Hottest take of the year
Modern life has long been on a trajectory of accelerating cultural diffusion. In pre-history one can assume there were no mono-cultural norms, nor even the illusion of them. With the formation of complex societies, then the increasingly wide berth of international trade, then mass media, then the internet, a steady movement toward global homogenization of culture has taken place.
A peculiar counterveiling force proliferates in the age of social media, as hyper-personalized content feeding algorithms fracture the simulacrum. The culture is globally diffuse, yet filled with narrow channels which amplify shared interests into artificially constructed sub-cultures not bound by geography or, in many cases, even by time.
Neural networks and now large language models mirror this to a parodic degree, distilling the corpus of human experience into a math equation which minimizes a single loss function over the entire possibility space of human interaction within the system.
In the 1900s, societies like the USA exerted considerable and intentional control over cultural norms using such mechanisms as propaganda, educational standards, and war. Now the landscape of culture is driven by uncontrolled positive feedback loops and reductive value functions which are derived entirely from the goal of making money for large corporations.
The result is a world which increasingly divorces our internal value structure from traditional human experience, the one our bodies were evolved to live with. It's no wonder, then, the trans-humanist goal of divorcing ourselves from that body, to maximize success in modern life, to minimize the loss function.