Universal platform culture was a historical experiment, not the natural order

Evidence

But perhaps this simply ended a peculiar experiment in global culture, in which all tastes—high, middle, and low; cosmopolitan and provincial—coexisted on the same mega-platforms. Rather than a total collapse, this fragmentation signaled a return to the natural order—the splintering of culture into smaller, more insular communities. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 715

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: Key pivots for the reader’s counter-thesis: Marx frames mega-platform mixed-taste culture as the aberration, fragmentation as normal.
• SEED: Possible counter-case essay: if fragmentation is the historical baseline, then the ‘blankness’ of the 21st century is really the tail of a brief universal-platform experiment, not a signature.

Related

• The omnivore monoculture was a temporary anomaly against culture’s natural fragmentation (similarity 0.89)
• Shared mass cultural events now outweigh the predicted fragmentation into infinite niches (similarity 0.79)