Calm Down, Doomers. There Is No Sign of Cultural Decline.

There’s a toxic idea floating through the intellectual corners of the internet. It’s not a meme or a virus, but more like a fatalistic mood: the sinking suspicion that human culture is in terminal decline.

Don’t fall for it.

Stories of doom easily go viral. Because, you know … humans. It took me two days to write this rebuttal. But critical nuance is hard to sell. I’d appreciate your help in getting the word out. Please like, share, and help me spread the message into the vast creative extremes of human culture.

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The diagnosis is bleak: humanity has run out of creative ideas. We’re drowning in movie sequels, algorithmic pop songs, and story templates recycled from the previous century. Every coffee shop looks like an Apple Store, every logo is a cheerless sans-serif rectangle, and every car is an aerodynamic blob. It seems as if every hue, shade, tint, and tone is vanishing from our public space. In many designer offices, Photoshop’s color wheel sits gathering digital dust. We’re trading humanity’s glorious weirdness for a global colorless uniformity.

Multiple recent essays capture this narrative perfectly. In “The Decline of Deviance,” Adam Mastroianni argued that we’re trading weirdness for sameness, pointing out that the outliers in society (inventors, cult leaders, even serial killers) are becoming increasingly rare. In a later piece, “Our Overfitted Century“, Erik Hoel borrowed a concept from machine learning to argue that culture has become a victim of “overfitting“—so ruthlessly optimized for engagement and profit that it’s lost the ability to surprise us. Book covers, car designs, even human faces, are all trending toward the same mind-numbing optimum.

The conclusion is that we’re experiencing a cultural collapse.

Deviance is retreating.

It’s a compelling narrative. And because doom and gloom stories sell better than honest, nuanced analyses, such articles easily go viral. Confirmation bias kicks in, and everyone around the world almost wants it to be true. It certainly feels true when you’re watching the seventeenth Fast & Furious movie or having dinner in one of over fifty burger restaurants in town that all peddle some variant of a bacon burger, cheeseburger, chicken burger, and chili burger.

But as a student of complex systems, I paused at the massive contradiction staring us in the face. It’s surely the height of irony to discuss the “decline of culture” on Substack—a culture-loving platform that has single-handedly unleashed an explosion of independent writing and literally didn’t exist a decade ago.

It’s rather ironic to discuss the “decline of culture” on Substack.

To understand why the doomers are mistaken, we need to dig deeper into the mechanics of networks and complex systems.

I’m sorry. This is going to be a long post.

But it matters.

The Explosion of Novelty

In systems theory, whenever a new “solution space”—whether in biology, technology, or the economy—opens up, the result is never a polite, orderly queue. It’s a riot. It’s a mad scramble to colonize the empty space, resulting in a sudden, violent explosion of diversity.