The Death Of Pop Culture

The key words in monoculture are derivatives of “monolithic” and “culture.” In other words, it’s a term for a shared cultural experience. In pop culture, it's the notion that we have shared cultural narratives, values, experiences, and popular phenomena that dictate what the masses engage with. Historically, this was through limited availability, physical engagement with media rather than access to infinite information, and on a smaller scale.

Rather than the world being at your fingertips, you only had immediate access to your local community and what the gatekeepers (such as the owners of physical media stores determining what to stock, the local radio station DJ deciding what to play, and local cinemas deciding what movies to show) allowed you to be exposed to. When the same art is being experienced on a grand scale, simultaneously, by virtually everyone in that culture, that’s a monoculture.

The grand question is: now that there’s nothing monolithic about modern pop culture, is this a consequence of it being killed by the internet, like video killed the radio star, or is it downstream from having no defined culture at all? Will we really never be united by the resounding popularity of art and stories by virtue of limited availability ever again, or has it simply morphed into a different beast?

The End of Monoculture as We Know It

Monoculture is what reigned from the early 1900s, thanks to the rise of radio, Hollywood, then broadcast television, followed by cable, and then sharply fell off with the rise of the internet, and the modern monolith (ironically), the smartphone. The smartphone fractured our collective tastes into more obscure, niche, and personalized variants of virtually everything. Art, news, information, subcultures—all of it suddenly diverged as we handed everyone personal portals to their own privately doctored multiverse of madness, where they’re the main character and everything is tailored to their preferences and the topics they’re interested in.

But what was it like and how has it changed, or as some have argued, completely ceased to exist? Well, as Matt Walsh points out in an eloquent monologue about the fall of cultural cohesion and artistic shared experience, it felt nonchalantly meaningful in a way perhaps we didn’t grasp at the time, having not known there would come a time when it wouldn’t be there. He recalls how, up until about 2008, we all watched the same movies, the same TV shows, got our news from the same places, and attended the same physical stores.

Popular culture was filled with not just blips in the attention pond but cultural touchstones that defined generations and became ingrained in public memory.

As a consequence, popular culture was filled with not just blips in the attention pond but cultural touchstones that defined generations and became ingrained in public memory, inspiring parodies, jokes, new films, costumes, and re-enactments. It was iconic. Recognizable to everyone. Unavoidable. It was all-consuming. Think of shows like Friends or franchises like Star Wars. Shows were either massively popular, like The Sopranos, or they were canceled. Celebrities with millions of followers weren’t just niche internet microcelebrities, but public figures recognized around the world.

Walsh pins the zenith of pop culture—as in, the pinnacle of artistic expression in quality, quantity, and ubiquity—between 2007 and 2008, arguing that this was when both mediums (TV and film) reached their artistic peak. Not everyone is going to agree on when the zenith was. In fact, some are calling it “the most Millennial post of all time” in his reverence for conventionally popular films and TV shows of the era, like No Country for Old Men and The Wire, but the point remains the same.

Walsh grants: maybe you don’t agree that the best films and TV shows were hitting the airwaves at this time with incredible frequency, but what’s for certain is that no two- or three-year period that comes after comes anywhere close. Of course, fantastic films and TV shows have been released since then, but they’re few and far between, often separated by decades, and drowning in a surrounding sea of slop. That slop is overwhelmingly comprised of existing IP: remakes, franchise films, sequels, superhero adaptations—now morphing into cinematic multiverses with endless “this minor character from seven films ago is now getting their own movie” announcements.

So, this period, 2007–2008, must be the curtain call. The peak before the fall. It feels like we don’t have major stars the way we used to. Walsh points out how poetic it is that Michael Jackson, the biggest star of his era, died in 2009—“when the monoculture was extinguished, so was its biggest star.” Tom Cruise is regularly heralded as the “last real movie star.” Celebrity has been replaced with influencer culture. Now social media stars have niche followings, sometimes amassing larger followings than we’ve seen in recent history for some of the most famous people on the planet, and yet they boast a distinct kind of fame: one that inspires parasocial devotion in their following but which might not have enough exposure to the outside world for name recognition.

Now we operate in the same space but are mentally elsewhere, united in our addiction to scrolling and screentime in form but not content.

In 2023, The Verge reported on TikTok’s annual announcement of the most viral videos and trends, and concluded “the platform’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen,” and noted it demonstrated “just how disparate our individual experiences are on one of the most influential platforms of our age.” That’s the defining ethos of pop culture now: disparate. What’s popular isn’t necessarily ubiquitous, just popular enough that it enters the awareness of large groups of people in that demographic viewer base. Naturally, we can’t have a monoculture if we aren’t all experiencing or consuming the same reality. We have many cultures, operating simultaneously, all over the place, completely removed from even our peripheral vision.

This peculiar phenomenon, where the biggest stars are simultaneously names that a sizeable portion of the population have never heard of, and where the most streamed TV shows are so out of left field that they’ve never entered your radar—never even been a blip in your field of awareness—is a consequence of the algorithmic age. We now have splintered realities. As a result, it’s exceedingly rare for something to reach such iconic heights that it becomes embedded in the cultural canon as it has in the past. Walsh cites scenes and images that have become cultural touchstones so omnipresent that not being aware of them would mean you’re probably alien to the culture. Evocative images like Rose spreading her arms on the bow of the Titanic, supported by Jack, as she euphorically utters, “I’m flying.”

Moments like this become so imbued into the cultural awareness, so watched, meme-ified, and commented on, that they are imprinted on the culture itself. Walsh’s worry is that the reason nothing makes a cultural impact anymore is that there is no culture to imprint on. That perhaps when we cut loose the gatekeepers in favor of an informational Wild West, we also cut the last remaining tether that glued us together. Now we operate in the same space but are mentally elsewhere, united in our addiction to scrolling and screentime in form but not content.

The New Culture Isn’t Monolithic, But It Isn’t Inaccessible, Either

Author Jason Pargin took to TikTok to ask his followers if they can recall the last truly original film character that became a genuine pop culture icon. A viral tweet supposes that they can’t think of anyone post–Jack Sparrow that meets the threshold. The comments are frustratingly myopic in their inability to come up with original IP that meets Pargin’s Halloween costume test: if the character is truly iconic, you should be instantly recognizable if you dressed up as them for Halloween.

Characters from existing IP, like comic books adapted into movies or sequels or franchises, obviously do not count as “original” or “new” characters. The only valid modern examples I found in the comments weren’t even from films but from TV: Grogu, also known as Baby Yoda, and the Squid Game guards. This got me thinking: is monoculture really dead, or is it just the film industry that’s become so derivative and unoriginal that it’s been eclipsed by TV?

It’s widely understood that the early 2000s marked the emergence of the Golden Age of Television. What you might have missed, though, is its obituary, circa 2023. With the exit of Succession and Better Call Saul and the SAG-AFTRA writers’ strike of 2023, prestige television was pronounced dead. David Chase referred to the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos in 2024 as a funeral for the Golden Age of TV, noting that with streamers reintroducing commercials along with the attention economy promoting constant multitasking and distraction, he’s already been asked to dumb it down again. The age of prestige television, he sees today, as a “25-year blip.”

Viewership of scripted television peaked in the 2010s but began declining in the 2020s as both quality and cultural impact waned. With the rise of streaming, audiences fractured, and oversaturation left few opportunities for mass, collective viewing experiences. The Sopranos may have been a big fish in a small pond, but nearly everything that followed was an iteration of the same morally ambiguous, gritty antihero template it pioneered. And the entire streaming model collapsed in 2022 when Netflix saw a steep subscriber loss for the first time in a decade, with people emerging from post-lockdown subscription fatigue. Investors panicked, and Netflix lost $50 billion in market value.

The industry could no longer continue this endless growth model, pivoting instead to an immediate-profit model instead of borrowing endless billions of dollars. This left little room for risk-taking and experimentation because if a show wasn’t immediately profitable or showing a good return on investment, it would be canceled. Even the successful shows seem to be stuck in production purgatory thanks to budget cuts, fewer episodes, and longer gaps. Now it takes years to churn out a new season, losing the momentum of interest from their viewer base. Euphoria has been stuck in production limbo for so long that most of its fanbase is no longer interested in a third season, instead asking showrunner Sam Levinson to just cancel the show.

So, even prestige television has been presumed dead. While diamonds in the rough will continue to emerge, like Severance or The White Lotus, and while cultural phenomena like Squid Game sometimes take the world by storm, waking people up from their scrolling stupor long enough for everyone to watch the same thing at (relatively) the same time, there’s still not much of a mainstream culture anymore.

There are simply too many options; too many online communities, ideological subcultures, and their endless offshoots of aesthetics, interests, and thought leaders to keep up. Walsh compares this artistic drought to the collapse of the music monoculture around 1999, when Napster popularized file sharing. The shift away from physical media in the following years (cassettes, CDs, and the brick-and-mortar stores that sold them) marked the end of shared musical experience.

With streaming and online discovery, everyone suddenly had access to everything, and musical taste splintered overnight. There are still radio hits, but many of us no longer listen to the radio at all. Even the biggest pop stars of today exist in cultural silos: wildly famous within certain demographics and virtually invisible to others. You see this in action all the time in the comment sections of Facebook, where Gen Xers and Boomers take pride in not knowing who the hot commodity of the day is. “Chappell Roan? Never heard of her. They’re just making up pop stars now.”

Whatever is left of mainstream culture is on life support. Hardly anyone watches network TV, and more than a quarter of Americans don’t watch TV at all. Cable subscriptions are collapsing, and late-night TV is disappearing in favor of internet shows and short-form content, as their viewer bases are relegated to an older demographic that won’t hold as time goes on.

As a consequence, we live in fragmented, atomized realities that are wholly separate from one another. But we also consume media more passively now, thanks to infinite scroll vying for our attention. Short-form videos provide low-effort, high-reward entertainment. The act of scrolling with your finger on a touchscreen literally lights up dopamine pathways, making the infinite scroll addictive and difficult to stop to focus intently on three hours of The Godfather.

What Killed Monoculture and How Do We Cope With It?

There are more ghosts of mainstream culture that sometimes pop up and dominate the cultural conversation and online discourse—even Halloween costumes—but because there’s so much content available to us and because it’s at our fingertips, delivered via feeds tailor-made to show us exactly what we like and want, we’re not physically going to Blockbuster and scanning the aisle of a limited selection of films and picking out a Friday night movie. We’re not calling into the radio station and asking them to play us a specific song for our crush. We’re inundated with choice, fed to us by algorithms on our solitary screens.

As a result, the 2010s feel like the first notably formless decade compared to the evocative ’80s, ’90s, and aughts, which felt more distinct from other eras but individually cohesive. People describe modern culture as “stuck,” noting that culture has remained frozen in time since the mid-2000s. We see fewer jarring shifts in aesthetics, tastes, fashion, and consumption. We wear more or less the same clothes, don the same hairstyles, use the same technology, and even the same websites.

Paul Skallas, better known online as LindyMan, is a writer, thinker, and Twitter personality known for championing the “Lindy” philosophy, which draws from ancient wisdom and rests on the idea that anything that has stood the test of time, especially if it originated in the ancient world, endures because it contains some proven basis in truth or utility. Skallas coined the term “stuck culture” to describe the phenomenon of culture frozen in time since the mid-2000s.

The first is that we moved from a 20th-century top-down monoculture, where a handful of centralized institutions—via radio stations, Hollywood studios, TV networks, and fashion houses (the gatekeepers)—dictated trends. Their all-encompassing control brought about seismic vibe shifts every ten or so years that looked unrecognizable from the previous ten. But the “real internet” came along in 2005 and decentralized everything.

As Skallas put it, “All of a sudden, small groups online have innovated and changed. But the big media monoculture has stayed the same. Why? Because the current model makes money, and why change it? Why risk it? Not everyone is going along with you, like the previous century, where people had no choice.” Combine that with algorithms, whose objective is to predict what you’ll like in the future based on what you liked before, and we have an infinite cultural loop that can no longer innovate, no longer create—only curate from what existed before. Hence, the era of perpetual regurgitation. Everything is a remake, an iteration of what came before.

Derek Thompson, while a guest on The Gray Area with Sean Illing, proposed his “everything’s a cult now” theory. “The internet has shattered that reality [of monoculture]. We are in a way going back to that pre–20th century, where culture is actually just a bunch of cults stacked on top of each other; a bunch of mini local realities stacked on top of each other, and that we maybe never will have anything like monoculture ever again because the internet in a weird way thrusts us back into the 19th century.” Everyone is scattered into their local realities that are segregated from other people’s realities. It’s probably more accurate to describe this current culture as a multiplex of multi-realities as opposed to a monoculture.

The result has been a mixed bag of good and bad. As far as entertainment and information go, we’re spoiled for choice. Accessing new artists and discovering niche art has never been more accessible. It would be a mistake not to recognize how incredibly lucky we are to have vast libraries of endless information and cultural niches at our fingertips.

People with more obscure tastes now easily get their fix without being the odd one out in a society that only presents a handful of options. People with unconventional ideas and preferences, rather than becoming social outcasts, are living in a golden age of sorts. Not only do they not have to live under the tyranny of the mainstream, but they can find a community of like-minded people with the same interests all over the world.

Without gatekeepers, we have total freedom. But the algorithm is a kind of gatekeeper of its own. Not one of flesh and blood, as Matt Walsh points out, but one “far more tyrannical and sinister” than any previous one because it’s invisible. Walsh has a pessimistic take: that the algorithm has one mission—to keep us staring at the screen, alone, isolated, fragmented. And that, for as bad as the algorithm is, AI will become far worse because it won’t be feeding you content from other people, but content that it created itself, or that it lets you believe you created.

Where we’re going from here, I don’t know, but I have noticed that there are little blips here and there that ring out from the chaos and operate as moments of shared experience. Only, they seem to be relegated to the dramatic, the tragic, and the scandalous. We do get a palpable sense of shared community and culture occasionally, when something awful happens. A mass tragedy. A shocking death. An unfolding, high-stakes mystery. Events that sometimes feel like pulling out the big rainbow parachute in gym class. Everyone is suddenly in sync, if only for a moment. I only wish that the only time we feel that palpable sense of community wasn’t limited to terrible tragedy.