We're All Living in America

America’s political power recedes but its cultural power surges to even greater heights.

America is the world’s sole generative superculture.

This may not seem obvious. In fact, it seems counterintuitive. America is bungling its Middle Eastern diplomacy regarding Israel and Palestine, facing increasingly open competition from China for leadership of the world system, and cannot seem to fully expel Russia from Ukrainian territory. American Empire is facing threats in several strategic theatres. Domestically, the American public seems to be adopting a more pessimistic outlook on life with numerous social ills; drug abuse, homelessness, crime, illegal immigration, crumbling cities and infrastructure. It feels like, perhaps, after a quarter of a century of world-historical power and prosperity, America is starting to feel old.

It is often difficult to perceive the waters we swim in. Where many Americans perceive American culture to be waning, those of us who are subjects of American empire are better able to look without the box as well as within. If you pay close enough attention not only is Americana the world’s sole superculture but it has taken on a new, more potent virality: the smartphone-enabled reordering of our collective psychology via unrelenting algorithmic bombardment.

There are roughly two periods of Americana: pre-smartphone 1991-2007, and the smartphone era that commenced after the release of the iPhone in 2007. The main difference between pre-smartphone Americana and smartphone Americana is that the former was defined by central points-of-access focused mostly on consumption (think McDonalds, CNN, Coca-Cola, Angelina Jolie, and other centralised institutions/brands and celebrities). Smartphone Americana is defined by algorithmically-driven, psychological fine-tuned, and endlessly generative social media applications. The smartphone acts is a decentralised point-of-access in the hand of every individual that can get one. Not only has the demand for cultural consumption massively increased in the years since but so has the speed of delivery (inverse to the quality of production). American culture is no longer just present in everyone’s living room; Americana is hiding in your walls.

When Taylor Swift announces a new tour in Southeast Asia, governments compete to have her perform exclusively in their country. When Donald Trump causes a new scandal that grabs headlines and generates new battle-lines between Republicans and Democrats, these become the new battle-lines between political factions in other countries. American fast food and beverage chains are found even in the heart of Islamdom. No one is looking to China or Europe for cultural inspiration. China is the closest thing America has had to a competitor in recent decades, yet China’s impressive economic growth or political mettle has failed to translate into a ‘Chindom’ – a global fanbase for Chinese cultural exports in the realms of music, literature, and film.¹

Americana is quickly becoming the default global youth culture. One may notice an almost perverse physiognomic convergence: young people in Los Angeles, London, Dubai, and Istanbul increasingly have the same fashion sense, facial mannerisms, hand movements, and even American-tinged accents in any language you can think of among young people increasingly comfortable with mid-sentence transitions between English and their native tongues (i.e. Arablish, Spanglish, Hindlish, etc). The video below is from the Kuwait Times shows a glimpse into the emerging youth culture in the Middle East, for example. Of note is the dress sense, social attitudes, and Arablish:

Beyond the physiognomy, there is a rapid convergence in foundational thoughts and attitudes. It is not just that people consume like Americans do. They now think like Americans think. American ideas, specifically the progressive-liberal ideas and attitudes incubated in and among America’s college campuses and urban bourgeoisie, are spreading like wildfire in the non-West. Gender roles are being ‘deconstructed’, animosity is increasing between men and women, and there is even greater support for LGBT. Granted, the latter is mostly confined to university campuses, but these issues were not present in any force even a decade ago, and now they are a matter of campus orthodoxy featuring protests and sometimes pitched battles between students.

American identification along lines of gender, “sexuality”, and other potential poles that invite grievances against ‘the other side’ (in many cases, pitting men against women, ‘patriarchal’ elders against liberationist youth, etc) are becoming more important to young people over their “traditional” forms of identity like nation, religion, and local cultures. Americana’s generative nature gives it a vitality that attracts young people to adopt its various identities in lieu of the almost motionless and unvital culture of their surroundings. Young people want to feel part of a historical movement, and Americana is ushering them into ‘the future’.

‘We are stronger together’. A pride parade in Istanbul, Turkiye.

Many universities have become little more than reproductive barracks for Americana as the below tweet graph shows. These universities are not producing the ‘sovereign human capital’ necessary to develop their countries as independent nations but have been mimetically subverted into lightning rods for Americana’s spread from within their cultures. It is likely that many universities around the world now constitute a significant risk to the cultural sovereignty of their countries.

A purely materialist approach to how social trends, attitudes, and problems like fertility rates, gender roles, and general lifestyle expectations emerge is no longer sufficient. In countries that are not as industrialised or wealthy as America, their middle-and-upper classes mimic American social patterns and habits, causing a level of demographic convergence with America that hamstrings their own ability to industrialise and become wealthy.

Visiting some of the wealthier neighbourhoods in a Turkish city like Istanbul is no different to visiting a wealthy neighbourhood in the West: there are five pet dogs for every child, most of the inhabitants are middle-aged, and there is a general state of unhappiness that their country is not at a stage that allows them to genuinely consume like Americans do. It is not uncommon to hear strange lamentations along the line of, ‘it is my right to live like the Americans and Europeans, and I am being deprived of it. My country should do better.’

Their perceptions about how westerners actually live are purely derived from the Hollywood and social media content they are consuming of Americans living in sizeable mansions, driving sportscars, and eating obscene amounts of beef. Americana’s slick messaging, aesthetics, and overwhelming material abundance are nearly impossible to defend against with counter-propaganda. Yet by failing to reproduce at the minimum replacement rate, countries like Türkiye is being deprived of a future and growing labour force that is an absolute prerequisite to full industrialisation, not to speak of the expectations for healthcare and pensions by an aging society that cannot be provided for by its shrinking youth population and future labour force. Much of the economic woes of middle-income countries like Türkiye is partially driven by the debt incurred through excessive imports, driven by their middle-and-upper social classes’ desire to live beyond their means. Countries still in the ‘developing’ stage are now speed running the process of social transformation that industrialising societies went over a longer time period. Often just as they reach middle-income status (let alone upper), entire swathes of a society have been immersed in the mimetic contagion of Americana, contributing to demographic convergence without material convergence.

History shows that culture has a greater endurance than the political power of its creators. Empires that recede in importance or collapse entirely can continue to have their culture act as the basis of a high culture for generations after. Rome adopted Greece’s culture; in turn, post-Roman Europe and the wider Mediterranean basin rebuilt on top of much of the Greco-Roman culture. Britain lost its empire after WWII and in terms of its economic and political capacity is nothing more than a middle power today, yet for much of the post-war period Britain has been able to coast off of the cultural prestige of its imperial legacy and enjoyed one of the highest rates of soft power among any nation except America (and maybe Japan).

What does this mean for the future? Far from becoming less influential, Americana is going to reach new heights of global influence. The distribution of American culture through centralised points-of-contact was a test-run. There is now complete distribution to every human being on Earth with a mobile phone and an internet connection, and America remains one of the few countries on Earth that actually generatively produces culture. What types of culture are actually produced is beyond my ability to guess, but if current trends are indicators of the likely trajectory, we are likely to see more monoculture now expanded to the physiognomic and spiritual self.

Americana is so generative because America has more than any other nation been able to reverse-engineer culture down to its building blocks, and re-build it back up into any cultural format an American marketer desires. If there is industrial production for machine goods, there is industrial production for culture. This poses a critical threat to nations that do not possess ‘the means of cultural production’, i.e. the bare minimum ability to produce subcultures with enough vitality to provide their youth with a sense of belonging and identity. We are likely passing through a great filter in world history as entire cultures and languages are abandoned to extinction, or otherwise dismembered for scrap to be re-integrated into the latest TikTok trend. This is another front the 20th century nation-state is facing alongside the decline in fertility rates and aging populations and is unlikely to be able to respond to robustly; supercultures are inherently imperial projects with imperial intentions, beyond the middling ambition of nation-states that want to be left alone in their homogeneous pastures. The nations that want to survive this ‘Great Filter’ of mass cultural extinction may very well have to adopt their own imperial mindsets in response.

Until such a robust response arises, Americana is the vibe of our era. As the song goes,

This is not a love song.
This is not a love song.
I don't sing my mother tongue.
No, this is not a love song.

1. This essay makes a convincing case that this is due to China’s refusal to engage with the same sort of ‘reverse engineering’ of American art production and marketing techniques done by successful generative subcultures like K-Pop (Bollywood can also be included in this). Even though K-Pop is a generative subculture, it shares the same DNA of and is downstream of the American superculture.