The Invisible Hand of Culture in the Digital Age
A look at the hidden force that bends technology to humanity’s will.
AKurdish teenager in Berlin is teaching herself K-pop dance moves from Seoul as her grandmothers recipe for tahdig goes viral on Persian TikTok which inspires a fusion chef in São Paulo for dinner that night. All before breakfast. This isn’t some kind of economics globalisation. It is the invisible hand of culture in the digital age. We are rewriting what it means to be human at the speed of the internet.
In the 18th century, Adam Smith came up with the idea of the invisible hand of economics but it was in the terms of individual self-interest. We can also say there is an invisible hand of culture, perhaps always has been, but it is not based in self-interest. It is based in the collective minds of humanity around the world.
We are in a period of planetary cultural improvisation and evolution through billions of tweets, memes, and constant scrolling and creation. Mashing up musical styles, poetry, political ideas and economic models. A time where Afghan girls can code resistance in Minecraft. Where we make intentional typos and ignore punctuation to resist the algorithms of corporations. We are turning our collective digital gestures into tomorrow’s cultural reality.
The invisible hand of culture thrives on friction. It is the grain of sand that creates the pearl of human meaning. Cultural transmission is occurring faster than ever before in history. Some might suggest we’ll end up with some sort of global monoculture. I don’t think so.
We are more likely in a period of “harmonic emergence”. Much as musicians finding unexpected resonances, cultures discover synchronicities yet maintain their distinct voices. Friction generates heat, but also light.
The invisible hand of culture has shaped technologies in the past as well. Alexander Graham Bell imagined businessmen making deals. But the telephone was placed in the hands of women as operators and social users. It was women that shaped telephone culture; etiquette, social networks and the concept of hanging up on someone. It paved the way for women’s increased participation in public life. AT&T saw this as a “frivolous” use and tried to fight it for years, eventually surrendering to cultural reality.
And the invisible hand is ambidextrous. This creates a form of cultural recombination, which results in a form of anti-fragility. When musical types from different cultures mix and mash, they represent a combination that no single culture could imagine. This can happen with the political and economic systems we evolve.
We might imagine what’s happening with culture in our digital worlds is a sort of cultural overlapping. Different frequencies occupying the same space, yet influencing one another. We interact with an incorporate elements of different cultures, creating a mashup in a constant cycle.
The Western invisible hand pushes individualism through Instagram while the Confucian hand reinforces collectivism through WeChat in China. We end up with a sort of cultural jazz; improvisation, fusion and new remixes.
Cryptocurrencies are more about an argument against the current financial systems than just profit. Blockchain ideas for governance are a reimagining of building fairer systems and fighting back against structural violence from massive bureaucracies.
Estonia’s digital governance innovations have spread to India. Korean gaming culture teaches American educators about engagement in their systems.
There are, however, risks. As there always are with technologies. We sometimes see a sort of “narrative whiplash” where the invisible hand makes erratic gestures. Such as India’s embrace of tech entrepreneurship along with a return to Hindu nationalism. It is similar in the United States today with the tech giants and the return of Christian Nationalism.
Then there’s the risk of algorithmic colonialism where Western design algorithms become invisible hands themselves, shaping global behaviours. African storytelling traditions compressed into 60-second formats; contemplative Eastern practices become quick productivity hacks and meaning is lost.
We see some forms of mimetic contagion via memes. Being so hyperconnected, desires can spread faster than understanding. When the invisible hand of one culture starts mimicking others’ gestures without understanding their deeper meaning. Like Americans adopting Japanese kawaii aesthetics without understanding the cultural rebellion they represent.
I don’t think we’ve developed a global culture yet and if we do, it’s hard to know what that might even look like. Yet digital culture is moving fast, much faster than embodied culture, such as family structures, religious practices, governance models, move at human speed. This creates a temporal mismatch, which in turn creates frictions and turbulence.
Technologies are often invented as the tools to help solve our problems, yet are most often evolved by the invisible hand of culture in novel and sometimes unexpected ways. The radio was created as a form of point to point communication. But the invisible hand created a broadcast culture. In the 1920s and 30’s, family and friends gathered around the radio to listen and share an experience.
The #MeToo movement spread around the world in weeks, but various cultures metabolised it differently. In America the invisible hand shaped it in terms of individual accountability. In South Korea toward systemic reform and in India toward family honour dynamics.
While algorithms have, and are, influencing cultures around the world, in many ways, we are shaping the algorithms too. They’re becoming our fingers on the invisible hand as features of human agency reasserting itself through the very technologies that have been designed to predict and control culture. But they will fail. The invisible hand of culture is more powerful than we may think.