Oh, the irony

Some good reading on micro-culture and macro-culture

Sometimes you just have these posts that are links of links to other links. I’m afraid this is a little bit of that.

Aaron Renn’s piece recently (actually, on my birthday), on The Future of Media was terrific. Link below.

The Future of Media

His piece was a written review of this really excellent piece on micro-culture and macro-culture by Ted Gioia.

In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War

I tried to share some thoughts about all this on Twitter (sorry Elon, I still have a hard time calling it X), and of course the algorithm wouldn’t let me post, because it’s a Substack link. The irony of it all is too much to bear.

I’m a too-big consumer of media. As such, I’m a frequent critic of what I read and see. The reason I can be a harsh critic of journalists and media is because people understand their world through the lens of whatever they read or see, and what their friends read and see. If that lens is terribly distorted, it has a downstream impact on everyone.

I’m also an enormous fan of new media. It’s so blindingly obvious to me that podcasts, for example, are orders of magnitude better than any news on tv, and 90% of what is in print. As a listener, you get to hear from people directly. Curious about what someone really thinks, or how they explain their ideas? All you have to do is listen to them in a long-form interview, instead of a 30 second piece where someone else interprets it all for you. That piece might be flattering, or it might be a hit piece, but it’s always laced with the bias of whoever is doing the interpretation. Podcasts, Youtube, etc - these allow you to directly judge for yourself. It’s just so much better in every respect.

I could say the same for other aspects of social media. It’s true, and I agree, that there’s a lot of toxicity to social media. People say things to each other on social media that they’d never say face-to-face. In fact, a whole lot of people would get punched in the face if they spoke that way to other humans in person. But you can’t also ignore the benefits. Twitter, for example, is just plainly a far better source of information on breaking news than anywhere else. The fact that individuals can upload video and commentary instantaneously allows for events to be seen and heard without filters. And there’s one other sly benefit - the bias of individuals in the news business is impossible to hide on social media. People just can’t help themselves, and you get to see behind the curtain.

So for all this and more, I’m a fan of what the author calls “micro culture,” and a regular critic of what he calls “macro culture.” Statistics bear out that my view is the dominant view today. Of course, what he references about the “alt” culture of previous decades also deeply resonates. I was long a fan of “alt” music, movies, news, etc. Even when it was truly lousy, I still enjoyed hearing and seeing other voices outside the mainstream. I even once was a projectionist for a student film series in college, and loved every minute of it.

Read Gioia’s piece, I recommend it highly. It might help you understand your world better.

Lastly, I’d add, I agree with Renn in the sense that it’s probably not good for us as a society to have institutions and broader culture that just seems to be failing over and over. But, it’s also a necessary condition of the time we are in. If you believe the Fourth Turning thesis, and I generally ascribe to it, we will have this period of failure followed eventually by one of rebirth and rebuilding. There’s a lot of what I try to write and speak about that is focused on the aftermath - the rebuilding. We’ll need good people with practical approaches to recreate a healthy macro culture. I think we’re still a ways off from that happening, but it will happen. In the meantime, one of the best things we can all do in this fractured micro-culture is to expose ourselves to as many diverse viewpoints as possible. Challenge yourself. Subscribe to someone that you think is diametrically opposed to what you believe. Listen to some long-form podcast interviews. Dump the current toxic macro-culture, and start building a better one for the future.