What happens to culture in an era of identity politics?
Ephemeral Identities
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~6 minute read | Published: Sep 16, 2026 | Updated: Oct 7, 2026
Links on Status and Culture - January 2024
Read to the end for a longer essay critiquing Ted Gioia's idea of Macro vs. Micro cultures that explains why we get confused about niches and countercultures Personal News I’m spending 2024 writing a new book — a cultural history of the first 25 years of the 21st century.
The State of the Culture, 2024
Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)
The Great Social Media Diaspora
What happens when sprawling online communities fracture into politically homogenous, self-governing communities?
Culture & truth : the remaking of social analysis
xii, 253 pages ; 22 cm; Argues for a new approach to thinking and writing about culture. Exposing old conceptions, the book argues that new ethnographic writing must come to terms with the dynamic nature of social reality - with history, spontaneity, and human emotions; Originally published: Boston: Beacon, 1989; Includes index; Self-Renewing 2017; Includes index
The Malaise Of Peak Wokeism Within Online Culture
How have certain forms of education and new technology formed the template to woke culture today? This piece examines the link between social media and new technology to the outwoking of the wokest through a veritable closing of the mind.
Spider-Verse, Identity Politics, Leftist Infighting, and the Oppression Olympics
The Great Realignment: Why the New Right Is Here to Stay
The re-election of Donald Trump has illustrated in spectacular fashion the extent to which politics all over the world is in a state of continual flux. Old political configurations and parties are under unprecedented strain, with new forces, particularly on the hard right, challenging the status quo everywhere. Rejecting stale analyses based on moralistic panics about 'populism' or social media, political commentator Steve Davies shows how we are going through a deep-seated process of realignment rooted in underlying structural trends. We are transitioning, he argues, from an era where the key political division was over the economic structure of society to one where the primary division is between a vision rooted in national identity and sovereignty, and an essentially post-national cosmopolitanism. This change upends the ideological and electoral alliances that have structured our political systems for decades. No-one who wishes to truly understand the crises currently roiling the political status quo can afford to miss this stunning panoramic analysis of how this process works and how it is playing out across the world, from the USA and Germany to Argentina and India, and beyond.
Does modernisation erase cultural difference – or amplify it? | Psyche Ideas
We understandably fear the flattening effect of modernity. But global data from China to Peru tells a hopeful story
The Case for User Agent Extremism - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Hospicing Modernity
The book “Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism” was published in September 2021. If you are in Canada, you can purchase the book …
Third Places as Mini-Cosmopolitans - Surfing Modernity
What happens to identity in times of movement and change? In my second post, I proposed the importance of cultivating a third space that is not dependent on…