TS7: Sm(art) Culture loss isn't a border problem

🎬 Teaser

✔️ TLDR

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.

💬 Context

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.

📄 Going deeper

Systematic reviews of algorithmic platforms show the feed really does act like a queen: it coordinates attention, decides what counts as “news” or “normal,” and locks people into the same reactive loops. Algorithmic influence and media legitimacy: a systematic review · Social drivers and algorithmic mechanisms on digital media