The Monoculture is Dead: Why We Ditch Global Superstars for Local Champions

If you tuned into the men’s World Cup opening ceremony on the outskirts of New York, you might think that the internet is turning us into one big cultural melting pot. The official theme tune was belted out in five different languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. It felt like the ultimate symbol of a world holding hands and singing from the same hymn sheet.

You get the same vibe if you pitch a tent at Denmark’s famous Roskilde festival. The line-up is a glob-trotter’s dream, throwing Britain’s The Cure, America’s Addison Rae, South Korea’s Jennie from Blackpink, and Tanzania’s Pili Pili Girls onto the exact same stage.

Look at that spread, and you would easily draw two obvious conclusions. First, entertainment is more global than ever. Second, America is still the puppet master pulling the strings of worldwide culture.

Both assumption may be wrong. Sure, massive events like the World Cup or the Olympic still grab billions of eyeballs for a few weeks every four years. We still have a tiny, lopsidedly American club of megastars (think Taylor Swift, MrBeast, or Roblox) who thrive on platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and Netflix. But step outside that top tier, and the grand American monoculture is growing weaker.

Instead of consuming the same recycled Hollywood exports, audiences from Asia to the Americas are retreating to their own backyards. We are using global, connected technology to indulge in hyper-local fun.

Why are we turning out of the American monoculture?

A decade ago, the big bosses in Hollywood thought globalisation meant everyone would watch the exact same television shows. When Netflix first pushed abroad, they tried to make universal hits. They spent a fortune on Marco Polo, a drama about the Venetian explorer in Asia, and Sense8, a sci-fi romp featuring psychically linked strangers from major Netflix markets.

Neither really hit the spot. Television executives had to learn a hard lesson: the “global show” is mostly a myth. Try to make something that appeals to everybody, and you usually end up with a lukewarm mess that appeals to nobody.

So, streaming platforms changed their strategy. They started making hyper-local stories aimed directly at local viewers. Netflix greenlit 1670, a wonderfully bizarre comedy set in 17^th-century Poland that probably baffled executives in Los Angeles, but went down a storm in Warsaw. They made Troll, a Norwegian mountain-monster flick that cost $6.3m, lavish for Norway, but absolute pocket change by Hollywood standards. These shows were built to make a profit even if nobody outside the home country watched them. Yet, funnily enough, shows like Britain’s gritty Adolescence only became global smashes because they were so authentically local, not in spite of it. You need a hot local fire before the heat can spread.

The numbers back this up. Six years ago, 70% of new television shows commissioned by global streaming platforms were North American. By the first quarter of this year, that share had halve to 36%. In fact, Netflix recently made more foreign-language shows than English ones for the first time in history. Whether you look at Spain, Britan, Japan, or South Korea, local shows are stealing the spotlight. The only place struggling to build domestic hits are countries that share a language with a massive neighbour, like Australia, Canada, or Ireland, where American and British content still floods the screens.

Music is moving in the exact same direction. Back in the era of CDs and physical record shops, the costs of making and shipping albums meant record labels only backed big acts that could sell globally. Digital streaming ruined those economies of scale, making it profitable to serve smaller niches like Danish hip-hop or Polish comedy.

Take those festivalgoers in Denmark. While the Roskilde stage is wildly international, their private Spotify playlists tell a different story. In 2019, only five of the top 20 songs in Denmark were sung in Danish. By last year, that jumped to 18, led by homegrown artists like Omar and Mumle singing Hele Vejen (“All the Way”).

Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, and Italy have all seen massive jumps in people listening to their own language. Brazil is the wildest example: in one week in June, 96 of the top 100 artists streamed on YouTube Music in the country were Brazilian, leaving just four spots for foreigners like Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson. Even in India, Hindi music is losing its grip because listeners are drilling down into regional tongues like Malayalam and Odia.

Why the sudden shift? Two things. First, artists now make most of their cash from live gigs and loyal superfans who buy merchandise and promote them on social media. It is much easier and cheaper to build a die-hard community of six million Danes at home than to chase six million casual listeners scattered across the globe. Second, algorithms have taken over from traditional radio and television tastemakers. The old gatekeepers assumed we all wanted American pop. The algorithms figured out what we actually enjoy: tunes from just down the road.

What happens when smartphones become our global playgrounds?

Video gaming is the youngest, fastest-changing entertainment beast on the planet. A generation ago, gaming meant buying expensive plastic cubes and cartridges for a niche crowd of teenagers. Today, it is a digital pastime for over 3.5 billion people, mostly played on smartphones.

If you look only at PC and console games, the world still looks pretty uniform. Kids in London, New York, and Berlin are all playing Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. But consoles are expensive. The real gaming masses live on smartphones, and that is where regional tastes sharply diverge.

Across the five biggest gaming markets (America, China, Japan, Britain, and South Korea) not a single mobile game appeared in every country’s top ten last year. Instead, players are flocking to culturally specific games, like digital versions of the tabletop board game carrom in India.

This has opened the door for clever underdog companies to eat America’s lunch. Take Garena, a Singapore-based developer that makes a mobile shooter game called Free Fire. Western gamers obsessed with Fortnite barely mention it, but Free Fire has built a massive following across Asia and Latin America, amassing more global users than almost any other mobile game except Roblox.

How did they beat the American giants? They designed for the reality of emerging markets. They built a game that runs smoothly on cheap smartphones with weak processors and tiny storage. When a Mexican player showed developers that his phone got so hot he had to play next to a desk fan, Garena altered the code to cool the software down. They also realised many players do not have bank accounts or credit cards, so they set up pre-paid cards and billing through local mobile phone bills.

They also matched the local culture. While Fortnite throws virtual parties for Western events like Halloween or Hollywood movie releases, Free Fire celebrates the Rio Carnival, Diwali, and Ramadan, even letting players donate virtual alms by finishing in-game challenge. When an Indonesian boy went viral on TikTok for aura farming in front of a traditional racing boat, Garena put his dance moves into the game within weeks. They also teamed up with India developers to add Bollywood themes, celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the classic movie Sholay.

Meanwhile, Chinese game publishers are quietly taking over the charts, growing their share of the global market from 10.7% to 14% in just six years. Two Chinese mobile hits, Kingshot (a strategy game) and Gossip Harbor (a puzzle game), recently cracked the top ten in eight different countries.

Interestingly, China isn’t exporting its own culture through these games. To win abroad, Chinese developers build games that look completely Western. Kingshot is dressed up as medieval Europe, while Gossip Harbor feels like small-town America. At home, Chinese gamers play entirely different titles that never cross the border.

Can local sports save us from everyday gloom?

While music, television, and gaming are splitting into regional niche, sports have almost always been stubborn homebodies. We like supporting our local team. The National Football League in America is the highest-earning sports property on earth, yet it makes 98% of its media money within its own borders. Apart from the English Premier League, which uniquely makes more money abroad than it does in Britain, fans generally ignore foreign leagues to focus on their domestic turf.

When you look at why people obsess over local sports, it is easy to see why the shift toward homegrown culture is booming. Local culture builds real-world community, especially when times feel bleak.

Take New York City recently. By many economic metrics, the rich world is doing well: unemployment is low and stock markets are high. Yet, general gloom is the mood of the decade. Enter the New York Knicks, a basketball team that hasn’t won an NBA championship in 53 years, finally did, beating the San Antonio Spurs.

New York is the ultimate playground for cut-throat capitalism, and tickets inside Madison Square Garden for the finals were fetching anywhere from a few thousand dollars up to about $100,000. Everyday fans have no hope of getting a seat. Yet, instead of bitterly grumbling about the billionaires inside, ordinary New Yorkers are packing into local pubs, gathering in living rooms, and crowding city pavements just to watch the games through restaurant windows.

In a city known for cynicism, the gloom has vanished. At a massive free watch party in Manhattan’s Bryant Park, thousands of fans gathered under the green trees while the Empire State Building glowed blue and orange above them. People of every political stripe and background were hugging strangers. One local politician summed up the euphoria perfectly, noting that the team’s run had transformed the world’s most intimidating metropolis into the world’s friendliest small town.

What makes this local obsession so powerful is the team’s ethos. The Knicks do not act like stereotypical greedy superstars. When former US President Donald Trump showed up to game three at Madison Square Garden, forcing police to cancel a public outdoor watch party, the arena crowd showered him with thunderous boos. The fans weren’t interested in political celebrity; they cared about their team.

The players themselves reflect the unpretentious, hard-working side of New York. Point guard Jalen Brunson, the undisputed hero of the city, recently extended his contract by leaving roughly $113m on the table. He deliberately took a massive pay cut so the team would have enough room under the league’s salary cap to hire better teammates.

Brunson and two of his key teammates, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges, played university basketball together a decade ago. Together, they run a selfless “five-out” offensive system where everyone passes constantly and anyone can score. It is built on grit, relentless defence, and zero ego. When a sports reporter tried to flatter Brunson by calling him a superstar who should demand the ball more, Brunson just stared back and said, “First, I’m not a star. Second, I want to win.”

That collective grit was put to the ultimate test in game four. After losing game three to San Antonio’s tower French prodigy, Victor Wembanyama, the Knicks fell behind by 29 points. Instead of folding, they clawed their way back to win by a single point, puling off the biggest comeback in NBA finals history.

Outside the arena, fans celebrated this blend of teamwork and civic pride with a brilliant chant that captured New York’s mix of diversity and unabashed consumerism: “My mayor Muslim! / My bagel Jewish! / My Christian Dior! / Knicks in four!” It wasn’t a call for a socialist revolution, nor an endorsement of greed. It was just pure, joyful local pride.

Where does this leave American soft power?

Put all of this together and we have a hypothesis: the century of American dominance over global pop culture is waning.

For decades, American movies, music, and television acted as a massive cultural magnet, pulling millions of people toward American values and ideas. Today, America still owns the digital plumbing (the Apple and Google app stores, YouTube, and Netflix) and it still takes a hefty cut of the profits. But it has lost its grip on the content flowing through those pipes.

Technology has lowered the barrier to entry so much that every nation can finally afford to tell its own stories, sing in its own language, and code its own games. South Korea is dominating television screens, Brazil is taking over playlists, and China is quietly ruling the mobile gaming world.

If our cultural habits turned entirely inward, the world would certainly become a duller place. A diet consisting only of local food and old domestic sitcoms would be bleaker than purgatory. But we aren’t locking ourselves in the dark; we are just enjoying a much bigger menu. Instead of accepting whatever Hollywood serves up, we can sample Polish satire, Danish hip-hop, or Indonesian gaming crazes whenever we fancy a change.

So, when the World Cup final kicks off soon on the outskirts of New York, all eyes will indeed be on America for a day or two. But once the final whistle blows and the stadium lights go out, we will all go right back to our smartphones, listening to our local tune, watching our local shows, and cheering for our backyard heroes in a brand new game of global culture that has only begun.