We live in an era defined not by paradigm-shattering inventions but by a vast, networked convergence of people coordinating within existing cultural forms. Rather than each generation announcing a radically new aesthetic or movement, 21st-century culture channels its creative energy into remixing, iterating, and expanding what already exists. On TikTok and other social platforms, millions of users perform the same viral dances or participate in meme formats instead of seeking unheard-of forms of expression. In Hollywood and pop music, the biggest hits are reboots, sequels, retro revivals, or mash-ups of familiar franchises and styles. This is more than a passing phase of nostalgia – it reflects a deeper structural shift in how culture operates. Networked social coordination has become the dominant mode of cultural innovation, overtaking the pursuit of pure novelty. Human creativity, once celebrated for bold originality, now often takes the form of curatorial or collaborative iteration. Online networks bind us into what feels like a massive multiplayer cultural game: creation is a socially synchronized act, and anything “new” tends to arise from innovative recombination of the known rather than from invention ex nihilo. The result is a cultural landscape in which the new often feels eerily familiar, and progress comes from expansion sideways into innumerable niches instead of leaping upward into the unknown. Our era excels at filling in the negative space of culture—sprawling outward into every permutation of existing ideas—even as it struggles to climb toward entirely new paradigms. In short, networked coordination has restructured the terrain of innovation itself: rather than vertical breakthroughs that establish new paradigms, we see a horizontal sprawl driven by the logic of connectivity and consensus. This essay will argue that this massive focus on maintaining and extending coordination networks is not a side effect of the internet age – it is the core innovation of our time. And as a consequence, the cultural, economic, and cognitive space for true paradigm shifts (vertical innovation) is increasingly closed off. Technologies that promised revolution, from cryptocurrency to virtual reality, have failed to take root not because they were too weird or too flawed, but because they weren’t weird enough to overcome the inertial pull of a culture preoccupied with lateral expansion. In the age of networked coordination, even the boldest ideas are quickly absorbed, iterated upon, and neutralized within the existing network, foreclosing the emergence of any radically new cultural future.

The cultural moment can be characterized as a self-perpetuating loop of remix and iteration. The connective infrastructure of the internet – especially social media platforms – has made culture highly participatory, but also highly imitative. Virality and algorithmic consensus-making have replaced the shock of the new with the comfort of the familiar. The feedback loops of platform algorithms ensure that once something gains traction, it is repeated and remixed ad infinitum. We see a successful meme format or catchy challenge and immediately hundreds (or thousands) of others replicate or riff on it. Trending dances, hashtag challenges, reaction videos, remixable audio clips – these become the dominant cultural products, all variations on a theme circulating within the network. Originality still exists, but it no longer drives engagement; coordination does. In the attention economy of platforms, to participate is often to copy with a twist, to synchronize with what others are doing in order to be seen.

This dynamic creates a consensus-driven creativity. On one hand, the internet’s connectivity has democratized content creation – everyone can participate in shaping culture now, from remixing songs to co-authoring fanfiction or Wikipedia entries. On the other hand, this very connectivity synchronizes our attention around the same circulating references. The sheer volume of content does not translate into a wider diversity of fundamental forms; instead, it produces an endless array of permutations of known styles. The collective creative effort is funneled into keeping the existing cultural repertoire in constant motion, like thousands of people collaboratively spinning a giant kaleidoscope of past and present images. Novelty has not vanished, but it is typically a novelty of re-combination – the mash-up, the throwback, the genre-blend – rather than something truly without precedent. As a result, anything “new” arrives pre-contextualized by references and familiarity. The imaginative bandwidth of creators and audiences alike is consumed by iterating within established frameworks.

Crucially, this is not just a quirk of online subcultures – it is the defining logic of mainstream culture now. Pop culture in the 2020s has often felt like a collage of the past five decades running in parallel, a horizontal timeline where every trend returns and nothing ever truly dies. As one observer noted, the traditional 20-year cycle of nostalgia has collapsed. Decades that used to return after a generation now come back after mere years – if not continuously. By the early 2020s, it wasn’t unusual to see simultaneous revivals of 1970s fashion, 1980s synth music, 1990s TV reboots, and 2000s pop-punk, all co-existing on streaming platforms and social feeds. Every recent decade’s aesthetic is referenced at once. The normal life cycle of trends – introduction, rise, peak, decline, obsolescence – has accelerated to the point that a trend can rise and fall in a matter of months or weeks on social media. For example, a niche fashion or meme might explode on TikTok and feel “over” within a season, replaced by the next micro-trend. This acceleration and flattening of cultural time means that most eras feel accessible all at once: “It’s not a reach to say that currently most decades are being referenced most of the time,” as a Vice cultural analysis put it. The collective cultural experience is disorienting and fragmented – a “miasma of ideas and references” swirling in the network with no forward trajectory.

What underpins this remix loop is the logic of platforms and consensus-making. The major social platforms (YouTube, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) operate on metrics of likes, shares, and views – numbers that inherently reward content that a broad base can immediately recognize and engage with. This creates a powerful selection pressure favoring the already-known or the easily categorizable. A totally novel, paradigm-breaking piece of content would likely confuse the algorithm (and many users); a clever twist on a familiar meme, by contrast, is instantly legible and shareable. In this way, the algorithmic curation of our attention ends up reproducing the same patterns. Cultural evolution on platforms tends to behave like a consensus filter, amplifying things that large groups find relatable or trendy, and filtering out the truly eccentric or unproven. Even the aesthetics of content creation have homogenized under this influence – consider how vloggers, influencers, and TikTok creators quickly converge on similar styles of editing, sound effects, and personalities because those are the formats the platforms elevate. The net effect is a culture that innovates horizontally. It produces seemingly endless content, but that content constitutes a sprawling lateral extension of known forms, rather than a leap into new artistic or conceptual territory. We are, in a sense, living in an age of cultural copy-paste, where creativity often means finding a new arrangement for pre-existing pieces.

To understand this peculiar cultural condition, we can turn to the concept of hauntology. Coined by philosopher Jacques Derrida and later popularized by cultural theorists like Mark Fisher, hauntology describes a society that is haunted by the “lost futures” of its past. In a hauntological culture, the momentum of progress has stalled, but the specter of bygone dreams and aesthetics persists. Instead of moving forward into truly fresh terrain, society endlessly recycles and replays fragments of past imaginings. The present becomes a kind of looping echo chamber of yesterday’s tomorrows – a time that can’t quite leap into the future, and so is saturated with the past.

Mark Fisher described hauntology as “a cultural condition of late capitalism” where genuine innovation has slowed to a crawl, and nostalgia (often ironic or superficial) dominates. We have, as Fisher observed, “endless references to the past – retro fashions, vintage soundscapes, old genres revived – but they don’t truly propel us into a new future”. It’s as if we are stuck in a temporal loop. The culture continually “recycles past styles and aesthetics, leading to a cultural flatness… where the new is just a reconfiguration of the old.” By Fisher’s account, the result is that the future feels cancelled or foreclosed – we sense that no drastically new cultural epoch is on the horizon, only permutations of what we already know. The collective imagination has been exhausted to the point that we can scarcely conceive of alternatives beyond the ever-present mash-up of history’s museum.

In the 21st century, this hauntological condition has become starkly visible. There is a “slow cancellation of the future,” accompanied, as Fisher noted, by a deflation of expectations. Few people today genuinely believe that next year will bring a cultural revolution on the order of rock ’n’ roll or the modernist art movements of the 20th century. Instead, even our dreams of the future are backdated – dominated by sequels, franchises, or retro-futurist pastiches. We fantasize about revivals more than about inventions. The sensation of living in a used-up present is pervasive. Fisher put it poignantly: “The 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future… We remain trapped in the 20th century.”. In other words, despite all the technological advancements, culturally we have not felt a true break into something new; we are looping through leftovers of 20th-century imaginaries.

Hauntology as a concept is often imbued with a melancholic tone, a mourning for futures that never arrived. Here, however, we invoke hauntology as a precise diagnostic tool. It allows us to identify the pathology: our culture is haunted by its own prior potential. The ghosts of earlier visions of the future (the flying cars and moon bases promised in the mid-20th century, the cyberpunk utopias or dystopias imagined at the dawn of the internet) linger in our collective unconscious, but we seem unable to materialize any of them. Instead, we oscillate between hyper-nostalgia and cynical pastiche. The hauntological lens helps explain why every emergent cultural form today quickly feels old or eerily familiar: our present is so thick with apparitions of past futures that novelty can hardly get a foothold before it’s contextualized as another revenant.

A key insight from hauntology is that the imagination of a society can become stuck in a loop, unable to narrate a compelling future. Our age’s obsession with rebooting the past (whether it’s endless Spider-Man reboots or the vinyl record resurgence or Y2K fashion revivals) isn’t merely stylistic – it indicates that we collectively find comfort in the known because the path forward is obscured. We are, as one critic put it, “living in yesterday’s future, stuck in a sort of retrochronal malaise”. The lost potential of prior decades hangs over us: for instance, the utopian hopes that early internet pioneers had for cyberspace (as a new democratic public sphere, a new frontier) now exist as ghosts, as we instead inhabit a very different reality of walled gardens and algorithmic feeds. The pervasive sense of being late – of coming after the golden age of innovation – creates a feedback loop where creators look backward for inspiration more than forward. It is as if the culture carries an unconscious knowledge that any radically new idea was already imagined and failed, so all that’s left is to play with the pieces.

Importantly, our hauntological moment is supercharged by networks. If late–20th-century culture was already drifting into hauntology, the internet has amplified that effect multifold. Never before have so many people been so interconnected, co-creating in real time and feeding on the same cultural memory. Networked social coordination is the engine of our hauntological state. The ghosts spread faster: a nostalgia meme can circle the globe in a day; a vintage aesthetic can be adopted by millions overnight. The network democratizes the haunting – everyone can summon the ghosts of past culture with a quick search or a streaming playlist. And the network also standardizes the haunting – via algorithms that ensure everyone sees the same ghosts. The looping effect of culture gets tighter and faster when feedback is instantaneous and global. In previous eras, a revival trend might have taken years to catch on across geographies; now, a single viral post can spark a worldwide revival of, say, 90s-style bucket hats in a week. We are all collectively haunting ourselves with our cultural memory, in one synchronized chorus.

By using hauntology as a diagnostic frame, we can strip away any romanticism about this phenomenon. The diagnosis is stark: our culture is stuck recycling old ideas because the system we’ve built prioritizes coordination and consensus over experimentation. We are haunted not just by the aesthetics of the past, but by the unfulfilled promises of past innovation. The result is that our imaginative horizons have contracted. Even when something appears novel, we immediately perceive its precedents; nothing can emerge sui generis without being compared to a prior model. Hauntology pinpoints this as a condition of being out of time – our cultural clock spinning in place. And it sets the stage for understanding why coordination itself has become our era’s true innovation, consuming the energy that might have once driven us out of the loop.

If we ask, “What is the greatest technological or cultural innovation of the early 21st century?”, the tempting answers might be smartphones, social media platforms, or perhaps some biomedical or energy advances. But these are essentially components or results of a larger meta-innovation: the creation of ubiquitous, real-time, networked coordination among humans. The defining development of our time is that nearly everyone is connected to everyone else, all the time. The coordination network is the innovation – a feat of engineering and social organization that has reconfigured daily life across the globe.

Think about it: our era did not quite deliver the jetpacks or teleportation devices promised in mid-20th-century sci-fi, but it did deliver something arguably more transformative in practice – the ability for billions of people to synchronously communicate, share, and organize without geographic constraints. Social media and high-speed internet have woven humanity into a single, throbbing web of information. This is an unprecedented scenario in human history. It’s as if we have collectively built a new nervous system for the species, one that can propagate ideas and reactions at lightning speed. That nervous system – the Internet and its social platforms – has in turn become the main arena of innovation. Tech companies and creators alike now focus largely on products and content that deepen the connectivity, engagement, and data flows on this network. The brightest engineering minds of a generation, instead of working on, say, interstellar travel or new energy sources, have often ended up working at social media companies refining algorithms to keep people scrolling, clicking, and coordinating.

The consequences of making coordination itself the core innovation are profound. It means that the dominant “product” of our era is not a particular gadget or genre or art movement, but the platforms and networks that mediate all those things. In the past, one could point to distinct cultural innovations in each decade – e.g., the 1960s gave us the space age aesthetic and rock music revolution, the 1970s gave us personal computing and punk, the 1980s gave us hip-hop and the blockbuster film, etc. In the 2000s and 2010s, arguably the most sweeping innovation was the rise of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and their ilk – systems that changed how we consume and produce culture, more than they introduced any singular cultural style of their own. The “style” of the 2010s, if anything, was connectivity. Memes became as important as traditional art; virality became a metric of value. The logic of Silicon Valley came to dominate creative industries: growth, scale, engagement. In effect, the cultural operating system was rewritten to prioritize network effects above all. Coordination was valorized as the highest goal – connecting everyone, sharing everything, quantifying all attention.

This shift can be illustrated by a famous quip from tech investor Peter Thiel, who lamented the state of innovation by saying: “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”. Thiel’s comment, made around 2013, captured the disappointment that instead of investing in bold “hard” innovations (like advanced transport), the tech world had funneled enormous capital and talent into social media (Twitter’s 140-character tweets being emblematic). In the context of our argument, Thiel’s observation highlights how resources that might have gone into vertical, paradigm-shifting innovations were redirected into building and optimizing coordination platforms. We got a world where posting and scrolling became the predominant activities – an endless horizontal expansion of communication – while more ambitious technological visions stalled. Indeed, venture capital in the 2010s heavily favored software and platforms that could scale horizontally (apps, networks, fintech, ad tech) over risky fundamental innovation in science or infrastructure. The dominance of the internet’s coordination economy arguably crowded out other avenues of innovation. As one analysis noted, many VCs began focusing on “shorter-term, safer bets” like social apps and enterprise software, rather than moonshot projects – an explicit shift from venture to just capital.

In cultural terms, coordination-as-innovation means that what’s “new and exciting” is often just a bigger, faster way to connect. The major cultural products of our time are things like streaming platforms (that let us access all past media anywhere) or viral content formats (that let us all join the same joke). These are horizontal innovations: they widen access and participation, but do not alter the content of culture in a vertical sense. For example, compare the impact of TikTok to the impact of, say, the invention of the electric guitar. TikTok has hugely changed how music is distributed and consumed (songs go viral via dance challenges and memes), but the music itself remains within familiar genres – TikTok didn’t give birth to a new form of music, it gave a new network for music. The electric guitar, by contrast, unlocked entirely new sounds and genres (rock, etc.) that had no precedent. Our age is filled with innovations like TikTok – innovations of distribution, coordination, and scale – and very few like the electric guitar or synthesizer that introduced a new paradigm of sound.

By absorbing the imaginative bandwidth and system resources once devoted to invention, the coordination networks have made themselves the main event. The creative minds of our generation often aspire less to invent a new cultural form than to “go viral” on existing platforms. To be an innovator now frequently means to innovate within the system – to find a clever new way to use the algorithm, or to start a niche community that gains millions of followers – rather than to create something wholly outside the present frame. The coordination infrastructure is so vast and dominant that any new idea almost has to plug into it to gain traction. That means new ideas get immediately shaped by the imperatives of the network: speed, popularity, monetization, brevity. The result is a kind of closed loop for innovation. We innovate how we share, how we coordinate, how we optimize our attention, but not what fundamentally we are about.

Another way to put it: the dominant cultural “operating system” is fully occupied with expanding laterally across known territory. It is busy networking every last person and every last idea, mapping every niche interest, turning all culture into data and circulation. This is our generation’s great work, consciously or not – a “horizontality” project. But like a computer whose CPU and memory are maxed out running one giant process, this leaves little processing power free for the vertical leap, the disruptive paradigm shift. It’s not that people have lost the ability to imagine big breakthroughs, but the entire incentive structure and momentum of society is currently geared toward the horizontal. The core innovation (the internet coordination machine) absorbs all oxygen in the room. When every company is trying to maximize engagement or network effects, fewer are trying something truly off the map. When every creative person is busy building an online brand, fewer may be isolating themselves in a garage to invent the next genre of music or art – and even if they do, it will likely be swept into the network’s churn before it can stand apart. The lateral expansion is self-reinforcing: the more interconnected we become, the more any new spark is instantly seen, shared, replicated, and normalized. The very success of the coordination era might be what’s preventing any single spark from catching fire into a transformative blaze.

The fate of several much-hyped “vertical” innovations in recent years starkly illustrates the gravitational pull of horizontal network logic. Technologies like cryptocurrency, virtual reality, and the metaverse were hailed as revolutionary – potential paradigm shifts that would upend economics, human interaction, or the internet itself. For a time, each garnered massive attention and investment, with proponents proclaiming that a brave new world was imminent. And yet, in each case, the promised revolution failed to take root in the mainstream. These technologies did not fizzle out merely because of technical flaws or lack of interest – indeed, interest was initially sky-high. They faltered, in large part, because they could not escape the orbit of the existing coordinated culture. In a society preoccupied with expanding the current networks, there was little space to actually move into a new orbit. Each “vertical” innovation was absorbed into the horizontal dynamic and either neutralized or reduced to spectacle.

Take cryptocurrency as a case study. When Bitcoin’s mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto introduced blockchain technology in 2008, it was undeniably a stroke of radical invention – a novel way to achieve trustless transactions. In theory, crypto could have birthed an entirely new economic paradigm. For a while, it seemed like it might: an early subculture of crypto true believers envisioned decentralized finance freeing people from banks and governments, a techno-utopian leap forward. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, crypto had entered the zeitgeist, triggering a frenzy of investments, startups, and media hype. But what followed offers a cautionary tale of innovation in a hyper-networked era. Rather than spearheading a coherent new economic system, the crypto boom devolved into an inward-looking frenzy. Entrepreneurs and developers piled in not to expand civilization in some bold new direction, but to launch yet another cryptocurrency, another token, another NFT collection – usually repeating ideas with only slight tweaks. Online communities coordinated into tribal “armies” to promote their favorite coin, flooding social networks with propaganda and memes. Every minor project sought viral attention, and speculative fervor far outpaced actual use-cases. In short, crypto became a mirror of the wider internet culture – hyper-coordinated, self-referential, and driven by hype cycles.

As crypto’s popularity exploded, it revealed the limits of vertical innovation in a horizontal culture. Enormous amounts of talent and energy were coordinated around the crypto phenomenon, but much of that energy looped in on itself. Instead of creating “the next internet,” the brightest minds crowded into the same chatrooms, talking up a future to each other without truly building it in reality. For all the grand talk of decentralization and world-changing potential, the movement spent most of its effort expanding horizontally – spawning countless niche coins, niche communities, and speculative bubbles – rather than delivering fundamental value to society at large. By 2022-2023, the cracks were evident: major crypto exchanges and projects collapsed in spectacular fashion (e.g. the downfall of FTX), wiping out billions in value. Public trust waned after repeated busts and scams. “The crypto hype cycle is over,” declared a Brookings Institution report in 2023, noting that after the crash, investors and venture capitalists had largely moved on to generative artificial intelligence. In hindsight, crypto’s revolution had been more theatrical than real – “innovation theater,” as some called it – an intense spectacle without commensurate breakthrough for everyday life.

Even industry insiders began to acknowledge that crypto hadn’t delivered. As one observer lamented, “there is no new innovation in crypto – projects are just reinventing the wheel… bringing nothing truly new to the table,” essentially recycling the same ideas with new branding. A senior Gartner analyst in 2024 summed it up bluntly: blockchain technologies “just really haven’t hit the heights that were promised” – it turned out not to be an overnight revolution after all. The crypto saga underscores that coordination without a clear creative horizon leads to diminishing returns. Crypto absorbed huge amounts of the era’s talent and attention – for a time it was the cultural and intellectual center of gravity in tech – yet it ultimately produced relatively little of the world-changing novelty it had promised. It’s as if the movement ballooned in size but burned through its fuel without igniting new light. Once the hype dissipated, much of that coordinated energy simply migrated to the next big thing (many of the same investors promptly jumped to the AI boom). Crypto didn’t fail for being too “out there” – it failed because it wasn’t allowed to be truly out there. The horizontal culture pulled it back to earth, collapsing a potentially paradigm-shifting idea into yet another meme stock frenzy.

A similar story can be told about the metaverse and virtual reality (VR). When Facebook rebranded itself as “Meta” in 2021 and poured billions into building a metaverse, it signaled an attempt at a vertical leap – a vision of the internet evolving from flat screens to immersive 3D worlds. Tech evangelists proclaimed the metaverse would “touch every product we build” and be the future of online interaction. For a brief period, the metaverse was everywhere in discourse: corporations from fashion brands to banks announced metaverse initiatives, virtual real estate sold for millions, and media declared a new digital frontier. Yet, by 2023, the fervor had notably cooled. Reality (the physical kind) reasserted itself. Despite Facebook (Meta) reportedly spending over $100 billion on its metaverse push, user adoption remained tepid and the experience underwhelming. As one analysis noted with some irony, the metaverse hype became “a quick hack to win over Wall Street investors” during the craze, but lacked a coherent reason for everyday people to actually live in a virtual world. The initial excitement – amplified by pandemic lockdowns when virtual gatherings had a moment of appeal – proved unsustainable once people returned to physical interaction. By mid-2023, even Meta’s top executives were openly downplaying the metaverse. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s “single largest investment” had shifted to AI, and Meta stopped aggressively pitching the metaverse to advertisers. In the broader culture, interest in the metaverse plummeted: search trends for the very term “metaverse” spiked in late 2021 but then declined steadily throughout 2022 and 2023 as the hype died down. A Business Insider obituary for the metaverse in 2023 flatly declared it “officially dead,” killed by the rise of ChatGPT and AI which stole the spotlight and seemed more tangibly useful.

The metaverse’s collapse again reveals the horizontal gravity at work. People did crave richer online experiences, but rather than flock en masse to VR worlds, they gravitated to incremental enhancements of the existing network (like AI that generates content for the social feeds they already use). The flashy promise of an entirely new virtual reality couldn’t compete with the convenience and familiarity of scrolling a smartphone screen. Even in niches where VR made some inroads (gaming, remote meetings), it remained a sideshow. By late 2024, the verdict was clear: the grand metaverse experiment had fizzled. In South Korea – a country known for early tech adoption – major companies that had launched metaverse platforms during the pandemic were shutting those services down due to lack of sustained user interest. One Korean telecom’s metaverse app, which had gained users in 2021’s hype, saw its active users plunge and was discontinued by 2025. An industry article succinctly concluded that the metaverse “turned out to be a financial sinkhole” and that even those who hyped it had moved on to greener pastures (again, notably AI).

What both crypto and the metaverse illustrate is that vertical innovations can be hyped within a horizontal system, but they struggle to truly break free of that system’s logic. Crypto became another domain of internet speculation, subject to boom-and-bust attention cycles just like a social media trend. VR/metaverse became another product to consume briefly, not a paradigm shift in how we live. In each case, when the new idea didn’t quickly integrate and yield immediate network effects, the collective interest waned and redirected to something else. It’s almost as if the culture said: “We’ll pay attention to you for a moment, but if you can’t seamlessly plug into our existing mode of interaction (short-form, viral, networked content), we’ll move on.” In the end, crypto wasn’t weird enough to overthrow the economic order – it was absorbed as high-risk stock entertainment – and the metaverse wasn’t compelling enough to displace our current digital lifestyles, so it was left on the shelf while we scrolled TikTok and tried AI toys. The dominant cultural operating system (the horizontal, platform-driven, attention-maximizing system) simply had no openings for a truly separate paradigm to grow. The house was full; the new arrivals either had to find a small corner for themselves or get back out.

Beneath these high-profile failures lies a deeper cultural pathology: an inability to produce or even recognize true novelty. In a hyper-connected, hyper-coordinated environment, every emergent form is immediately noticed, absorbed, and iterated upon until it loses any radical edge. The network is a voracious assimilator. The moment something appears that might be genuinely new or challenging, it is instantly surrounded by commentary, parodies, derivative works, and commodification, all of which can serve to neutralize its impact. In essence, nothing remains untouched long enough to stay genuinely new.

Consider how subcultures or underground art movements functioned in the past. They often began in isolation or obscurity, giving them time to develop a distinct identity and challenging ethos before the mainstream took notice. In the 20th century, a genre like punk music percolated in small scenes, initially baffling or offending outsiders; it took years before it was co-opted into commercials or widely imitated. Now, that cycle has shrunk drastically. The internet’s totalizing gaze finds subculture instantly. A new fashion or musical style might be percolating in some corner of the world, but if a video of it goes viral early, the entire network jumps on it. Within days, influencers are wearing a version of it, journalists are writing explainer articles, fast-fashion brands are mass-producing knockoffs, and the original community’s aura has been diluted. The subversive style becomes an “aesthetic” available on Instagram for anyone to try on. This rapid mainstreaming dissolves the long-form structures that once made subcultures coherent. What remains are surface aesthetics floating free of their original context – “empty signifiers devoid of their fuller past meaning,” as one commentator described current trend culture. In other words, the network strips away the depth and context of emergent cultural forms, presenting them as just another option in the content buffet.

This dynamic creates a scenario where authentic novelty is elusive. It’s not for lack of creative individuals or ideas, but because the ecosystem doesn’t allow novelty to breathe. By the time the broader culture is aware of a new phenomenon, it’s already being memed to death or turned into a marketing hashtag. The very mechanisms that spread ideas (social media virality, influencer amplification, algorithmic feeds) also act as digesters that break ideas down into easily consumable bits, often robbing them of the originality or radical intent they may have carried. Every revolution gets rendered as content. The pattern is so predictable that it’s practically a cultural immune response: novelty is the foreign substance, and the network’s reflex is to engulf and incorporate it, rendering it familiar and thus harmless.

One stark symptom of this pathology is how quickly dissent and critique are co-opted. For example, a movement criticizing social media might itself trend as a hashtag and then spawn memes, which then become just another piece of social media fodder. The critique is subsumed by the thing it was critiquing. Similarly, countercultural styles (say, a genre of music meant to protest the mainstream) get sampled in pop hits or used in ads within a short time frame. It’s as if the cultural operating system has learned to instantly metabolize any disturbance. This reflex prevents phase changes. Nothing accumulates into a true tipping point, because any buildup of novel energy is swiftly dissipated across the network in diluted forms.

Another aspect is audience complicity in neutralizing novelty. In a coordinated culture, audiences often exhibit a paradoxical behavior: they clamor for something new, yet they also pounce on the new to categorize it via existing frames of reference. When confronted with something unusual, the first impulse is often to say “It’s like X meets Y” – to immediately analogize it to known quantities. This knee-jerk contextualization is a cognitive comfort in an age of overload, but it also means we rarely experience something on its own terms. We preempt our own sense of wonder or shock by swiftly explaining the new away. In effect, our collective taste has been trained by algorithmic feeds to seek the recognizable novelty – the new thing that also feels like the old thing we liked. If it’s too unfamiliar, it might not get the likes and shares; if it’s a clever remix, it will. So creators consciously or unconsciously cater to this, pitching new ideas as combinations of proven hits (“it’s like Game of Thrones meets cyberpunk”) rather than risking something truly alien.

Within this network-driven culture, any emergent edge is rapidly dulled. The process can be summarized as: emergence → instant visibility → mass imitation → saturation → exhaustion. The cycle time can be months or even weeks. By the end, what began as a potentially groundbreaking idea is drained of its novelty and folded into the ever-expanding catalog of cultural tropes. A recent analysis of the trend cycle noted that we’ve essentially compressed and eliminated the gap that once existed between a trend’s start and its mainstream saturation – “Where even a few years ago, a trend would last for a year or two, this whole cycle now runs from start to finish in months or even weeks.”. The horizontal sprawl of culture ensures that every corner is filled with something, which paradoxically means nothing can spring up without immediately colliding with everything else.

This pathology has cognitive and creative consequences. It instills a kind of innovation fatigue – a sense that “everything’s been done” or that anything genuinely new will just be a flash in the pan. Creators may feel there’s no point striving for radical originality because the audience apparatus won’t sustain it. Audiences, inundated by constant content, may become skeptical of hype (“we’ve heard this is the next big thing a hundred times before”). When every novel idea is instantly merchandised and memed, cynicism can dominate: the culture learns that novelty itself is a commodity, often an overhyped one. As a result, we collectively lean into irony, pastiche, and meta-commentary – which are safe, known modes – rather than sincere leaps into the unknown. The result is a kind of cultural self-neutralization: the moment we glimpse the truly unfamiliar, we reflexively wrap it in layers of familiarity (ironic references, comparisons, commodifications) until it no longer poses a threat to our comfortable frame of meaning.

Surveying this landscape, we arrive at a precise and unforgiving synthesis: the operating system of our current culture is one of networked coordination and horizontal expansion, and it has effectively foreclosed the horizon of the future. The present is queen – an endlessly iterated, laterally stretched present – and the future is either an extension of this present or an impossibility that we can no longer truly imagine. We have built a cultural machine that excels at absorbing now every potential spark of next.

This operating system shapes everything about our moment. Culturally, it produces the remix-loop aesthetics and the hauntological stagnation we’ve described. Economically, it channels investment into platform monopolies, data infrastructure, and short-term attention grabs, rather than long-term visionary projects. Cognitively, it trains our minds toward distraction and instant pattern-recognition, making us adept at parsing myriad small bites of content but perhaps less patient with deep, paradigm-challenging ideas. The networked logic doesn’t just live “out there” in Silicon Valley – it has rewired our very expectations. We come to expect any problem has an app, any desire has an on-demand service, any idle moment has a feed to scroll. This smooth functioning of the now leaves little room for the rupture of the new. It’s telling that our most celebrated technological leaps in recent years (like advances in AI) are immediately funneled into consumer apps that slot into daily routines, rather than sparking radically new social arrangements. Everything tends to be domesticated by the existing system.

One might ask: is this necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps the horizontal expansion is simply different, not worse – an adaptive cultural phase where we optimize breadth and connectivity. Indeed, some argue that this state is a kind of “cultural adaptive radiation” – a flourishing of countless niche cultures and micro-innovations, enabled by networks, that could be seen as a rich diversification. It’s true that there’s more content and more subcultures than ever before; in a sense, every possible idea is being explored somewhere in some form. But what’s missing – and what marks this era as fundamentally different from earlier ones – is the vertical vector: the sense of ascending to new chapters of history. We have variety, but not trajectory. We have millions of micro-niches, but no grand novel movements. The horizontal sprawl, for all its kaleidoscopic allure, has come at the cost of direction. Culture has lost its arrow; time has lost its thrust.

The implications of this structure are stark. When the future is foreclosed, society risks falling into a kind of permanent present. This doesn’t mean stasis – things are happening all the time, but they all feel iterative, as if we’re rearranging furniture in the same room rather than building a new house. The promises of modernity (that each generation would surpass the previous, that technology would fundamentally uplift and transform human life) have given way to a more cynical maintenance mode. We use cutting-edge technology largely to simulate the familiar (e.g., algorithms that generate “new” music indistinguishable from old hits, or remastered nostalgia films in ultra-HD). Our economic system, locked into maximizing engagement, has little incentive to pursue risky innovations that don’t promise immediate network effects. Even at the level of dreams and fiction, our visions of the future often loop back – dystopias that exaggerate present conditions, or fantasies that resurrect past styles with a twist. The collective result is that our imaginative capacity has atrophied for anything beyond the horizon of our current platforms.

This is not a moral judgment on individuals, but a structural observation. We have, unwittingly, engineered a cultural machine that is too efficient at what it does. It achieves near-total coordination – a state where nothing can escape integration. But a system that integrates everything leaves no external vantage point, no outside from which the truly new can emerge. In previous eras, paradigm shifts often came from the periphery – outsiders, countercultures, unorthodox thinkers who operated outside the dominant system until their ideas forced a change. In the current era, there is effectively no outside of the network. The moment a periphery forms, the network pulls it in (through curiosity, profiteering, or sheer connectivity). This is the monolithic quality of the horizontal paradigm: it’s all-encompassing. And so it ensures its own continuity at the expense of discontinuity.

In concrete terms, our cultural operating system’s dominance means that nascent technologies or ideas that could lead to paradigm shifts are either co-opted into the existing paradigm or discarded if they can’t be. We saw it with crypto and VR. We may see it with other domains: for instance, biotechnology or climate engineering might be the next “big things” in principle, but if the logic of the age holds, they will likely be packaged as consumable services and subcultures rather than society-wide transformations. If an invention doesn’t align with the coordination logic (i.e. if it doesn’t enhance connectivity, data, engagement), it struggles to get resources or attention. If it does align, it is developed in a way that reinforces the existing mode (for example, AI is being developed largely to augment content creation and personalization – essentially turbocharging the horizontal content explosion – rather than to, say, rethink economic fundamentals or political decision-making processes).

In the end, the precise implication of this structure is a kind of cultural paralysis hidden beneath frenetic activity. Superficially, it looks like we’re innovating at breakneck speed – new apps, new viral hits, new “disruptions” every week. But at the level of fundamental change, we are running in place. We churn through the new only to end up with more of the same. The horizontal sprawl can continue indefinitely, giving the impression of progress (more choices, more content, more connectivity), yet never yielding a qualitatively different world. It’s a bit like a civilization that has mapped every inch of its continent and is now just building endless strip malls and highways, having forgotten that there is an ocean that could be crossed to discover a new world.

The age of networked coordination thus finds itself haunted by the future it cannot actualize. We are surrounded by the spectral presence of what could have been – all the paradigm shifts that stalled, all the novelty that was neutralized – even as we stay busy coordinating the present. The cultural operating system we’ve built is supremely effective at keeping us occupied. It extends sideways into every aspect of life, leaving no mysterious gaps. But in filling the entire map, it leaves us with nowhere radically new to go. This is the fate of a culture that expands sideways instead of upwards: it may never crash or collapse in any dramatic way; it will simply sprawl onward, exhaustive and exhausting, until the notion of “upward” (of true innovation, true change) fades from memory. In our time, the great innovation is that we learned to all walk in step. The cost is that we no longer remember how to take a leap. The future, in a very real sense, has been put on hold – indefinitely – while we remain locked in the mesmerizing coordinates of an ever-coordinated now.