A quiet eradication: technology’s erosion of culture

Stories are what keep us alive

We tell ourselves stories to create lives for ourselves within the context of the world we find ourselves in. I’ve been telling myself stories about America for as long as I can remember, though I’ve spent no more than a week of my life within its borders. From my vantage point America has been both everywhere and nowhere. It has become the default backdrop for almost everything happening on our screens and infiltrating our conversations, shaping our understanding of ourselves in relation to a place most of us will never visit.

This morning in Sydney the leaves outside are turning sunset yellow against a dour autumn sky. April in Australia—the Southern Hemisphere's gentle slide toward winter while the Northern Hemisphere rushes toward summer. This inversion of seasons, this fundamental difference in how we experience the rhythms of the year, seems suddenly significant. A reminder that perspective is everything, that the world looks different depending on where you stand.

I am thinking about distance. About the 12,000 kilometres of ocean between here and California. About how technology has collapsed this distance while simultaneously making it more profound.

The Technology Paradox

When I scroll through my feed on this ordinary Tuesday in April, I see more news about American politics than I do about decisions being made in Canberra. The US president occupies more mental real estate than the name of my local member of parliament. The struggles of Hollywood celebrities feel more immediate than the autumn festivals in regional towns just beyond the coastal fringe. I know more about the streets of New York than I do about the neighbourhood three kilometres South from where I live.

Photo by Jason Briscoe

This is the first paradox: that technology has made me a partial citizen of a country I have hardly visited while estranging me from the place where I actually live.

In the rural town where my grandfather grew up, people understood themselves based on their relationship to the land. They knew when to expect the first frost, when the rains were likely to come, when to prepare for the colder months ahead. They inhabited a specific place with specific knowledge. Their identity was rooted in soil and shared stories and a defined community.

Now identity is something that’s predominantly constructed online, piece by piece, post by post. It exists everywhere and nowhere. It is both infinitely malleable and strangely constrained. We are free to be anyone, and yet we find ourselves becoming more similar, more homogenised. We become concepts, ideas, copies of the avatars of the people we see online. More American.

Flattening of Culture

Consider the algorithm. Consider how it shapes what we see, what we know, what we believe. Consider how it has trained us to think in its language, to value what it values, to ignore what it ignores.

Last month, I watched as cyclones threatened communities in Queensland. I learned about it not through local news or word of mouth, but because it briefly trended online between updates about a celebrity divorce and speculation about the next iPhone. The disaster was content, to be consumed and forgotten. The suffering was flattened into the same stream that delivers makeup tutorials and political outrage.

This is what the flattening does. It makes everything simultaneously more visible and less seen. It creates the illusion of global citizenship while severing us from genuine connection to place. It makes us feel informed while drowning us in a sea of context-free information.

I have a friend who works for a tech company in Silicon Valley, though he lives in Surry Hills. Recently, over flat whites, he told me about a new feature they were developing—something to do with augmented reality, with layering digital information over the physical world. "Soon," he said, "you won't need to know anything. Your device will know it for you." He meant this as a promise, not a threat.

The Death of Identity and Culture

But I find myself wondering: if I no longer need to know my own landscape, my own history, my own culture, then what exactly am I? If my knowledge is outsourced, my memory external, my attention fractured, my identity curated, then what remains of me?

I read American writers who worry about the death of American culture, the loss of American identity. I understand their concerns. But from where I sit, on the other side of the Pacific, it looks different. It looks like a world where American culture has not died but has instead consumed everything else. Where American English has become the default language of the internet. Where American politics, American celebrities, American values dominate the global conversation.

This is the second paradox: that globalising technology has not created a truly global culture but has instead created a monoculture with American features. That in connecting the world, we have not become more diverse but less so.

Growing up across the Southern Hemisphere I witnessed cultural cringe as a palpable force—the sense that real culture happened elsewhere, that anything south of the equator was on the periphery, that our stories were somehow less important, less universal, less relevant. We looked to Europe first, then to America, for validation, for models, for permission to exist culturally.

Technology promised to change this. It promised to democratise culture, to give voice to the previously unheard, to create a global conversation where all perspectives would be valued. Instead, it accelerated the dominance of a single narrative. It has made the periphery more peripheral, and the long tail irrelevant.

The Silent Extinction

I think of the Indigenous knowledge systems that have sustained life on this giant island (Australia) for over 60,000 years. I think of the complex understanding of country, of songlines, of connection to place that existed here long before white settlement. I think of how this knowledge was systematically devalued, how it nearly disappeared, how it struggles to survive in a world that increasingly values only what can be digitised, monetised, converted into content.

And I think: this is happening again. Not through physical violence or explicit policy, but through the quiet violence of technological capitalism. Through the flattening of culture into content. Through the extinction of difference.

I think often about resistance. About what it would mean to resist the flattening, to reclaim some sense of place, of specificity, of difference. I think about deleting my accounts, throwing away my devices, retreating from the digital world entirely. But this feels like capitulation of another kind. The world has changed. There is no going back.

An Urgent Call to Action

Instead, I find myself looking for small moments of authenticity. For experiences that cannot be flattened, compressed, or commodified. I find myself seeking out local stories, local voices, local knowledge. I find myself trying to see my own place clearly, to value it not as content to be shared but as reality to be lived.

Last autumn, I spent a week in the Blue Mountains with no internet connection. Within a day something in me had shifted. I noticed my thoughts, the depth of my emotions. I began to feel like myself—not one of the curated versions I present in the myriads of digitally defined contexts of my everyday-life. I am not the data point tracked by algorithms, but something messier, more contradictory, more unfathomable. We all are.

Every moment we experience our lives as ourselves is a small act of resistance against the silent extinction, a reminder that another way of being is still possible.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The story we have been telling ourselves about technology is no longer serving us. We need a new story, one that acknowledges both the connection and the distance, both the freedom and the captivity, both what we have gained and what we are losing.

It is time to see clearly, to call things by their true names, to recognise extinction when it is happening before our eyes. And then to decide, with full awareness, how we wish to live in this changed and changing world.