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I want you to ask five people under 30 what books, movies, or music defined the last decade. Chances are, you'll get five completely different answers.
Now ask someone over 60 the same question about the 1960s. They'll all likely say: The Beatles, Vietnam, JFK, and the Moon Landing.
That difference might be evidence we've entered what cultural critics are calling a "post-culture era" - a time when the shared cultural alphabet that once united us has shattered into a million tiny little pieces, leaving us only niche subcultures and fragmented feeds.
There, he argued that Western civilisation had moved past its golden age of shared literary and moral consensus. Back then, most educated people operated from the same cultural playbook; biblical stories, classical references, historical touchstones. You could mention Shakespeare or the Bible and assume your audience knew what you meant.
In a post-culture era, those shared reference points dissolve.
Different groups operate with entirely different sets of facts and symbols. What replaces unified culture is fragmentation - niche communities, algorithmic bubbles, and what Steiner called a "fragmented global morass."
Artistic works that were once treated as monuments (permanent contributions to humanity that would be studied and preserved) are now content (quantifiable, disposable digital units designed for immediate engagement and monetisation).
Your favourite album is content. That novel you loved? Content. The film that changed your life? Just another piece of content competing for attention in an infinite scroll. Everything flattens into the same consumable format, stripped of the reverence we once gave to art.
And what about value? Well, value gets determined by viral popularity rather than critical consensus. A TikTok with 10 million views matters more culturally than a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel most people will never read.
Your feed is custom-built for you based on what you've engaged with before. This creates what scholars call "private realities" or echo chambers where everyone experiences a completely different version of culture.
You and I could be living in the same city, on the same internet, and have zero cultural overlap. Which is so f*cked up when you think about it. Your algorithmic feed shows you one set of references. Mine shows me something entirely different. And neither of us has any idea what the other is seeing. Wild.
This technological mediation means we've lost the broadcast age - that brief period when a few TV channels and radio stations created a shared national conversation. The monoculture, if you will.
Cultural nostalgia and endless recycling feel like symptoms. We're drowning in sequels, reboots, and "90s nostalgia" because we've seemingly lost the ability to create new, cohesive cultural forms. Everything is a remix. Everything references something else. Originality feels impossible when shared cultural foundations no longer exist.
Then there's the post-truth problem. When personal beliefs and emotions hold more weight than objective facts, when different groups can't even agree on basic reality, that's a direct symptom of collapsed cultural authority. We don't just have different interpretations anymore - we have different facts.
And maybe most tellingly: we experience everything with meta-awareness now. We celebrate holidays with layers of irony rather than genuine belief. We perform cultural rituals while simultaneously commenting on how weird it is that we're performing them. Distance from meaning has become the default mode.
Some see this as disaster. Cultural analysts often associate it with societal stagnation, the death of shared meaning, cultural collapse. Which is true, in a sense. Others argue we're in transition, a chrysalis stage where new forms of connection are still being born. Maybe fractured culture allows more voices and perspectives than the old monoculture ever did.
But living through it feels disorienting either way. That’s why Gen Z and Alpha are nostalgic for eras they never experienced. Because at least those eras had cohesion. At least people agreed on what mattered, even if they disagreed about everything else.
Probably, yes. Let’s see:
Do we mourn what's lost and try to rebuild shared foundations? Or do we accept fragmentation as the new normal and figure out how to create meaning within our smaller communities?
Because whether this is calamity or chrysalis, we're living it. And your algorithmic feed is probably showing you a completely different version of this article than what someone else would see.
Argue amongst yourselves about it x
