Cultural touchstones

“What defines culture?” — it was a question a longtime friend had asked casually over a cup of coffee, and it stumped me more than it should have. He brought it up in the middle of a conversation about the frankly dizzying array of big events and things happening in specific niche interests that, within that sub-culture, is a massive deal but which almost no-one outside of it has any knowledge of. Think things like Anime Con or Comic Con for which people spend months preparing costumes and planning travel for, or the video game speedrunning community finally discovering the exploit for a sub-1hr run, or an obscure EDM artist announcing a tour and tickets selling out within seconds. All of these are a small glimpse into the wide-ranging spectrum of sub-cultures and niche interests that have always existed and will continue to exist. The question we were debating is that if these things are all little nodes in a giant tree of connected human interests, is there anything at all the majority of people share at least a passing interest in and “defines” culture, so to speak?

As a millenial, I definitely had a lot of these growing up. The release of Pokémon Red and Blue in was a big one, where it captured the imaginations of almost every kid who could get their hands on a Game Boy. Collecting little creatures and training them while you create a set of six personal favorites on a long and personalized role-playing adventure through a fictional world? Sign me up! Harry Potter was another huge one, where the release of each book coincided perfectly with the age I was for it. I, along with millions of millenials, aged at the same rate as Harry. We all shared a connection with the character as our brains developed from early teenagers to late teenagers to young adults and were able to connect intimately with the main trio’s mental states, even if their thoughts weren’t explicitly described in the books. All of us found something we could project onto in one of the characters easily. Game of Thrones was the last major cultural touchstone I can recall in my life, where it felt like literally everyone was awaiting Sunday night’s episode to talk about it. I was so obsessed with it that I picked up and binge-read the entire book series after watching the first season on HBO. I didn’t want to wait another year for the next season to come out. The ending of the series left a sour taste in the mouths of many, but for a good chunk of its run, the show absolutely hogged every Monday morning water cooler conversation at school and work.

Now, in the mid-2020s, I don’t feel like there’s any specific cultural moment uniting us all. There’s a lot of things happening in specific subcultures, for sure. My wife recently mentioned how Onyx Storm, the third book in the Empyrean series (the “Fourth Wing” book franchise) was a huge bestseller months before its release because people were so excited for its launch. I wasn’t tracking this at all, but millions of readers on BookTok were (TikTik’s book niche). It felt weird to me to be so disconnected from popular book releases after literally decades of being absorbed into the most popular book releases — Harry Potter and the Song of Ice and Fire books. I had a moment where I felt detached from the entire culture of book readers. Whereas formerly these things would make a big splash on news sites, urban advertising, and TV, they are now confined to a specific niche inside a single social media app. The people already in it are soaking it all up, absorbing every fan theory and release memes and catchy jingle while those outside of it continue living their blissfully unaware lives.

A few years ago, I was watching the Overwatch League finals. It was a big deal to me because I played the game a lot and watching people at the highest ranks pull of incredible plays requiring top-tier synergy with their team and characters was a treat to watch. The game also has some really fun risk vs. reward mechanics where teams are encouraged to try out-of-the-box strategies that the enemy team won’t know how to react to. My wife walked by me watching it on the big TV and was surprised to see how into it I was. I explained a bit of how the game worked and she didn’t fully get why it would be an entertaining and fun thing to watch on a Sunday. Ultimately, I said “It’s like the Superbowl of this video game,” which she immediately understood. That phrase conveys a lot with very little — it gets across the point that this is the elite tier, is the big event for this experience, that the plays she’s seeing on-screen are the best of the best. It was her glimpse into the Overwatch node of the massive branching tree of our culture.

Wolfe Glick, a renowned competitive Pokémon player, recently uploaded a nearly 3-hr video about his entry into the 2024 Pokémon World Championships. It detailed all his planning, prep, execution, and gameplay strategies. Having previously played competitive pokémon in the past, I was absolutely engrossed in this video. I understood every reference, joke, strategy, pros & cons, tradeoffs, and every high and low he detailed in the video. I watched this video in parts on the bus during my commute to work and when I was getting off, the person next to me asked what it was about. I told him it was about competitive pokémon battling, to which his first response was “That’s a thing?,” a question that had me just as dumbfounded as I later would be when I’d get asked the “What defines culture?” question at the coffee shop. I have been tracking and following this niche of pokémon for so long that it always causes a bit of whiplash for me whenever I encounter people who are outside of it (sure, there’s always older people I encounter who don’t know anything about it, but I tend to expect people around my age to have some passing knowledge of these things). To this man, it’s utterly incomprehensible why I would spend 3 hours watching this video, but to my brain, it’s the most entertaining thing ever.

I’ve only outlined the nodes of our culture that I’m tracking or have some awareness of, but there’s obviously a ton of things that I’m simply not aware of. Sports related things like Ultimate Frisbee, Pickleball, or Aussie Rules Football have their own entire niche group of fans that I have zero awareness of. Oil-free cooking, meal prep, and smoothie fanatics own entire pockets of TikTok dishing out thousands of tips on how to make the most of the raw ingredients in your fridge, and it’s complete with controversies, drama, and infighting amongst factions within that niche. It sometimes overwhelms me to think about the fact that other folks likely have an obsession with some specific thing like I do with pokémon and they possess all these little nuggets of information that I’ll never know and never be able to comprehend due to the level of proficiency you need in that space to fully understand it. It’s frightening that they have this superpower.

So if there’s all these unique little things happening in all our little pockets, what is it that actually “defines” culture as we find ourselves 25 years into the millenium? You know, the way Star Wars, Lord of the Rings defined the past decades? The way The Beatles and Madonna were known names around the world? The same way Pokémon, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones are recognizable concepts for all millenials? What is it for the current generation and all future ones? Is it Taylor Swift? The Superbowl? Fortnite? I have no idea, if i’m being honest. This isn’t just a fun thought experiment either, it has real dangers. If there’s nothing uniting everyone with a shared interest, it makes it that much easier for the negative things that do unite everyone to take the spotlight. It’s easier for news media to sell us an idea of how everything is getting worse in global conflict, political power-mongering, and our slow progress in climate policy. Perhaps this is one reason our “culture” feels so divided lately, because there isn’t one positive thing uniting us all and we’re instead uniting by our shared hatred of the negative things, which in turn brings out the raw emotions of hate and disgust.

In response to the question of “What defines culture?,” I thought about everything I mentioned above in a speedy twenty-second version and replied “We do.” It was a cheesier answer than I was expecting to give, but ultimately it’s true. These entire communities only exist and thrive because we care about them. They are around because some passionate early fans took it upon themselves to spread the word and keep the hobby or thing alive. They may not have broken through the mainstream cultural barrier that many of the past things have done, but they are there still. They exist, and we shouldn’t discount them because of that. Maybe going forward, culture will be defined not by global touchstones with recognizable names that everyone knows, but instead by one-off references to a thing that sounds entirely unknown to someone until they inquire more about it, where the best outcome is either that they now become absorbed into that culture or at the very least, form a deep human connection with the person explaining it with such a fervor and passion that you can’t help but admire them for it.