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I am a bit sleepy, so I apologise in advance if this sounds all over the place/incomprehensible. I've been reading Hyperculture by Byung Chul-han (pdf below) recently and wanted to hear what you Lains think. His point is essentially that due to globalism, overexposure, and the nature of the internet, anyone anywhere can experience anyone else's culture on a whim albeit at a very shallow level. This makes it so that people across the world judge each other's norms and beliefs at a much faster and larger pace, while simultaneously making every country feel the same. If you travel frequently, you may have noticed that nearly every country has something in common with everyone else. Almost everyone in the world agrees on common beliefs. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does bring about the question of cultural integrity and uniqueness. We hear about appropriation and representation on the internet all the time now, and in the shade of it I personally feel as if almost every culture in the world has been reduced to the same general concepts, barring some cool clothes and foods. Please let me know what you think. It is a rather short book.

>>76920 >and in the shade of it I personally feel as if almost every culture in the world has been reduced to the same general concepts, barring some cool clothes and foods I feel like this too. I'm going to take a pessimistic approach to this, and say that it seems to be caused by western brainrot spreading around the world too much. I don't really feel there was this lack of variety before in the world. When you look at historical buildings or artworks, you can recognize easily where you are. It's not like you had these same glass skyscrapers all around the world. You also had genuine different ways of life. You know manning Programming books? For some reason they often have people in traditional clothing of different cultures. I remember reading once a foreword in one of them about how the author laments the lack of variety people have in style now compared to just a few centuries ago. A book that might interest you is The Dawn of Everything from 2021. It's goes into the ways people used to live around the world and the variety of cultures you could actually find. Not that there no overlap between cultures. Everyone can point the similarities that Egyptian, Greek and Nordic mythologies have. But I do feel what is happening in recent decades is killing variety in the world. You can end up somewhere in Asia as an European, and it's not like it would be difficult to talk about pop culture with the locals there. And this is actually very weird. There's billions of people around the world, yet we all seem to watch the same things more or less. More so now then before. Returning in my eyes through to what I called western brainrot. I think there's a long history here in trying to remove things from their context, break them down and not take a look at the outside world too much. This is more or less how you are expected to do science, and I'll go as far as to even say this is how colonization was done. It's also why I believe the modern world is so often ugly. There's no appreciation of the environment, that's why it's not seen as crazy when an architect designs a building for a place he never put his feet on and has no way of knowing what kind of structure a place might need. That these ideas spread so far and also got accepted is tragic in my opinion. I know why they got accepted, as they are perfect mode of thought for manipulation of things, but they have become so widespread and integrated around the world as to be dangerous.

It's very true, and has been going on for ages For instance each city in France used to have its own unique architectural style, but by the 1700s and 1800s Europe had been conquered by Gothic architecture and each major city looked 90% the same. Rural France even now is filled with remnants of past styles which could have developed further but never did. Honestly any city in America above 100k doesn't feel very American. Say what you want about small town America's flaws (there are plenty) but there is a strong sense of "Yeah this town could only belong in america". Cities might have some cute regional quirks like "Ohhh atlanta has the varsity!" but that's from a bygone era, most people in atlanta don't even have southern accents anymore. And I expect european or aussie lains to feel the same way about their cities. Does Stockholm really feel Swedish? Does Berlin feel German? Everywhere is just kinda "a place" now with no culture. Just convenient places to soykaf, eat, and sleep.

its not a natural process, its artificially enforced by money spend on exporting culture to integrate other countries into ones own empire.

>>76921 When Europeans begun colonizing the Americas, Western philosophy slowly became obsessed with overcoming human limitations through reason and conquering nature so we could milk it for power. Slowly, everything became an object that's only valuable if it can be exploited for profit. Even people have become expendable statistics and "human resources." This mindset of rationalization, standardization, and exploitation was eventually applied to culture. So like a Ford car plant, everything has to be stripped down and manufactured to a basic profit generating formula and pumped out for profit. If you've seen one Marvel superhero film, you've basically seen them all. They are identical. So culture has become samey because original content is dead and its all about pandering and repeating the same old soykaf. Meanwhile, people in third world countries were told they had to abandon their indigenous lifestyles and mimic American (or Russian commies) to modernize. Big tech came along and are now using their choke hold over the internet to assimilate everyone into a monoculture and shove their California woke lifestyle down everyone's throats. From Japan to Finland, everyone uses Netflix, Google, and Twitter. If you control search engines, you control what information people are spoon fed.

>Big tech is not the problem. Its finance. Namely blackrock spreading esg with fed money. Corporations are getting bought and forced to comply with californian values. You have literal californians sitting in japan telling them what to do. And there is a logical rationale for it too: westerners were fleeing into japanese products. i.e. comics died while manga soared in us. They aim to destroy the competing product japanese culture to force their own people into compliance.

>>77111 If you look at the culture giants (Apple, Google, Facebook, Hollywood studios, the big record labels) they are all based in California and their CEOs are all woke neolib hipsters. This isn't fake, they actually believe in this stuff. These corporations aren't being paid to comply with fed values, they are creating the values and the feds are backing them so America can have total infrastructure and pop culture dominance. Its a case of I scratch your back you scratch mine. You can have your entertainment monopoly if you serve my interests. I remember a few years back, Western NGOs and pundits were going after otaku culture and trying to get Japan to crack down on "fictional child abuse" or saying fujoshis were "objectifying gay people" and warning of the dangers of anime. Its like people can't be allowed to have their own cultures anymore, everyone has to be assimilated into CNN culture Defending against "hate speech" and self-victimization are just excuses to attack people for being different. This even happens online. There has to be a single corporate sanctioned and sanitized internet culture so you see the Redditifcation of literally everything and if a site isn't like that then its evil fringe website and people should avoid it. The sad thing is it works. If a site doesn't have that corporate look most people will just avoid it or think its shady.

>>77115 >trying to get Japan to crack down on "fictional child abuse" ironically that stopped cause the accusers got jailed for real child abuse. Made me also think maybe they were trying to ban competition to their real kid selling business...

>>77111 >Corporations are getting bought and forced to comply with californian values It is interesting that by "Californian values" you refer to a very specific set of beliefs held by some wealthy people that happen to live most of the time in California. Having been born and raised in a relatively small California town, I can tell you that their values don't represent even half the population here. Certainly they don't represent the Mexicans, blacks, or natives, no matter how much they claim to. We hate our billionaires, robbing from them is almost a civic duty. >>77115 >they are all based in California and their CEOs are all woke neolib hipsters maybe not woke (except in the most shallow sense) and often not hipsters, but definitely neolibs. Guys like Peter Thiel are more common than guys like Tim Cook.

>>77118 What i meant by californian values is primarily california's state laws. Cali has mandatory diversity hiring quotas and now japanese companies are getting forced to hire non-japanese by quota under esg compliance. This is how they inject their own people into jp corps to repeat the same pattern spreading their ideology topdown through legal means. Also i wouldn't dispute that many people reject it but cali became synonym with this movement because its the strongest representative.

>>77120 Fair enough, Californian law has always been retarded. Most of the time it's pandering to the SJW crowd, blatant cash grabs, or both.

>>77115 >ts like people can't be allowed to have their own cultures anymore, everyone has to be assimilated into CNN culture Defending against "hate speech" and self-victimization are just excuses to attack people for being different. Whiteness studies and SJW politics is one of the most colonial mentalities ever produced. Western bourgeois liberalism will praise diversity, while completely destroying and subverting anything that is actually alternative to the incredibly occidental value system it seems to hold. It makes universal appeals to "humanity", as if to say any culture that goes against it is not even human. It is also extremely puritanical, as evidenced by its rabid hatred of Otaku culture. Or consider how interracial relationships are actually treated here in the west. It is allowed because non-whites and whites alike are told to be "colorblind", so you cannot love your partner for their ethnicity or cultural heritage, as that would be "fetishism". If you are an African dating an European, or a European dating an Asian, you can only do so if you pretend they just happen to be of another race. And that's despite the fact that this is so obviously not the case. Which is to say, everyone has to be part of the same deracinated blob. Your children cannot even being truly multicultural. There is no diversity, even if there are many people of different racial backgrounds, because all of them are forced to comply with the same set of cultural attitudes. Look at that acronym, "DEI". Is there anything more self-refuting? Diversity implies differentiation, which implies exclusivity, which implies inequality. Just pointing this out is an unspoken taboo on our college campuses, because even the conservatives all believe in the same nonsense which underpins it (all conservatives want to larp like they are a continuation of MLK or some other nonsense).

>>77109 >When Europeans begun colonizing the Americas, Western philosophy slowly became obsessed with overcoming human limitations through reason and conquering nature so we could milk it for power. Yes, very much so. And I feel we keep forgetting that the border between where "nature" ends and "humans" start is an imagined one. Like all borders are. I don't like saying this because we are taught that nature is brutish, uncaring and cruel. Also it's seen as somehow "backwards". So thinking in these ways makes people uncomfortable (it used to make me too), but I don't know when will people realize that the butchering of nature for own gain in the end always equates to self harm. Really, if you want to feel it. Take away your phone on next commute. Don't listen to music, don't distract yourself and just walk on the street. If you are in any place like I am, you'll see invasive roads, brutish simple buildings, plastic bottles in the water. Lack of natural sounds. There was once a joke that I don't remember word for word, but it went something like this. A native American walks up to a guy and asks why he's working so much. He replies that he is doing that so that one day he can retire and spent his day resting under trees, fishing and playing music. The native American responds saying that he already is resting under trees, fishing and playing music in his day to day life. That kinda sums up (a big part) of the problem. We are pretty great at inventing tools and simplifying things on the short scale, but really really bad at thinking about things in big terms. That's why we can quote “All the labor-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being". That's why we call someone educated when he has a paper that shows he didn't disagree too much with his teachers and showed good skills at manipulating symbols. There's barely any point put into thinking about harmony and restrictions of things. An other great remark that I don't remember once again word for word went something like "Any plan to improve traffic won't have in it the suggestion to slow down the speed of the vehicles". I think most modern fad on this is AI content. You can create believable looking images and text of things, and do them in fraction of the time it would take a human to do them. Yet there's only so much human attention to see these things and physical space to host them. Think of what that means in the long run. When we have the issue of cells spreading in the human body without any harmony or regard for the function of the whole, we call it cancer and it's very dangerous. The spreading might be even seen as good in some perverted and anthropomorphic sense by the cancer as it's gaining more territory. But it's also killing the ground from which it came.

>>77125 productivity improvements cant help you because generated value is captured by capital owners and never passed down. In fact the reverse happens through govs printing money for themself while resulting inflation eats your earnings. Sitting in US you would need ~$80.00 on minwage today to return to 70s earning power.

>>76920 >nearly every country has something in common with everyone else Starbucks. Not sure a whole book was necessary for this premise. Thankfully the meat and potato of cultures even in places such as American states have grown their local micro-cultures. >We hear about appropriation and representation on the internet all the time now, and in the shade of it I personally feel as if almost every culture in the world has been reduced to the same general concepts, barring some cool clothes and foods. This is not an accident. It is true that any imperial culture (take Rome or some Caliphate variants) sort of homogeneized identifiers and quirks but there are limits to that. In general it took more of the form of '''BORROWINGS''' while the core of a culture didn't change too much locally. However, our modern NWO global elites are pushing hard for leveling everything down to a convenient one-world soup. The point is to destroy all the barriers so it's easier for people to move around.

>>76922 >Rural France even now is filled with remnants of past styles which could have developed further but never did. Unless you look at villages which have been frozen in time (aside from electric cables, street lamps and roads), all rural villages are either of the cheapest and dirtiest kind when very isolated, mostly comprising of farm houses that are a sore to the eye, or everything is being built with a mix of suburbian houses that are absolute ugly (and nothing has improved at all within 60 years) or with public buildings for which we still pay the effects of leftist and communist ideologies and all variations of LeCorbusier structural deconstructions and recompositions. In other words, the only good looking places in France that have interesting buildings are: - old castles and mansions - old religious buildings - old houses - places that were modernized during the 19th century (see Paris and the Hausmanian buildings plus the later art nouveau constructs) The French government has been secretly destroying many churches in a way that will remind you of the way so many places in the US have been destroyed or caught fire within the last five years, often chemical or agricultural depots and silos. Our countries are being sabotaged on purpose, like our economies. Very modern buildings aren't even pretty while ultra elitist modern houses are nothing more than piles of cubes and rectangles with lots of glass. IOW, post WW2 architecture is drab, the work of destroyers of the noble soul, an open war against beauty.

>>77117 >USA: Hey you, pedos, stop doing what you do! Dontcha know it's wrong? Hypocrisy. >If a site doesn't have that corporate look most people will just avoid it or think its shady. Because a loss over medias and political power has happened and these cultural changes costs hundreds of billions, don't they? >>77118 >Having been born and raised in a relatively small California town, I can tell you that their values don't represent even half the population here. North California? The filth flourishes in the big cities. >>77124 >It is also extremely puritanical, as evidenced by its rabid hatred of Otaku culture. Sexualized content on underage kids should not have to be accepted. >everyone has to be part of the same deracinated blob They made the topic of race a taboo whereas in all non-Western countries it's perfectly accepted to extents that surprise Westerners as forms of racism take on such a local scale that it's more like "regionism" more than anything else, and then it is equally forbidden to accept that cultures are not created in a vacuum, that the wealth of true diversity is the expression of these biological instincts. For sure, if all races and species on this planet need not being told how to behave because they instinctively know what to do so as to fit their necessities for survival, thus behavior is genetically induced, why suddenly the rich variety on mankind should totally be impervious to this most basis rule? That makes no sense. Western liberals who only want to hear about the uniformying universalism refuse to let people think that culture follows function and function is defined by biological needs, and we see how the different races of this world have created so vividly different cultures, yet only the anti-cultural cognitive dissonance is allowed in society, entertainment and academies. This is a mad world where people are afraid of gigantic windmills. We are different, period. Why not accept these difference and learn eventually to appreciate different nations preciesly for these differences? More importantly, how do you preserve these differences if you keep cutting and sewing whole clothes of people together? Where is the authenticity in any of this? It all becomes fake and superficial, as if cultural norms were toned down fanciful tags that could be randomly attached to anyone. It creates unnecessary tensions and tragedies on the world scale for very minimal gains unless you're at the head of one big company and you're a sociopath who sees all these cultural differences as native barriers to your ever expanding chain of globalized products. We shall be "consuming" Netflix, all of us. A disruption is imposed. There are no degrees. It's either local or fully global and only the latter is truly tolerated.

>>77125 >If you are in any place like I am, you'll see invasive roads, brutish simple buildings, plastic bottles in the water. Lack of natural sounds. Cities always have had that issue, even five thousand years ago. But humans always seemed to understand the point of keeping greenery within cities nevertheless. Now this is being forgotten or erased on purpose too as we see trees being felled without reason. Perhaps on the positive side, the reduction of traffic and the use of silent electric cars is a clear net positive on that side alone, but electric appliances and systems create all sorts of issues higher up the chain of production that certainly do not solve the issue of brutality against nature at all. With much irony, the noisier vehicles of fourty years ago were also much simpler to produce and repair. As for the use of plastic, can we just admit that although there were advantages it brought for transportation of anything, from large supplies to mere carrying around water, there definitely were occasions when less plastic could have been used in favor of glass or sulphurized paper and cardboard, but that would have cut into the profit of oil companies that were close to the Western governments. >He replies that he is doing that so that one day he can retire and spent his day resting under trees, fishing and playing music. The native American responds saying that he already is resting under trees, fishing and playing music in his day to day life. Yes but in what conditions? America has vast areas that are underpopulated so it is always possible to already find one without having to save pennies through decades of hard work, but if you want a decent place that's not too cut off from civilization either, it's going to cost something, a hefty price. Working may not be too much of an issue here but how much money is actually taken away from the laboring people, how much work was necessary to secure the same amount of wealth in the 50s. We have been globally robbed, that's all. Debt, inflation, crisis after crisis, all too convenient and serving the interests of the same caste above us. Money hasn't vanished. It's there, hoarded in insane quantities reaching in the trillions which don't benefit the peoples. >That kinda sums up (a big part) of the problem. We are pretty great at inventing tools and simplifying things on the short scale, but really really bad at thinking about things in big terms. That's why we can quote “All the labor-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being". Perhaps not true for every single case of machinery and modernizing of our industries, but overall it's correct and the only change brought is the safety of use, quality of life and the output. >An other great remark that I don't remember once again word for word went something like "Any plan to improve traffic won't have in it the suggestion to slow down the speed of the vehicles". Good luck measuring this when the roads and cars have multiplied decade after decade. Although slowing down does minimize the risks of lethal accidents and makes life less stressful, the better take on this would be to stop forcing people having a life of commutting. We spend too much time away from our homes, which are all regrouped in areas that are barely lively and even less now that both wife and husband have to work to accrue the same amount of money than in the 60s amounted to one salary only. >When we have the issue of cells spreading in the human body without any harmony or regard for the function of the whole, we call it cancer and it's very dangerous. The spreading might be even seen as good in some perverted and anthropomorphic sense by the cancer as it's gaining more territory. But it's also killing the ground from which it came. There's definitely a problem about the saturation of useless content. Soon enough, a sense of popularity will be used to define what content is most seen or saved and therefore should be presented to people. In a way that's already done in many services but it barely corrects the issue of the sheer excess of useless material that's produced by machines, or even humans who think they have talent but aren't exactly that impressive.

>>77146 >North California? The filth flourishes in the big cities. South. Norcal is full of tweekers and antisocial homestead LARPers. Redding is worse than SF by almost any metric except cost of living. Rural socal has lots of tweekers too, but it also has lots of Mexicans which means that it's culturally superior to inland norcal. Coastal norcal is pretty cool tho. I've thought of moving there.