There’s a café near my workplace I could describe without ever having been inside it and it wouldn’t matter which one, because there are several within a five-minute walk, and they’re nearly indistinguishable. Pale wood, raw concrete, a single lowercase word stencilled on the glass, a plant in the corner that isn’t real. This is the backdrop here: Singapore, and most of Asia I’ve spent time in, has converged on a kind of Muji-fied minimalism, all restraint and negative space. Fly to Brooklyn or Lisbon and the backdrop flips to its opposite twin: exposed filament bulbs, reclaimed wood, subway tile, deliberately unfinished. Two aesthetics that look nothing alike, and yet both are the same phenomenon wearing a different regional costume. The floor plan changes. The mechanism underneath it doesn’t.

That low-grade vertigo everywhere and nowhere at once is the feeling this piece is actually about. Something has happened to the texture of culture. Not its content, exactly. Its elevation. The peaks and valleys that used to separate one place, one sound, one scene from another have been sanded down to a single, consistent grade. Culture got flat.

This isn’t a new observation Kyle Chayka gave it a name and a book-length argument in Filterworld, tracing how recommendation algorithms across Spotify, Instagram, Airbnb, and Google Maps quietly converged the world’s aesthetic output toward the same optimized middle. What I want to do here isn’t repeat that diagnosis. I want to press on it to ask what flatness actually costs, in the specific rooms I’ve spent my life in, and to argue that the algorithm isn’t just curating culture badly. It’s replacing the mechanism that used to make culture uneven in the first place. That unevenness wasn’t a flaw waiting to be optimized away. It was the whole engine.

But first, the evidence. Flatness shows up in three places I keep returning to in this newsletter, which tells you something about where I think the damage actually lives.

Space

The café is the easiest tell because it’s architectural you can stand inside the sameness, in either of its regional costumes. It’s about what happens when a physical space stops being of somewhere and starts being legible to something: it needs to photograph well and read as “aesthetic” to an algorithm sorting images by engagement, not feel like the street it’s on. The room stopped answering to the block outside it and started answering to the feed above it and the feed doesn’t care which costume it’s wearing, minimalist or industrial, as long as it performs.

I grew up around rooms that answered to nothing but the people in them all-ages matinees in halls that smelled a specific way, shops with hand-lettered price tags and a wall that told you what the owner thought was good, whether you agreed or not. Those rooms were illegible on purpose; you had to show up to know what they were. Algorithmic space does the opposite, optimized to be understood instantly, by anyone, from a thumbnail. Legibility at that scale is incompatible with specificity. You can have one or the other, not both.

New York’s dive bars are dying of exactly this. Jimmy’s Corner, a boxing bar just off Times Square since 1971, is fighting to survive a landlord dispute after its longtime owner passed. Happy Village, a Chicago saloon that had been pouring drinks since the 1870s, was bought out and razed a vacant lot now, reportedly earmarked for something “fancy.” The New York Times recently reported on this decline directly, and the reporter’s own definition of what a dive bar actually does cuts straight to the point: a dive, she writes, brings together people who would otherwise never be in the same room. That’s not incidental color. That’s the entire mechanism this piece is about, confirmed independently by someone who wasn’t trying to make my argument.

What’s replacing these places is a simulacrum rooftop bars borrowing the dive aesthetic, none of the actual unpredictability. The look survives. The collision doesn’t. This deserves its own piece. I’ll come back to it in Collision Points soon. For now it’s the sharpest proof I’ve found that flatness isn’t only happening to feeds and playlists. It’s happening to rooms with addresses, right up until the lease runs out.

Sound

Same mechanism, different medium. A song built for a platform that autoplays in three-second increments has to front-load its hook; slow builds are a liability when the algorithm’s attention span is the only one that matters commercially. Not bad music, exactly music shaped by a distribution system rather than by what the artist actually heard first. The intro gets shorter. The chorus arrives faster. Bridges disappear because nobody scrolls that far in.

I think about this against the records I grew up loving, the ones I still write about in Against the Algorithm. Coldcut’s Journey by DJ doesn’t arrive anywhere quickly; it’s a journey because it insists on being one, and refuses to compress itself for an audience it never had to court. That kind of patience used to be a viable commercial choice. Now it’s closer to a countercultural one. Songs that used to earn your attention over four minutes now have to fight for it in the first four seconds and the ones that don’t fight, don’t get heard, not because they’re worse, but because the system was never built to notice them.

Style

This is maybe the strangest flattening of the three, because it collapses not space but time. Fashion used to run on what insiders call the twenty-year rule a look surfaces, dominates, fades, and returns two decades later, recontextualized by whoever was too young to catch it the first time. Y2K nostalgia hit right on schedule in 2021. One culture writer clocked something specific the following year: the aesthetic had already moved on into 2000s territory, a full decade ahead of schedule. It’s one observer’s read, not a hard statistic but it captures a feeling a lot of people online have named independently: cycles that used to take decades now seem to clear in a season.

The clearest confirmation of what’s driving this didn’t come from a critic. It came from Miuccia Prada, at her own Spring/Summer 2025 show, describing how designers themselves now work: we are directed by algorithms, she said taste itself, arriving pre-instilled rather than discovered. Style used to have a memory; you could date a photograph by what someone wore, because eras were legible. Now it mostly has an inventory, restocked on whatever cycle the feed can sustain, with no twenty years required to earn its way back.

I’m not going to pretend this is neutral. I’m mourning something in these pages, not just diagnosing it you can probably hear that by now. But mourning isn’t the same as accusing. Nobody at Spotify or Airbnb sat in a room and chose flatness as a goal. Recommendation systems optimize for legibility for how confidently a system can predict what you’ll respond to next because confidence is what turns attention into revenue. So everything that made a café, a record, or an outfit hard to predict the specific, the local, the historically weird gets quietly selected against. Not by decision. By what a system built to be sure of itself can and can’t afford to reward. The grief is real. The villain isn’t.

Which is where I think the missing piece of Chayka’s argument actually lives. He’s right that algorithms flattened culture. But he stops at diagnosis; the fix he lands on is mostly structural: fewer algorithms, more human curators, deliberate friction reintroduced from the top down. What I keep coming back to, from the other side of this from the physical rooms I grew up in, the ones I’ve written about here before is that friction was never something you could reintroduce by policy. It has to be produced, the way it always was: by unplanned proximity between people who wouldn’t otherwise have ended up in the same room.

That’s the collision principle, even if I don’t always call it that on the page. The skate shop that didn’t ask where you were from, only what you could do. The basement show where the guy next to you was into something you’d never heard of and made you listen to it, loudly, whether you wanted to or not. The record store clerk who put something in your hands because he thought you should hear it.

That clerk was predicting, too he’d read you, made a bet, handed you a record based on a guess about who you were. So the difference was never prediction versus no prediction. It’s what the prediction is for, and whether you can see the logic doing it. The clerk was optimizing for something like your taste, or his own conviction that you’d grow into the record even if you didn’t love it yet and if you asked him why, he’d tell you, and it might even be wrong, but it would be a reason. The algorithm is optimizing for how long you stay, how reliably it can keep predicting you next time, and it’s built specifically so you can’t ask it why and get an answer that means anything. That’s the actual gap. Not unpredictability. Legibility, and what the prediction is in service of.

Flatness, then, isn’t a design flaw in the algorithm. It’s what culture looks like once you’ve engineered the unpredictable proximity out of how it gets made. You don’t get flat culture by making bad choices. You get it by removing the mechanism that used to make choices strange, local, and slightly inconvenient in the first place and replacing it with one whose entire job is to make sure nothing ever surprises it again.

The cafés near my workplace will probably still be there next year, in whichever regional costume, indistinguishable from a hundred others. What I’m less sure will still be there — unless people go looking for it on purpose is the room that couldn’t be predicted from outside. The one you had to show up for. The one that didn’t care how it photographed.

That room is still where the real thing happens. It’s just gotten a lot harder to find.

WHERE THINGS MEET . WHAT SURVIVES THE IMPACT

Words: Aamir Ghani

There is a particular memory that almost anyone who came of age before the smartphone era can describe with unusual precision: the moment of walking through the door of a specific space a skate shop, a record store with handwritten sleeve notes tacked to the walls, a sweaty venue where a band you’d never heard of was setting up and knowing, immediately, that something was happening here. That this was where your people were. That culture was being made, not consumed.

That feeling has a name now, even if it didn’t then. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg called these places third places the spaces between home and work where people gather voluntarily, informally, and regularly, without anyone asking them to perform a role or declare an identity. Pubs, barber shops, parks, corner stores. And, for anyone who grew up in the last quarter of the twentieth century: skate parks, punk clubs, record stores, basketball courts, arcades.

Oldenburg’s insight was civic: these spaces were the connective tissue of community life, the places where strangers became neighbours and neighbours became something closer. But there was something else happening in the best of them that went beyond civic bonding. Something that produced hip-hop, and punk, and skateboarding, and the record store culture that seeded every genre-crossing collision of the last fifty years.

That something was collision unexpected, unplanned, and structurally impossible to reproduce on any platform that has ever been built.

How Culture Actually Gets Made

Look carefully at the origin story of any significant cultural movement and you find the same architecture: a specific physical space, a community drawn to it by proximity and passion rather than by any shared identity, and over time the emergence of something that nobody planned and nobody could have predicted.

“The South Bronx, 1970s the physical geography from which hip-hop emerged. ”

“What brought the Ramones, Patti Smith, and Talking Heads to the same room was not that they belonged to the same community. It was that CBGB was on the Bowery, they all wanted to play, and the venue would let them.”

Hip-hop is the most instructive case. It didn’t emerge from the Black community alone, or the Puerto Rican community alone. DJ Kool Herc was Jamaican-American, bringing sound system culture from Kingston to block parties in the South Bronx. Those parties were shared with Puerto Rican youth whose own traditions bomba, plena, salsa fed the emerging form. Grandmaster Flash was Barbadian-American. Afrika Bambaataa built the Universal Zulu Nation explicitly as a cross-community project, using music as the bridge across the neighbourhood divisions that geography had otherwise enforced.

The sorting mechanism was geographic: these communities ended up on the same basketball court, at the same block party, in the same park because that was where they lived. Not because an institution brought them together. Not because an algorithm identified them as having compatible tastes. Because they were nearby, and the space was there, and the shared activity the beat, the cipher, the dance gave them common ground.

“Breaking in the Bronx the block as stage, geography as the sorting mechanism”

Punk worked the same way. CBGB on the Bowery brought together the Ramones from working-class Queens, Patti Smith the queer poet from New Jersey, Talking Heads from the Rhode Island School of Design, Television with their literary obsessions. In London, punk’s most fertile period came from the encounter between white working-class youth and the British Caribbean community reggae and dub providing the rhythmic foundation to which punk attached its fury. Bad Brains, a Black hardcore band from Washington D.C. who fused punk velocity with reggae, embodied what collision actually looks like when it’s working at full intensity.

In each case, the sorting mechanism was the same: geography and passion, overriding every other category of identity. The skate park didn’t ask where you were from. It asked what you could do. CBGB didn’t care about your class background. The record store on the corner didn’t stock genres according to who lived in which neighbourhood it stocked music, all of it, and whoever walked through the door encountered whatever was filed in the adjacent section.

“CBGB, 315 Bowery sorting by passion, not identity”

The Record Store Clerk as Human Algorithm

The independent record store deserves its own chapter in any account of how culture was made in the twentieth century. It was, structurally, the most reliably cross-cultural of all the third places sorted by the broadest possible criterion (interest in music) and staffed by people whose optimisation function was surprise rather than confirmation.

When a record store clerk handed you something, they were pushing you toward what you didn’t yet know you needed. When a streaming algorithm recommends something, it’s refining its picture of who you already are. The difference sounds subtle. The cultural consequences are enormous.

"The record store as third place geography and passion as the only sorting criteria”

“The record store sorted by geography and passion. The algorithm sorts by what you already like. One produces collision. The other produces a mirror.”

In the record store, a punk kid encountered reggae in the adjacent section. A hip-hop head picked up a jazz record because it was shelved next to something he knew. A suburban teenager heard, for the first time, music from a community she had never physically entered and was changed by it. None of this was curated. None of it was designed. It was the structural consequence of putting many different sounds in one room and letting geography determine who walked in.

“The shop as cultural hub more than retail, the gravitational centre of a community’s orbit”

The scholar Simon Frith documented how browsing in a record store physically handling records filed in adjacent genre sections, overhearing what other customers were buying, talking to staff and strangers created conditions for cross-cultural encounter that were structurally unavailable on radio (format-segregated) and are structurally unavailable on streaming (algorithmically siloed). The record store was not just retail. It was infrastructure for the kind of cultural promiscuity that makes new things possible.

The skate shop operated identically. More than retail, it was a cultural hub where you could hang around without buying anything. Older skaters showed younger ones what tricks to attempt, what music to listen to, how to dress, what to think about. Skateboarding’s comprehensive value system creativity, risk, freedom, the aestheticisation of failure, a deep mistrust of authority was negotiated in real time, in physical space, between real people who knew each other’s names.

Family Fluency

There is a concept worth naming for what these spaces were actually producing, beyond the cultural movements they seeded. Call it Family Fluency: the cross-cultural literacy that develops through sustained physical co-presence with people whose background, race, and life experience is entirely unlike your own.

Family Fluency is not the same as tolerance, or even respect. Those are attitudes. Family Fluency is a competence the capacity to hold multiple cultural identities simultaneously, to understand and be genuinely shaped by people from different worlds. The Puerto Rican teenager on the Bronx basketball court in 1977 didn’t stop being Puerto Rican when he shared that court with Black peers from a different block. He became fluent in a second cultural language without losing his first. He became, in the fullest sense, more himself.

This kind of fluency doesn’t happen just because people are in the same room. It requires three things that third places were uniquely structured to provide. First, voluntary participation you’re there because you want to be, not because you have to be, which means your investment is genuine. Second, identity-light sorting the mechanism that brought you to the space (geography, passion for the activity) wasn’t sorting you by who you already are. Third, sustained co-presence over time not a single encounter, but the slow accumulation of shared experience with the same people, in the same place, around the same obsession.

“CBGB’s interior a room that held multitudes”

This is why diverse workplaces don’t produce subcultures. Work is instrumental. It sorts by role. The shared activity is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. The mediating object, the thing that holds the encounter together and makes difference interesting rather than threatening isn’t there. In the skate park, the mediating object is the trick. In the punk venue, it’s the song. In the hip-hop cipher, it’s the beat. These objects give people common ground that allows cultural difference to be experienced as a resource rather than a risk.

“Culture, in its most generative form, has always been a product of collision not of communities becoming more purely themselves, but of communities encountering each other in shared physical space and producing something neither could have anticipated.”

“Bad Brains black punk from Washington D.C., the collision of genres and identities made audible”

What the Algorithm Cannot Do

The platforms that have replaced these spaces are genuinely extraordinary pieces of engineering. TikTok’s For You Page is capable of identifying a user’s emotional vulnerabilities and steering their feed accordingly within minutes. Its ability to read you, model you, and reflect you back to yourself with extraordinary precision is, depending on your perspective, either a feat of personalisation or a form of sophisticated confinement.

The researcher Paolo Gerbaudo identifies what is structurally new about TikTok specifically: earlier social media built what he calls networked publics communities assembled around explicit interpersonal connections. You followed people you knew. TikTok introduced clustered publics audiences assembled by algorithmic inference about shared taste and past behaviour. You don’t choose your community. The algorithm assigns you one.

“Gen Alpha, the first generation for whom algorithmic mediation is the default condition of existence”

“The algorithm’s primary function is to identify what you already are and give you more of it. The productive friction of difference the friction that generated hip-hop and punk is not a bug it tolerates. It is a feature it actively removes.”

This is not a peripheral difference. It is the central one. The third place sorted by geography and passion, which produced unexpected encounters across demographic lines. The algorithmic platform sorts by inferred identity, which produces what we might call subcultural purity: increasingly refined aesthetic identities that are internally coherent, globally distributed, and culturally isolated from anything genuinely unlike themselves.

A teenager today can become extraordinarily fluent in a niche cottagecore, dark academia, hyperpop, any of the proliferating micro-aesthetics while having no meaningful encounter with anyone whose cultural starting point is genuinely different from their own. This is depth without range. Taste without Family Fluency. And it is the direct structural consequence of replacing geographic sorting with algorithmic sorting.

The cultural consequences are long-term and hard to quantify. The civic consequences are more immediate. Research consistently links cross-cultural exposure during formative years to greater empathy, lower in-group bias, and higher capacity for perspective-taking in adult life. Third places were, quietly and without design, producing the foundations of democratic participation. The algorithm, optimised for watch time, has no structural incentive to do so.

The Generation That Never Had a Room

Gen Z is the loneliest generation in recorded survey history. Jean Twenge’s analysis of decades of generational data finds them reporting loneliness at roughly twice the rate of people aged 65 and over. Jonathan Haidt’s synthesis of the evidence paints a picture of a generation that came of age precisely as the spaces where young people had previously formed their identities, the third places were closing, and as the platforms that replaced them were optimising for engagement rather than connection.

The generation after Gen Z Gen Alpha, now entering adolescence is the first for whom algorithmic mediation is not a new development but the default condition of existence. They have never known a world where their cultural environment was not curated for them by a system that has already decided who they are.

“A generation growing up with the feed as default depth without range, taste without Family Fluency”

The question this raises is not just about mental health, though the mental health consequences are real and serious. It is about the conditions under which new culture becomes possible. Hip-hop was not inevitable. Punk was not inevitable. Skateboarding as a comprehensive value system was not inevitable. Each required a specific set of structural conditions the right spaces, sorting on the right criteria, producing the right collisions. Those conditions no longer exist in the way they did. We have replaced them with something that looks like culture that has aesthetics and communities and its own languages but that cannot generate what those earlier spaces generated, because it is built on the structural opposite of the principle that made them generative.

The Analog Rebellion

There are signs that this is being felt, even if it is not yet being theorised. The generation most saturated by algorithmic culture is generating the strongest demand for unmediated physical experience. Run clubs have become what bars once were: regular gatherings where you show up, build relationships, and develop a social identity alongside people who share your values rather than your demographics. The Offline Club a network of tech-free social spaces has expanded to nineteen cities. Maker spaces, community gardens, climbing gyms with strong social cultures: each is a tentative reconstruction of something that used to be ambient.

“The run club as third place Gen Z’s analog rebellion against the algorithmic feed”

The question is whether these emerging spaces can do what the original third places did. The honest answer is: not yet. The run club and the Offline Club tend to operate in affluent urban areas, attract populations with discretionary time, and serve communities that are often demographically homogeneous in precisely the ways the original third places were not. The collision principle requires genuine demographic difference the geographic proximity of people from genuinely different worlds. A boutique wellness space in Shoreditch is not the South Bronx basketball court. The desire for physical co-presence is real and worth taking seriously. But desire is not structure.

“The Offline Club choosing presence over platform”

The structural conditions that produced the most generative third places urban density, economic precarity that kept rents low enough for small venues to survive, communities of different backgrounds compressed into shared neighbourhoods by geography rather than choice are precisely the conditions that gentrification, online retail, and the pandemic have systematically dismantled. Rebuilding them requires more than a desire to put the phone down. It requires a different set of decisions about how cities are built, what is allowed to survive in them, and what we think public space is actually for.

Culture Grows. It Cannot Be Curated.

There is a sentence at the heart of this argument that is worth sitting with: culture cannot be curated into existence. It can only be grown. And it grows in physical space, between real people, over time, through the productive friction of genuine co-presence the encounter with someone whose cultural starting point is different from yours, mediated by a shared obsession that makes the difference interesting rather than threatening.

What we have built instead is a mirror. Efficient, personalised, extraordinarily accurate. It shows you who you are with a fidelity that no record store clerk, no skate park hierarchy, no sweaty punk venue ever could. But a mirror shows you only what is already there.

The greatest cultural movements of the twentieth century the ones that changed how people heard music, moved their bodies, dressed, thought, and understood each other were not produced by people becoming more perfectly themselves. They were produced by people encountering each other in shared physical space and making something that neither could have anticipated and that no algorithm, with its infinite knowledge of what you already like, would ever have recommended.

“The question is not whether we miss these spaces. The question is whether we understand, precisely enough, what they were actually doing.”

They were not just providing community. They were producing the cross-cultural literacy through which the most generative human creativity becomes possible. And we replaced them with something that has no structural capacity to do that, and that is optimised, in fact, against it.

The room where it happened was a real room. It had an address. It smelled like something. It closed, usually, because the rent went up. What we build in its place matters more than we have yet understood.

— ● —

Key Concepts

Third Place: Ray Oldenburg’s term for the voluntary gathering spaces beyond home and work where community and culture form. Pubs, parks, barber shops — and, for twentieth-century youth, skate parks, record stores, and punk venues.

The Collision Principle: The proposition that transformative culture emerges from sustained cross-cultural encounter in shared physical space — not from communities refining themselves in isolation.

Family Fluency: The cross-cultural literacy developed through sustained physical co-presence with people of genuinely different backgrounds. Not tolerance or exposure, but fluency: a second cultural language acquired without losing the first.

Productive Friction: The creative tension generated when people with genuinely different cultural starting points occupy the same space over time. What makes collision generative rather than merely uncomfortable.

Subcultural Purity: What algorithmic platforms produce: increasingly refined aesthetic identities that are internally coherent, globally distributed, and culturally isolated from anything genuinely unlike themselves. Depth without range.

The Mediating Object: The shared obsession the trick, the song, the beat, the record that gives people in a third place common ground. What transforms proximity into collision.

Aamir Ghani ~ May 2026