Is everything becoming the same?
- Ethan Smith
- May 10
- 4 min read
Updated: May 18
Lately, I've felt that a lot of human culture is becoming the same. Groups have become very hive-minded and homogenous on an unprecedented scale.
Specifically, I see this a lot in social media, where large groups of people share the same jokes, mannerisms, and dialect to the point of near identicality. While this is typical in tight-knit cultures like corporations or fraternities, it's interesting to see this happening on a more global level.
I think this is the byproduct of how fast and connected our communication channels are becoming.
For much of history, fast communication channels have existed only with those in immediate proximity to us. In these pockets, shared cultures are able to mature and differentiate from others, such as the scope of families, schools, cities and more.
However, as technology has developed, information has been able to travel to more recipients, that are farther away, and more quickly than ever.
Aside from the bandwidth, the curation of information that makes its way to us is heavily curated by algorithms and popularity contests that keep people around the globe engaging with similar content.
Graph theory has an explanation that predicts this.
A phenomenon known as "oversmoothing" can happen when graphs are overly connected. Here, the rate of information transfer surpasses that at which new information enters the playing field. Every node has passed its message to all others repeatedly, such that all nodes converge on the same representation.
The opposite can happen with over-squashing when connectivity is sparse or highly bottlenecked. To get from node C to node E in the sparse graph, the message must be passed across many intermediate steps.
One of the most familiar types of graphs that reflect much of the happenings in our reality is the "small-world graph." The small-world graph contains a number of highly connected clusters, and in turn, these clusters are connected to each other sparsely through few channels. You can think of this like sets of friend groups, where on occasion, one friend may exist in multiple groups. A given friend group may communicate very quickly, and then, via the friend that exists in multiple groups, the message can pass onto others.
I still think the small-world graph does describe global human communication well. Online networks still have clusters containing people with similar interests.
However, these clusters include many more nodes, and there are many more connections between them. I think back to the time when my parents were on Facebook and how many friends they had, as well as when I first got Instagram in middle school. In the present day, we all have way more followers and following than we did then. Not to mention that social media algorithms also attempt to share content across clusters on their own volition to test the waters for engagement. You'll often hear people on X describe when a post "breaks containment" reaching many more audiences than expected. The content that appears to go viral, I have noticed, is often universally relevant and constitutes nuggets of culture that all clusters integrate in some capacity.
These qualities facilitate the rapid spread of culture, leading to the development of new slang that reaches millions within a week. It's fascinating witnessing how quickly large groups of online presences can synchronize and follow a trend without deliberate coordination.
At the same time, it's surreal in a slightly gloomy way. I don't think it's inherently a bad thing, nor do I believe this has happened to an absolute degree. However, it's weird watching subcultures that were once much more distinct from each other converge on the same ways of speaking, thinking, and acting. It's also noticeable the way that people across different cultures across the globe seem to be more independent/secular of their heritage and local culture these days and more similar to the global culture that appears online. And now more than ever, of course, English seems to be approaching the universal language of communication. It's common to see that the same movies and shows are being watched everywhere now as global phenomena, inadvertently coaching us all on how we act and socialize.
My read is that such convergence has increased with time. The rise of plastic surgery, eugenic technologies, and the aforementioned fast routing of curated information, I think, suggests a possible future where we collapse to sameness, not so different from sci-fi novels that imagine clones or rigid standards of social norms. For better or worse, it potentially squashes that which makes us unique.
I don't necessarily think this is a guaranteed future, but it's a possible one in the cards from my slightly cynical take.
On the other hand, watching humans communicate faster and be able to synchornize more quickly makes me think of other networks that exist in nature, such as ant colonies, bee hives, and the brain.
In all of these cases, there is some level of individualism and the whole that results from the relations of all the individuals. As humans approach the synchronization and communication speeds of these other networks, I wonder if the observation of foregoing some of our individuality could also signify becoming a more complete superorganism, yet only the sparks of it right now.
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