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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6576 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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From "The Refragmentation" by Paul Graham:

The consolidation that began in the late 19th century continued for most of the 20th. By the end of World War II, as Michael Lind writes, "the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations."

For consumers this new world meant the same choices everywhere, but only a few of them. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, and since they were all aiming at the middle of the market there wasn't much to differentiate them.

One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV. Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for eggheads and communists. The programs that the 3 networks offered were indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were expensive, whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.

And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync. [6]

In a way mid-century TV culture was good. The view it gave of the world was like you'd find in a children's book, and it probably had something of the effect that (parents hope) children's books have in making people behave better. But, like children's books, TV was also misleading. Dangerously misleading, for adults. In his autobiography, Robert MacNeil talks of seeing gruesome images that had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can't show these to families while they're having dinner.

I know how pervasive the common culture was, because I tried to opt out of it, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives. When I was 13 I realized, more from internal evidence than any outside source, that the ideas we were being fed on TV were crap, and I stopped watching it. [7] But it wasn't just TV. It seemed like everything around me was crap. The politicians all saying the same things, the consumer brands making almost identical products with different labels stuck on to indicate how prestigious they were meant to be, the balloon-frame houses with fake "colonial" skins, the cars with several feet of gratuitous metal on each end that started to fall apart after a couple years, the "red delicious" apples that were red but only nominally apples. And in retrospect, it was crap. [8]

But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall. [9] There I found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became a gateway into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and pretending to like it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been a book. I'm sure I still have it somewhere. But though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it till college.

[6] I wonder how much of the decline in families eating together was due to the decline in families watching TV together afterward.

[7] I know when this happened because it was the season Dallas premiered. Everyone else was talking about what was happening on Dallas, and I had no idea what they meant.

[8] I didn't realize it till I started doing research for this essay, but the meretriciousness of the products I grew up with is a well-known byproduct of oligopoly. When companies can't compete on price, they compete on tailfins.

[9] Monroeville Mall was at the time of its completion in 1969 the largest in the country. In the late 1970s the movie Dawn of the Dead was shot there. Apparently the mall was not just the location of the movie, but its inspiration; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies. My first job was scooping ice cream in the Baskin-Robbins.

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