How ‘monoculture’ became a catchall for two opposing anxieties – that we no longer share enough, and that we all share too much

When “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” aired its final episode on May 21, 2026, critics lamented more than the end of a television program. It was a nightly ritual that millions of Americans participated in, with Bloomberg media reporter Lucas Shaw describing its cancellation as one more sign of “the decline of monoculture.” Eulogies for “the monoculture” have appeared elsewhere. In fall 2025, BuzzFeed announced “ the death of celebrity monoculture .” The Ringer asked whether summer 2025 was the “ summer without monoculture .” In all of these uses, the word describes a vanished era of shared cultural experience, a time when most people watched, listened to and talked about the same things. But “monoculture” gets pulled in a different direction, too. Other writers, like cultural critic Kyle Chayka, have used it to describe the opposite problem : a sense that the culture today is becoming too uniform, too flattened , too much the same everywhere you look. When the same word is used as a lens to view the world in different ways, something else is usually going on. As a marketing professor who studies culture and consumer behavior , I find the current usage of “monoculture” telling. The word comes from agriculture, and tracing its journey from the farm to the algorithm reveals quite a bit about a tension many people are feeling right now: a craving for connection and community that coincides with a longing to stand out as unique. From the farm to the feed “Monoculture” began as an agricultural term in the early 20th century to describe planting a single crop across a large area of farmland. The practice was efficient and profitable, but it was also risky. Single-crop fields are more vulnerable to pests, disease and weather shocks . They also displace the smaller, scrappier ecosystems that once occupied the land. The word migrated into cultural criticism in the 1980s and 1990s. Music writers like Robert Christgau and later Chuck Klosterman used it to describe a media landscape dominated by a handful of TV networks, magazines and record labels. Much of the agricultural meaning came along for the ride. When people complain about “ creeping monoculture ” today, they’re often referring to the way the algorithms, artificial intelligence and the economics of the attention economy have flattened popular culture the way industrial farming flattened the prairie. For example, urban studies scholars have traced how independent coffee shops across North America have come to look strikingly alike , with the same exposed brick, vintage furniture and tattooed baristas. “Whether it’s popular fashion, architecture or interior design, idiosyncrasies are collapsing into a generic, hegemonic aesthetic,” they write, and it’s due, in part, to the way “social media algorithms promote the visuals that users are most likely to engage with.” Generative AI is starting to foment the same dynamic. A study published in January 2026 found that when generative systems are allowed to run on their own, they quickly converge on what researchers call “ visual elevator music ” – generic, familiar outputs that strip away quirks and kinks. The technology that promises infinite variety, it turns out, has a strong pull toward sameness. The original problem with monoculture in farming is the same one people now see in culture: Efficiency at scale crowds out the small, the spontaneous and the strange. What people are actually responding to But there is another way the word gets used, and it points in a different direction. People mourning the loss of monoculture are rarely mourning the loss of aesthetic diversity. They are mourning the experience of shared attention, the sense that a lot of people were oriented toward the same thing. When commentators eulogized “The Late Show” as the end of a nightly ritual, this is largely what they meant. In 1983, the series finale of “M-A-S-H” was watched by an estimated 106 million Americans . Finales from other shows – “ Cheers ” in 1993, “ Seinfeld ” in 1998 and “ Friends ” in 2004 – were also watched by huge swaths of the public. There’s still the Super Bowl, which reliably pulls in 100 million-plus U.S. viewers . But in terms of weekly television and pop music releases, the shared cultural experience that once defined American life appears to have gone by the wayside. So while some people worry that the culture is becoming too uniform, others worry that it is becoming too fragmented. “Monoculture” gets used in both cases because the word captures something a lot of people are struggling to name: a sense that the relationship between individuals and the larger culture they live in has become harder to navigate. Standing out and belonging This is where my own field has something useful to add. Consumer researchers have spent decades studying how people balance two competing desires that turn out to be central to almost every cultural choice: the desire to belong to a group, and the desire to express something distinct about oneself.