There used to be things that everyone watched. A television show could pull in half the country, a handful of magazines decided what was interesting, and a relatively small number of newspapers, radio stations, sports, and celebrities supplied most people with the same cultural reference points.
You could walk into a room full of strangers and have a reasonable chance that everyone had watched the same thing the night before. That world has largely disappeared, and the usual story is that this represents some kind of cultural decline.
We no longer have one common culture. Everyone is trapped in their own algorithmic feed, and culture has fragmented into thousands of tiny scenes, fandoms, sports, subcultures, newsletters, Discord servers, YouTube channels, group chats, and obscure hobbies. All of that is true, but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad.
I think monoculture is being replaced by microcultures, and microcultures are much more interesting.
Mass culture was a distribution problem
For most of modern history, culture had a distribution problem. Television had a limited number of channels, record stores had a limited amount of shelf space, newspapers had a limited number of pages, and movie theaters had a limited number of screens.
When distribution is scarce, it makes sense to concentrate attention. A television network would rather produce one show watched by 20 million people than 200 shows watched by 100,000 people each, because the economics reward things that appeal reasonably well to everyone.
The internet removed much of that constraint. There is now effectively infinite shelf space, which means culture no longer has to converge on a small number of things with mass appeal.
Instead, it can splinter into increasingly specific microcultures. There can be a YouTube channel dedicated to restoring century-old machinery, a community obsessed with ultralight hiking equipment, or entire worlds built around mechanical keyboards, amateur astronomy, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, specialty coffee, fountain pens, fermentation, obscure programming languages, vintage synthesizers, or running absurd distances through mountains.
Almost nobody participates in any particular one of these worlds, but the people who do can care about them enormously. That shift from broad, shallow participation toward narrow, intense participation is interesting on its own, but I think its most important consequence has less to do with media than with people.
Your interests reveal you
Every activity selects for something. Not perfectly and not exclusively, but people who repeatedly choose to spend their time on the same unusual activity are revealing something about themselves in the process.
Someone who wakes up at 5 a.m. to cycle 150 kilometers probably has a different relationship with discomfort than the average person. Someone who spends weekends photographing birds may have an unusual amount of patience, while someone who builds open-source software for fun is probably revealing something about curiosity, autonomy, or the pleasure they get from making things.
Competitive chess selects for people willing to spend thousands of hours being confronted with their own mistakes. Climbing, woodworking, distance running, dancing, sailing, gardening, cooking, and countless other activities each reward different combinations of patience, competitiveness, obsession, craftsmanship, tolerance for risk, desire for mastery, solitude, and collaboration.
This is what makes microcultures socially powerful: the activity is doing some of the sorting for you. You aren’t assembling a random collection of people and hoping that a few happen to share your temperament; everyone has already voluntarily passed through the same filter.
The hobby isn’t proof that you’ll like someone, of course, and people inside any community remain wildly different. But the more specific or demanding the interest becomes, the more information someone’s participation gives you about them.
Specificity is the filter
Monoculture has to be broadly acceptable. Anything requiring too much unusual knowledge, patience, commitment, or taste quickly loses most of the audience, so mass culture naturally gravitates toward things that millions of different people can enjoy at least a little bit.
Microcultures have the opposite property. They can be unapologetically specific because they don’t need millions of people to understand them.
A podcast can spend three hours discussing one technical problem, while a YouTube creator can make a 45-minute video comparing five pieces of equipment that look identical to everyone outside the hobby. A community can develop its own jokes, vocabulary, heroes, arguments, etiquette, and traditions that would be incomprehensible to 99.9% of the population.
From the outside, this can look ridiculous. From the inside, that specificity creates density: when someone understands the obscure thing you care about, the fact that they understand it already tells you something about them.
You’ve crossed some shared territory before you’ve even met. That makes it considerably easier to find your people.
We don’t have one culture anymore. We have thousands.
Under monoculture, identity was assembled from a relatively small menu. You supported one of a handful of sports teams, listened to one of a handful of musical genres, watched roughly the same television as everyone else, and encountered many of the same celebrities and ideas.
Now a person can belong to ten microcultures simultaneously. They might run trail races, collect natural wine, contribute to an open-source database, follow a particular school of architecture, play padel, and know far too much about espresso grinders.
Each interest places them into another overlapping network of people. Your social world is increasingly constructed from the intersection of these networks rather than from membership in one giant shared culture.
The important thing is that these communities don’t need to be large to matter. A microculture containing 5,000 deeply engaged people spread around the world can be much more significant to your life than a piece of mass entertainment consumed by 50 million people.
Scale and significance are not the same thing. Sometimes significance comes precisely from the lack of scale.
Hobbies are people filters
We tend to talk about hobbies as entertainment: things you do after work because they are enjoyable. I think that dramatically undersells their importance.
A serious interest is also one of the best social discovery mechanisms we have. It gives you something to do, something to improve at, something to talk about, and a recurring reason to encounter people who independently decided that the same strange thing was worth spending their limited time on.
Meeting someone through an interest therefore differs from meeting someone at random. There is already a small piece of evidence about who they are because they showed up and did the thing.
Maybe they climbed the same mountain, built something, trained for months, read the obscure book, or flew across the country to attend the conference nobody else has heard of. Whatever the activity is, both of you voluntarily passed through the same filter.
That doesn’t mean you’ll become friends, and treating hobbies as some elaborate networking strategy would destroy much of what makes them valuable. It simply raises the probability that the people you encounter will share something with you beyond the activity itself.
We lost commonality. We gained compatibility.
There is a strange contradiction in all of this: the internet has simultaneously pushed us further apart and made it easier for unusually compatible people to find one another. At the population level, we have less culture in common; at the individual level, we have unprecedented access to people who share incredibly specific combinations of interests.
There are fewer things that everyone likes, but it has never been easier to find people who like the exact strange combination of things that you like. Someone no longer has to live in your town, attend your school, work in your industry, or happen to be invited to the same party for the two of you to discover that you are interested in the same obscure thing.
The monocultural world maximized commonality between strangers. The microcultural world maximizes the possibility of finding unusually compatible strangers, and I think that is a surprisingly good trade.
There are obviously costs. Fragmentation can become isolation, communities can turn into echo chambers, and algorithms can transform preferences into identities and identities into tribes. A functioning society still needs shared institutions, shared language, and enough common ground for millions of very different people to live together.
But we tend to notice what disappeared more easily than what replaced it. We lost some amount of shared culture, while gaining an extraordinary machine for discovering affinity.
Follow the obsession
There is a practical implication to all of this: if you want interesting people in your life, do things you genuinely find interesting, and don’t be afraid to get unusually specific about them.
Take the class that seems too niche, join the tiny club, learn the difficult skill, go to the strange conference, enter the race, volunteer for the project, or start making the thing you’ve been thinking about making. Follow your curiosity further than seems reasonable, not because you’re trying to engineer a social circle, but because genuine enthusiasm naturally puts you in proximity to other people with genuine enthusiasm.
The deeper you go into something you actually care about, the more selective the microculture around it becomes. The people you meet there have not merely clicked “like” on the same thing; they have decided that it deserves some meaningful portion of their finite time and attention.
That decision tells you something about them, just as your decision tells them something about you. The shared interest becomes a starting point, but very often it turns out to be evidence of shared characteristics that run much deeper.
Monoculture gave us enormous numbers of people paying a little attention to the same things. Microcultures give us smaller groups of people paying an unreasonable amount of attention to things they genuinely love.
I think that’s better. The future may contain fewer moments where everyone is watching the same thing at the same time, but perhaps it will contain more rooms where you look around at a group of people who somehow share your particular collection of interests, obsessions, and instincts and wonder where all of them have been.