• pop monoculture refers to facets of popular culture experienced by a huge amount of people at one time
• when describing the way shared cultural experiences have shifted post-social media, -streaming, and -recommendation systems, “monoculture” has been used to describe two opposing problems:
  1. hyper-fragmentation → we don’t “tune in” together anymore. we have separated “walled gardens” of streaming content that we can watch when and wherever we choose.
  2. homogenization → recommendation systems reward what they already know people like, and so hyper-optimization for “the algorithm” (or attention) leads to cultural artifacts becoming increasingly similar.
     • requires that media has universal reference points that can be meme-ified for virality.
     • reminds me vaguely of human centipede epistemology.
• kyle chayka writes that optimizing for virality is moving us toward both a “monotonous” and “monolithic” culture.

[!note]- major overhaul 2026-08-03 consolidated / archived several atomic notes.