We keep hearing that immigrants are “destroying culture,” that things have changed because the street sounds different. That story only lands where culture is already thin.

At some point, it starts to look less like a culture and more like an ant colony. The feed plays queen; your pocket drops the pheromones. Millions of people react to the same cues, follow invisible trails, consume the same inputs, and think it’s their own idea.

So while people argue about outsiders, something quieter happens. Culture thins out.

Look at Venezuela during its boom years. It absorbed waves of immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and across Latin America. People didn’t erase the culture. They adapted to it. A strong culture pulls others in.

In many industrialized societies today, culture doesn’t grow from daily life. It gets streamed into people’s heads. Movies, media, and now algorithmic feeds repeat the same patterns until they feel natural.

The industrial education system did this at scale. Same schedules, same lessons, same mental tracks. It trained people to move together and think in sync.

Now that system runs in your pocket, all day long.

You’re not fixing one bad feed. Reality clashes with your map and pokes your identity at the same time. Both feel like a threat before they feel like information.

Your nervous system defends the map you run and the group you’re in. Discomfort hits fast, naming it comes later. That’s why dropping the signal feels safer than sorting it. What happens to the brain during cognitive dissonance?

When reality clashes with what you expect, you feel pressure to close the gap. You usually twist the story before you change your model. Your brain is trying to quiet the error signal. PMID 30524333

When your identity gets poked, you push back to calm the stress, not just to be right. The art leans on both without asking you to swallow the papers.

Building a narrative is cheaper than debunking it; repetition and “many sources” are easy to manufacture.

A “source” can be sincere, biased, or part of a campaign; from the outside they often look the same.

“How many of your thoughts do you think are actually yours?”