illusion of democracy: just like in the broadcast era, visibility continues to be mediated by a small number of big players. These now take the form of social media platforms, whose algorithms amplify narratives and formats optimised for engagement. Virality grabs our attention and influences our behaviour, from the way we speak to our beauty standards.
All this is happening as the discourse is being hijacked by ragebait and bots, with the growing realisation that the Internet, once a digital refuge, has completely taken over our lives. The result is not the end of monoculture, but a new version of it, still governed by businesses that make our hopes and fears a commodity to profit from, if only on a smaller screen. If we believe that monoculture never existed or has disappeared, we risk overlooking the continued concentration of cultural power in the hands of a few private companies who claim to be neutral actors while amassing eyewatering amounts of wealth.
How monoculture exists today may be up for debate, but the dissatisfaction people feel is real. Culture continues to connect us yet no longer in ways that feel meaningful or collective. This explains calls to boycott socials, the continued rise of analogue media, and Gen Z’s desire for third spaces, not as simple nostalgia, but as responses to the loss of shared meaning. When every single online space is monetised and optimised for virality, the Internet no longer feels utopian, and is instead reduced to another marketplace. Attempts to move offline reflect a desire to escape not just technology but also extraction, even if full retreat away from the Internet remains a privilege not available to all.
Maybe monoculture never existed, maybe it was just the friends we made along the way. Still, conversations that limit themselves to declaring its death or denying its existence altogether miss something more important. Because if culture is a set of references through which society understands itself, we seem to be very confused. The nostalgia for a time before iPhones mapped our facial geometry or bots outnumbered people online is far more than just us longing for an idealised past that never existed. It is a rejection of the commodification of our most intimate personal experiences.
While convenient and democratising, the business incentives of the platforms acting as distribution channels for culture today reflect both the deepening of a world order that does not have our best interests at heart and the loss of communal spaces free from exploitation – even the digital ones. The question is not whether monoculture is dead, but what price we will put on it now that we have become its primary producers.