Mass culture has been around since mass media, so there’s nothing new about large groups of people doing the same thing at the same time.
But what is new in the summer of 2026 is that Americans seem functionally unable to act unless it is in a group, swinging from isolation, bed-rotting and doomscrolling, to participating in viral trends and crowds.
In New York, it’s hard not to feel that way. The Knicks victory, for instance, converted overnight a bunch of transplants with no interest in or love of sports or hometown affiliation with New York teams into diehard Knicks fans for a few days, up through the parade. A few weeks later, the Knicks are old news.
In the summer of 2026, Americans seem functionally unable to act unless it’s in a group.
Fro-yo stands go viral and consumers stand in line because other people are doing it; joining the line, re-posting standing in the line, watching other people post about being in the line is the activity, not eating. Brand new soccer fans crowd into international bars to watch their new favorite sport and their new favorite team. Gambling, retail stock trading, politics are all driven by massification, by the knowledge that others are doing it.
If there’s not a bandwagon, there’s nothing. The bandwagon produces instant, confectionary belief, commitment and displace passions rooted in a long-standing relationship to place, to education and mentorship, to reflection and dialogue: to working out a sense of what is good, what has value, slowly, over time, through testing and refining.
If there’s not a bandwagon, there’s nothing.
This hyper-massification, this phobia of small intimate groups and this base passion for large, faceless crowds, are all features of a society that has either forgotten the habits of life without smartphones, or never known life without them (Gen Z). The young do not know how to do things for their own reasons; they know how to follow and copy; they inherit the future without knowing how to think, judge, choose for themselves. The habits of a mimetic society are self-reinforcing: the longer they persist, the more universal they become.
The dominant style of this new era is virality. The digitally mediated youthful demos is moved by scale, not quality, intelligence or dignity. As a consequence, the economic incentives favor the empty, the stupid, the sloganeered, the memetically sticky, and drain resources and energy; mass culture, already dominant, becomes total and absolute; and even while it is possible to produce films and music with comparatively cheap equipment, the attention economy, the attention marketplace, demands that all cultural production have some kind of viral element.
Only twenty-five years ago, there was a growing market for the niche, for records, books, movies, magazines, cuisines, clothing styles that were local, limited, hard to reach, downscaled. Taste was mediated in smaller groups: by family, friends, record, video, and bookstore clerks, by small blogs, by serious newspaper critics, and by general criticism in book form.
The smartphone, however, inverted the conditions that nourished indie culture and bred a generation resistant to and anxious about the sui generis and unique, uncomfortable with the niche tastes of the hipster.
There seems to be a convergence where it’s preferable for corporations to sell products to single-minded predictable consumers, but also where consumers, young consumers especially, who grew up experiencing material life like a video game, now require consistency and predictability to interface with physical reality.
According to this thesis, wearing your new Knicks jersey in line to eat fro-yo with a date you met on an app isn’t about seeking pleasure but about reducing unpredictability and hewing to life experiences that are most similar to phone experiences.
The social mechanics which encourage self-reflection and interiority, which help young people build up their nascent powers of deliberation, are damaged or deconstructed.
The pseudo-Knicks fans will melt away, the trust fund socialists will melt away, the fro-yo enjoyers will melt away. They will not even realize that, existentially speaking, they are afraid of their own freedom and angered by any appearance of freedom in others;
The pseudo sports fans and the trust fun socialists are afraid of their own freedom and angered by any appearance of freedom in others.
Decreasing experiential and cognitive diversity de-gestalts the human experience, and so language itself needs to express less, because there are fewer profundities to distinguish between, fewer shades and fewer tensions and conflicts. AI prose, automated language, is acceptable, unnoticeable if there is nothing unusual to express, if those who might in another era have spent their time and money on books, theater, sheet music, architecture, live like rats in a maze, seeking the next virality-approved event.
What I’m describing here is ecological collapse (or what Peter Sloterdijk calls ecotropological collapse): an interlinked cascade from complexity into stupefying and stupefied simplicity, mediated both by tools that make life too easy and by norms that validate and even celebrate the changes brought with those tools.
The development of massive ideological bubbles and echo chambers is too easy and too frictionless right now.
Access to information matters very little if algorithms control or corral that information, if private equity manages what appears in storefronts and restaurants, and if big tech must addict us to slop to justify its capex.
Structure is more powerful than culture, as they say, than intention; or rather there’s at this point almost no cultural bulwark with which to resist further erosion of phenomenology or taste.
The hipster, the comic-book store guy, the record store guy, these cliches of the 90s and early 2000s performed an important social function: to referee and shame aggregated, generic aesthetics. It should be permissible to shame the mass affluent and urban trust funders who spend their mornings scrolling for a pre-digested, pre-approved event to attend at night.
Recently I was invited to dinner at the rural home of a new friend who has dedicated his retirement to reading, writing, learning languages and local agriculture. I realized how vanishing it is to have the flowing conversation that we were having, conversation that isn’t mediated by the mimetic saliences of that day or week. Even as I’m writing this piece, I received a text from another friend: “there’s so little substance in culture right now, it’s so sad, it’s a lot right now, there’s so much of nothing, it’s narcissism without truth or humanity”.
Restaurants and clubs where you must turn off and hand in your phone are growing in popularity. But the value added by these third spaces will be minimal unless there’s a further criterion that participants are banned from talking about aggregated trends, viral gossip, meaningless viral personalities, and forced to re-engage with forms of discourse that are not entirely mediated by the internet.
Finding havens of differentiation where people might speak different languages or demonstrate different skills or points of view is nice and good. The shrinking minority of the non-massified need to work harder to cultivate disgust, which is a powerful and very socially mimetic emotion, in response to the sophisticated new forms of automaticity flourishing in this decade, especially as memories of the before times when independence was cultivated and venerated fade.
