There was a time when culture gestured outward toward shared experience, toward the new, toward some horizon of possibility. Now, it stares inward, fragmented, homogenized, and devoid of collective significance. The internet, once mythologized as the great democratizer of creativity, has instead become a never ending *feed *of cultural entropy and harbinger of a hyper-globalized cultural vacuum.

We inhabit a moment of infinite choice and yet infinite sameness: a cultural singularity where everything looks familiar, everything sounds recycled, and everything is created with one desperate reason in mind — to go viral.

The Loss of Collective Imagination

Culture was once sedimentary, built through layers of influence and time. Consider Blade Runner (1982): a commercial disappointment on release, it was dismissed as overwrought and slow. Yet over the following decade it germinated quietly in the collective imagination, reshaping how artists envisioned the future. By the 1990s, its aesthetic DNA had surfaced everywhere from William Gibson’s cyberpunk prose to video games such as Syndicate and Beneath A Steel Sky. That gestation period, that interval between creation and recognition, was essential as it allowed culture to metabolize its influences and evolve.

The same slow alchemy once defined pop culture’s evolution. David Bowie’s influence on the New Romantic movement exemplifies how art once propagated through lived subcultural osmosis rather than viral acceleration. Bowie’s theatrical and androgynous persona of the 1970s was not instantly mimicked but absorbed, digested, and reinterpreted by a generation of young artists who coalesced at a now famous clubnight at The Blitz in Covent Garden. By the early 1980s, that influence had crystallized into the New Romantics movement as the likes of Boy George, Spandau Ballet, and Duran Duran uniquely channeled Bowie’s aesthetic into a completely new look and style of music. The transformation was neither derivative nor instantaneous, it was a process of cultural fermentation. What Bowie represented — reinvention as art form, the performance of identity as liberation — took years to manifest collectively.

The algorithmic churn of today denies that possibility. Nothing is given the chance to capture the imagination organically in a digital dictatorship built on instant gratification. As cultural consumption becomes a reflex rather than an engagement, we move from one thing to the next with the same glazed efficiency with which we swipe. Ideas are not allowed to breathe, they are efficiently skimmed, sampled, then replaced. The feed consumes and discards too quickly for anything to take root.

Furthermore, the exponential growth of choice in film, television, and music—manifesting in the proliferation of streaming services, YouTube channels, and digital archives—has engendered a paralytic fragmentation of cultural consumption. Where the 20th century was marked by relatively constrained media options—a finite number of television channels and FM radio rotations, as well as a VHS collection and 24/7 MTV if you were lucky—the 21st century is inundated with a fractal abundance of cultural commodities. This overabundance creates a centrifugal force that disperses cultural attention, rendering collective engagement nearly impossible. No longer do monumental cultural artifacts emerge as unifying touchstones, instead micro-niches cater to hyper-specific tastes thus rendering the notion of a “cultural moment” obsolete. Take event television as an example: this once-dominant shared cultural phenomenon could see 83m Americans tuning into Dallas to find out “Who Shot J.R.?” in 1980, or see 24m people in the UK collectively watch as Del Boy’s generally misplaced optimism paid off at last and the Trotters became millionaires in the 1996 Only Fools and Horses Christmas Special. Such media events were formative nodes of collective identity, but today the algorithmic fragmentation of streaming platforms ensures that media consumption is hyper-personalized minimizing the possibility of shared cultural touchstones.

This phenomenon extends to music, where the collapse of physical media, music videos and chart shows like Top of the Pops has dissolved genre boundaries into algorithmically determined Spotify playlists (e.g., “Chill Vibes” or “Workout Beats”) ensuring that nothing really catches on. The erosion of genre specificity or mainstream exposure is symptomatic of a broader cultural erosion as music is no longer an ontological site for identity formation but merely a backdrop to atomized consumption. The once-predictable rhythms of cultural zeitgeists, exemplified by phenomena such as Beatlemania and Girl Power, are rendered inert by this algorithmic holocaust.

The Endless Feed and the Death of Attention

As such, the internet’s original sin is excess. It offers too much of everything all the time. The result is not enlightenment but option paralysis.

The feed — that endless, hypnotic mechanism perfected by social media — functions like a slot machine for the soul. Every flick of the thumb promises revelation and yet only delivers noise. With its ostensibly infinite horizons of choice, the internet offers a deluge of media commodities—films, television, music, articles, books—exceeding the limits of human cognitive capacity to parse or prioritize. What began as a means of access has instead become a system of entrapment, reducing attention to a commodity harvested in microseconds so it can be sold back to you as a targeted ad.

Mark Fisher described late capitalism’s cultural mood as “the slow cancellation of the future.”¹ and the feed is that cancellation made tactile: the future endlessly postponed by the next suggested video, the next algorithmic fix.

Online, culture exists as a smooth continuum of the same. YouTube thumbnails blur together in a collage of bright faces, red arrows and inflated typography, all merely the semiotics of desperation. Every video promises to “explain,” “expose,” or “blow your mind.” Each creator optimizes themselves into invisibility as their individuality is eroded by the SEO logic of the platform. Julian Rake calls this “algorithmic convergence — the process by which expression collapses into what performs best.”² Creativity, once bound to exploration or sincerity, now functions as a performance of relevance. The question is no longer what can I say? but what will the algorithm promote? The answer is almost always “whatever looks most like everything else.”

Meme Logic and the Culture of Infinite Remix

The meme — once the symbol of cynical digital humor and at times anarchic and absurd — has now become the cultural template of the 21st century. Everything functions like a meme: short, referential, iterative, optimized for recognition rather than revelation. And when everything becomes meme, irony devours sincerity. Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture describes them as “units of cultural transmission that evolve through imitation.”³ and that evolutionary model has gone feral as platforms like TikTok and Instagram have turned mimicry into a mode of survival. Each new trend — a dance, a soundbite, a half-ironic aesthetic (“core” culture: cottagecore, clowncore, goblincore, officecore) — is born, replicated, and exhausted within days. The meme cycle is capitalism’s new rhythm of acceleration without progression, of reproduction of novelty for profit. Leila Grange describes this as “viral monoculture — an ecology where difference exists only to be standardized.”⁴ Every trend incubates its opposite, and both are monetized.

The Collapse of Subculture into Aesthetic

Once, subcultures were laboratories for alternative worlds: punk’s DIY aggression, rave’s ecstatic collectivism, hip-hop’s linguistic insurgency. Historically, these evolved within specific socio-geographic contexts: punk emerged in 1970s London as a response to economic austerity, while hip-hop arose from the socio-economic marginalization of African-American communities in the Bronx. They thrived on locality, scarcity, and resistance. Now, subculture thrives only as style.

On Instagram and TikTok, “aesthetic” has replaced “movement.” What once took years to form through shared ideology and kicking at the mainstream’s doors now appears overnight as a moodboard: punk jackets without politics, goth eyeliner without existential despair, rave playlists without bodies in motion.

Dick Hebdige wrote that subculture was meaningful precisely because it opposed the mainstream — a semiotic rebellion against order.⁵ In the digital era, the mainstream is the rebellion and every aesthetic, however oppositional, is already monetized. Punk’s spikes are available at ASOS and DIY zines exist as Etsy décor.

Subcultural capital has been replaced by algorithmic visibility. Ethan Drever calls this “the influence economy’s terminal paradox: that the appearance of difference is more profitable than difference itself.”⁶ The internet’s aesthetics of diversity conceals an underlying homogenization — a flattening of meaning under the weight of constant exposure.

The death of subculture is not its disappearance but its overexposure. Once something becomes infinitely reproducible, it ceases to signify.

The Platform as God: Algorithmic Universalism

Every creative act online is now filtered through the unseen logic of the platform. The algorithm — opaque, omniscient, and inhuman — decides what we see, what succeeds, and what disappears.

Byung-Chul Han calls this the “psychopolitics of transparency,” a regime where individuals willingly offer their inner lives as data.⁷ The algorithm rewards engagement, not meaning and not truth. It universalizes taste by predicting it. The result is what Jeanette Krull names “the universal feed” — a space where everything feels equally relevant, equally empty.⁸

The YouTube creator who once sought expression now must learn the logic of retention graphs. The novelist must think like a marketer. The musician must design their chorus in the hopes it is picked up as a 15-second TikTok clip. The algorithm has become an invisible aesthetic director, shaping art through metrics rather than imagination.

Fisher’s assertion in Capitalist Realism that “capitalism seamlessly absorbs and neutralizes opposition” resonates here, as the internet’s infrastructure serves as the ideal mechanism for the capitalist appropriation of cultural resistance. Subcultural practices are commodified into products—fashion lines, playlists, and branded collaborations—while their ideological cores are excised.

Nostalgia Engines and the Necropolitics of the Past

Unable to create or imagine the future, the internet must then reanimate the past. The countercultural potentialities of previous generations, imbued with futurity and alterity, are foreclosed under the weight of nostalgia-fetishism. The resurgence of vinyl records and cassette tapes, VHS aesthetics, and 1980s-inspired synthwave, exemplifies this temporal stagnation. While ostensibly celebrating cultural artefacts, these revivals entrench culture within the purgatorial present by perpetually reanimating its own corpse. Nostalgia has depressingly become the default aesthetic of digital life.

Mark Fisher named this hauntology: a culture haunted by its lost futures.⁹ The internet perfects this condition by turning nostalgia into a business model. YouTube channels reconstruct “lofi retrofutures”, Netflix funds endless 1980s reboots and pastiches, TikTok cycles through decades under the guise of costume changes.

Amanda Drexel describes this as “algorithmic necromancy — the resurrection of the past for infinite playback.”¹⁰ But it is not the past that returns, just a simulation stripped of difficulty and context as the 90s are reborn without their politics, the 80s without their paranoia, the 00s without their uncertainty.

This hauntological condition is exacerbated by the algorithmic feedback loops of platforms like YouTube and Spotify which prioritise familiarity over novelty. The digital subject is ensnared in an echo chamber of curated nostalgia, incapable of accessing the radical alterity necessary for genuine subcultural innovation. The digital subject no longer remembers, it streams memory. Every playback is a re-burial, every “throwback” a small exorcism of the future.

Creative Labor and the Cult of Optimization

The death of culture is not just aesthetic, it is economic. In the creator economy, the self has become the final product. The influencer, the streamer, the micro-artist, each is bound to the same imperative: produce, engage, optimize.

Jonathan Crary argues that under late capitalism, “sleep is the last frontier of resistance.”¹¹ yet creator economy erases even that, demanding permanent availability. Every hobby becomes potential income, every idle thought content fodder.

Platforms like TikTok or Twitch convert artistic impulse into metrics: retention, likes, audience watch-time. The logic of the factory persists, disguised as freedom. The “independent creator” is in truth a hyper-managed worker whose boss is the faceless, merciless, and always awake algorithm. Laurent Echelon calls this “creative necrosis” — the slow death of imagination through forced productivity.¹² To exist online is to self-brand, to polish one’s despair into a digestible form. Even burnout is monetizable as rest is merely a prelude to another “return video” for a quick boost of stats.

The Great Flattening

What the internet has achieved, with algorithmic precision, is the eradication of hierarchy in meaning. All content now occupies the same ontological space: memes, philosophy lectures, ASMR mukbangs, state propaganda, it all scrolls at the same speed requiring us to never leave our homes or make an effort to actively discover.

The flattening is both technological and metaphysical. When all information becomes content, the distinction between significance and noise collapses. Jean Baudrillard foresaw this in his notion of simulation — “the implosion of meaning in the media.”¹³ — but where Baudrillard’s implosion was abstract, the digital one is a physical act of swiping. We live inside the feed, and the feed lives inside us. It tells us what to desire, then monetizes our despair when we fail to obtain it. In this loop, creativity becomes a side effect of consumption. Culture no longer reflects reality, it refreshes it every 0.8 seconds.

What Remains?

The internet’s role in the death of culture is neither incidental nor peripheral, it is structural and systemic. Through the paradox of choice and the universalizing tendencies of digital platforms, the internet has orchestrated a profound cultural entropy. Subcultures have been reduced to superficial aesthetics, devoid of the philosophical and ideological gravitas that once defined them. Meanwhile, the globalizing dynamics of the internet accelerate the homogenization of cultural expression, rendering the local and particular increasingly invisible. In this brave new world of infinite choice and perpetual connectivity, culture as a site of collective imagination, resistance, and meaning risks becoming a relic of the pre-digital past.

The only real escape may be the one Fisher hinted at but never lived to articulate — the collective re-imagining of time itself, a world no longer ruled by immediacy, novelty, and endless self-exposure. Some artists are even now beginning to resist the feed, not by attacking it but by withdrawing from it.

Until then, culture’s corpse still twitches. Our scrolling sees to that.

1. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014). 2. Julian Rake, “Algorithmic Convergence and the Death of Expression,” Theoretical Machines, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2022). 3. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2013). 4. Leila Grange, Viral Monoculture: Notes on Digital Repetition (Specter Press, 2021). 5. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Routledge, 1979). 6. Ethan Drever, “The Influence Economy’s Terminal Paradox,” Culture.exe Vol. 1, No. 4 (2023). 7. Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso, 2017). 8. Jeanette Krull, The Universal Feed: Algorithms and Aesthetic Homogeny (Noema Editions, 2020). 9. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, ibid. 10. Amanda Drexel, “Algorithmic Necromancy: Nostalgia in the Age of the Feed,” Interface Review Vol. 5, No. 1 (2022). 11. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013). 12. Laurent Echelon, Creative Necrosis: Capital and the Death of Imagination (Specter Press, 2022). 13. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994).

— Neil Thomason is a resident of Greater Manchester. He lives with his wife, demanding daughter, and very demanding cat.