Is Culture Dying?

Oddly, the culture around me seemed to get more communicative as I aged. One day in 2019, I walked into a trendy Malaysian restaurant—Kopitiam, in lower Manhattan—and found the food of my childhood presented as cool, even chic. Enjoying it apparently meant something beyond enjoyment; beautifully photographed on Instagram, it signalled both the rising fortunes of Southeast Asia and the possibilities of one’s own personality. (“Once upon a time, food was about where you came from,” the novelist John Lanchester wrote, in a 2014 essay. “Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live.”) Americanness was shifting in its significance, too: for some people, in some places, flying a flag or eating a corn dog could be a form of resistance. Increasingly, everything was Googleable and shareable, and social media was reducing cultural difference to a matter of style; as the novelist William Gibson observed, the virtual world was colonizing the real one. Every cultural act seemed to be becoming a message to be read, a statement to be placed in quotes.