The Great Flattening?

When Vasco da Gama landed in Calicut on the shores of Kerala in 1498, he expected to see Prester John (no relation), creatures like cyclops, and the magical mirrors of mythical India. Having made his voyage from Portugal across the Cape of Good Hope, he didn’t receive the adulatory welcome he might have expected. Armed with fine garments and olive oil, he appeared at the Zamorin of Calicut’s court looking to do business. But nothing less than gold would suffice for a meeting with the Zamorin whose courtiers promptly told him he could trade if he pleased but would not be granted any special privileges in the name of a king they hadn’t heard of. Da Gama was no doubt dejected, having traveled for ten months in search of exotic riches. The hundreds of princely states across the subcontinent made up nearly a quarter of the world economy, with the Zamorin alone controlling enough of the spice trade that his port city was a bustling trade hub with Arabs, Europeans, Chinese, and Indians. He would return with an Armada and the world wouldn’t be the same again.

The traders at Calicut were fascinated by the panoply of people, cultures, items on display in the city. But they found it hard to speak to each other. People spoke in a strange way, wore exotic clothes, and ate food you could barely recognize. Venturing out of the homeland was for exiles, ascetics, and the rare traveler. Most people lived in the small world of their village with their local hierarchies, with perhaps a shrine for devotees and the occasional festival. Dialects were hyperlocal and even neighboring districts weren’t as mutually intelligible as we’d think. The particularities of place, and the interaction between people and place formed unique codependencies. The trials and tribulations they faced, the other peoples they came into contact with, and their successes formed their shared memory. This shared memory was their culture. This may have surfaced itself in food or customs emphasized during village festivals. The season dictated lifestyle, and you prayed for good weather because how else were you supposed to make it past the harvest season? Life was hard but identity was easy because your locality was your world.

The National Era

The world itself was the original multiverse and you needed a portal to get to another world where things were weird. It could be done, and people did it at contact points like the famous Silk Routes but these were exceptions. As colonialism expanded, the competition between European powers led to rapid advancements in science and technology leading to the industrial revolution. The aggregating effects of the printing press, railroad, ships, and factories centralized human activity. Dialects began to get streamlined into languages. What we now know as France spoke Alsatian, Walloon, Bretton, Flemish as majority languages in their regions until a 16th century royal decree rubber stamped French. They say a language is a dialect with an army, and this started to play out across Europe with modern nation-states emerging in Italy and Germany. A nation was until then, an imaginary construct: stitching together adjacent regions into a larger polity organized by some founding principle. Given the degree of centralization, society had to bureaucratize to coordinate effectively. This meant many things, including one clock system aligning everyone into one time. States kept time differently until 1880 when we got time zones to align geographically dispersed locales. The same standardization happened to all units as the metric system expanded across Europe and later the world. It’s hard to overstate the extent of this revolution.

But the transition from localities to principalities to nation-states wasn’t smooth. Possibilities had been unlocked by nation-states but there was confusion about the identity of these new citizens. Massimo d’Azeglio described it best in 1866 with Italian unification, “We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.” While most people still related locally, the project of nation building needed to weave people in these principalities together. Each of these new societies was founded on some shared premise or organizing principle. In many cases, these were from a pre-existing majority identity affiliation. In the case of highly heterogeneous places like India, the question of how to weave together nationality was eventually solved by shared values across adjacent cultures and by appealing to the ability of liberalism to accommodate diversity. This is also the core backbone of the American experiment.

As nation states settled in, national cultures began to emerge as a lower fidelity clustering of regional characteristics given a new form due to their aggregation. They largely developed around the culture and output of their major cities. Paris, Rome, and London started to exert more influence than ever in their nations. Traditions like Thanksgiving became national traditions, and gained traction even in parts of the country far removed from its original meaning. These were often promulgated from political, cultural, or economic centers. Within a century or two of nationhood, most provinces would resemble the rest of the nation. The lower fidelity also increased legibility to outsiders. A well-read Italian could hope to pick up French and read French literature. It would have been much more difficult for him to learn Alsatian, Walloon, and Bretton to read dispersed works. Some regions were able to use their accrued strengths to specialize in a particular output. We started to speak of American movies, French food, Japanese cars, Korean electronics, and Indian textiles.

As the already aggregated units started to trade with each other, and adopted new trends from each other at faster rates, societies started to influence each other much more directly and immediately. This was more than trade. By the mid twentieth century, it began to look as though the world may be converging. In 1986, The Economist unveiled The Big Mac Index: a playful way of analyzing purchasing power parity across countries. But it was noteworthy that nearly every country already had a McDonald’s to begin with. Meanwhile, Hollywood started curating blockbuster movies to have appeal in other big markets. In 1997, Titanic became the first Hollywood movie to gross a billion dollars overseas. By the early 2000s, superhero movies featuring American cultural icons set in New York (and always saving it) started to dominate box offices around the world.

It’s clear that this increasing integration and assimilation has given way to something approximating a global consciousness. Over 500 years since Vasco da Gama, few still know who the leader of Portugal is. But the Portuguese and Indians both go to a green bannered American coffee chain for their Italian espresso fix, probably wearing jeans (and AirPods). They might even share their enthusiasm for these with each other, probably in English. The world has been so thoroughly integrated by technology and globalization that we, its product, can barely imagine what else it could have been.

The Post-National Era

For over a century now, nations have been our default frame to understand the world. It has also been our default frame to understand identity, just as ethnicity or religion would have been in a past era. Nations are still the largest meaningful units of the world. People identify with the nation they grew up in, the common themes and motifs of growing up in a place that immediately helps them relate to their peers. There are particular exams you take to graduate high school, certain common activities, landmark movies in the local language or music that your parents liked listening to. We may have been able to understand each other but we came from different places.

Then the internet happened. Suddenly, the pre-existing process of economic and cultural integration was accelerated by optical fiber. If you were born after 2000, the internet was a huge part of your childhood growing up. For the older ones in that segment, that meant shared memes on Tumblr, Facebook, or Reddit. For the younger ones, that means TikTok content feeds exporting local and specific trends to the far corners of the world. I’m beginning to think that this newfound discovery of lavish Indian weddings I’m seeing online isn’t a coincidence: the internet hive mind has discovered sangeet and decided it would like it too. Korean TV too has become synonymous with the modern romantic drama. Every potent trend now has the potential to become a global trend. That alone is cause for optimism. If the late twentieth century was marked by the overwhelming influence of American culture, there’s some early signs that the flattened experience of internet feeds is creating a new global exchange.

Luckily for us, the internet isn’t a monolith. It’s a long tail broadcasting machine. There are massive audiences for the biggest things, but there are also niche audiences for obscure things. Wherever there is an act of curation, there is a possibility for divergence. The subreddits you hang around, the YouTube stream targeted to you, the Twitter accounts you follow mostly only make sense to you. Areas like music are well into their long tail phase: most people have different go-to artists and pop music went from being “popular” music to being yet another genre. A thousand flowers are blooming, and this is terrific for individuals! We get to select, curate, and pair things from around the world, synthesizing them in ways that are unique to us, unbridled by place. It’s also replacing national cultures with something new as one nation’s collective consciousness becomes increasingly entangled with another’s.

Are we all going to become the same? In more ways, yes. It increasingly feels like the major metro cities around the world are becoming more like each other. Their residents will watch Squid Game and The Last Of Us with equal fervor but they will watch both of them. It may disappoint some of us looking for freshness through travel, but this is a manifestation of the global consciousness. But to those seeking freshness: it only looks the same when grouped by nationality. People within each group are becoming less like each other. Your neighbor may spend her evenings Twitch streaming to KPop while you’re busy watching Bollywood and browsing r/SneerClub. And in another country, there are others doing the same. We share a society with people who are on average becoming less like us due to the long tail. And identity is decoupling from national culture as the internet pulls people into umpteen different directions.

If culture used to be a product of the interaction between place and people, what will the future of culture be? I don’t really know yet, but it’s likely to be more eclectic. Individuals are going to be at the forefront of this new shift, and they will choose voluntarily. They will sample influences from many places and many times. Sometimes enough of them will do this and find each other online coalescing into a collection of niche communities. These consolidate into subcultures. Some of these have already developed and give us clues about where things are headed. We will be hipsters, otakus, steampunks, e-girls, and crypto bros more and Japanese, Indian, or French less. We will meet online first and default to that. Places in late modernity like America, Western Europe, and Japan have seen these changes already, but everyone will follow suit eventually. Our assumptions about our own identity and that of others will change. At the low resolution global picture of nations, the world is going to seem more homogenous. But in the open tabs of niche internet users, we may just find the divergent future.