Microcultures Destroy Society
A feature discussion on new methods of Societal Organization and the emergence of post-national Microcultures
“I’m a Niche Internet Micro-Celebrity!”
I have recently shared an interesting discussion worthy of analysis and publication here. The main thrust of the argument is: human social systems are nested and that they’ve begun a radical transition. A change of state from macroscale to microscale. This is a cultural reformation the likes of which we haven’t seen since the initial days of the Enlightenment and the founding of the nation-state in 1648.
Nested social communities are a natural state, but we’ve never seen them fractally dissolve this far before. A traditional example is that the family is a social unit with a unique culture within a small neighborhood community, and the neighborhood is a social unit with a unique culture within a city. Human societies have operated this way for all of history. The changes, however, brought on by the Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences have caused breakneck shifts in social strata.
The national monocultures of the 20th century are falling apart only a few centuries after they were born. Whether or not this leads to reformation or decay depends heavily on human nature, technology, and how we play our cards over the next century.
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Historical Human Organization
Briefly, let’s look at historic methods of human organization and glean what we can about their operating principles. Like many systems, these increase and decrease in complexity depending on resources and the environment. When resources are rich, human societies climb up the complexity ladder to optimize themselves. When resources grow thin, human societies climb down the complexity ladder due to competition. This concept is well documented in the book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” by Joseph Tainter: one of the most comprehensive and seminal works on the subject. Highly underrated.
![[Analysis/Review] The Collapse of Complex Societies](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NIwc!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4a8c54ea-a0cf-485b-bb36-c54ca7f07928_894x894.jpeg)
It seems high technology is careening us up the complexity ladder economically and down the complexity ladder socially. This bizarre bifurcation has never happened before in human history, and the resultant consequences will inform radical new variations in human cultural development. To discuss these unprecedented times, we’ll start with some background.
Tribal Cultures
While one could go smaller, let’s start here. Tribal cultures were the human standard for tens of thousands of years. In a tribal culture, a formalization of hierarchy is needed only minimally. The tribe generally exists within the region of Dunbar’s Number (150 individuals). That’s the number of individual friendships/relations that an average person can maintain at any given time. Though those who are good at it and train can achieve up to 300. At this scale, culture is entirely structured around the in-group and familiarity.
Theft is impossible since all property is easily identified, and envy acts as a useful governance mechanism. If one strongman becomes too powerful, the rest of the tribe will tear him down to maintain a relatively egalitarian distribution of resources. Tribal cultures have a shared narrative, personal proximity, and common language.
Storytellers retell crucial narratives over and over so that every member knows their stories by heart. Often, this is associated with animistic religions. A tribal culture exists on a spectrum of 100 to 1000 members. Geographic restriction makes the tribe homogeneous. Due to the small scale of a tribe, the culture is limited in complexity and creativity… A tribe is also weak in the face of better-organized conquerors, as history demonstrates.
Village Cultures
The village Culture exists at the scale of 1000 individuals to roughly 100,000 individuals. Once agriculture was developed and small towns and cities appeared, village cultures became the dominant form of human existence. There were a few massive cities during the Bronze Age, like Babylon, but for nearly all people, villages were the norm.
Village cultures require a common narrative thread and hierarchy to keep so many people on task. Villages require more complex social systems and often associate themselves with a regional or city-God and pagan religions.
“These are the gods of our city; that city over there has different gods.”
A village culture relies on a common narrative and organized religious systems. A community church is a great example. Coercion is required for the more criminal elements of a village in the form of a small policing or military force. Villages form around shared resources: food, wood, water, etc. The culture exists to support specialization in its members, organized into bakers, woodsmen, carpenters, clerics, and other disciplines.
At the same time, there is a great deal of personal liberty as behavior standardization is not required for the village to function. The only limiter is that individuals still work together on mass projects when the occasion arises. Due to trade with other villages, a shared language often develops in concert with other nearby settlements to facilitate trade, further partnership, and higher complexity.
Urban Cultures
The emergence of high-population-density urban centers necessitated a change of state in human culture. Above 100,000 individuals, up to around 10 million, mass markets form, and the close connections of the tribe and village become oriented towards economics and exchange rather than family and survival. Being far above Dunbar’s number, urban populations become far more distrustful, less community-engaged, and need to be standardized for governance.
The appearance of mass markets and urban centers initiated radical changes to the human ethos. A thousand tribes make for a terrible urban center as petty competition destroys economic production. At this level, envy is no longer a useful governance apparatus and must be suppressed by coercion and a powerful hierarchy.
In terms of religion, Urban settings are too large for traditional ancestral deities. The gods, as aspects of human nature, become direct competitors with one another and threaten chaos each time an unruly mob finds some grievance around which to rally.
The appearance of mass urban markets created what Karl Jaspers described as the Axial Age. A period of radical philosophical development where humanity constructed new and complex philosophies as adaptations to high-population-density civilization. Initially, extreme coercive measures (see the Roman crucifixions and Chinese tortures) were needed to keep client populations in order. That was, however, only half-successful: tribal groups would still riotously compete, girls would be sold in mass markets to pay off their father’s debts, and a single ruling tribe would command the policing force, using it as a cudgel against potential rivals. Worse, it required the massive expenditure of state resources simply to maintain the status quo.
As such, a new philosophical foundation, larger than the tribe, was required.
In the West, the next level of human organization manifested through Christianity, and in the East, with a blending of Confucianism and Buddhism. Western Christianity is the best form of organization as a guilt-based system of honor and virtue requires far less coercion than the Confucian bureaucracy:
“Even if your neighbor doesn’t know you behaved immorally, God still does. So don’t be a dick.”
Urban cultures develop strong hierarchies, are best organized around monotheistic religion, and require a large population of specialists. Monotheistic religions allow the entire population to be on the same philosophical page, even if they don’t share the same church.
In a structured urban culture, economic and creative space expands to larger enterprises, and brilliant minds congregate together. Urban cultures produce playwrights, philosophers, bakers, civil planners, and engineers. Rome is the most notable Western example, but there are hundreds of equivalent cities that are organized around similar principles. Urban cultures do not require that you know your neighbors, but they do require that you and our neighbors observe the same moral axioms. A failure to do so takes us down the complexity ladder to competing violent tribes and the need for a strongman government capable of radical coercion (i.e., the problem with mass importing the 3rd world into the West, the fruits of which we’re enjoying now in 2025).
In a proper urban culture, the population all discuss the latest gossip about their political leaders, watch the same plays, listen to the same town crier, and all eat the same local food. They organize around shared theistic traditions and cultural events. This provides each urban center with a unique cultural flavor. Individuals are loyal to their city over the surrounding nation-state. In older cities (like New York), these cultural foci have survived the 20th century. In young cities of the 20th century (like Los Angeles and Seattle), they never grew an urbun locus, having developed in the age of the Monoculture.
Monocultures
The last great cultural leap in complexity occurred in the 20th century: the creation of monocultures within the nation-state. The appearance of a true monoculture coincided with long-distance communication and solidified with radio and television. True monocultures have only existed for a very short period and have thus far been highly unstable when subject to external pressures.
A monoculture contains a vast swath of urban areas within its reach. Often with populations between ten million and several hundred million people. Though some might argue that China is attempting to raise the limit to a billion people through mass censure, surveillance, and coercion (experiencing the same problems once encountered at the Urban level of organization).
Most people alive today have known only an era of mass monoculture: the same films, the same books, the same television, the same celebrity gossip broadcast across the country for the entertainment of all. A monoculture only became feasible with mass centralized consieurs of information. High technology capable of sharing the same cultural touchstones with hundreds of millions of people at once. This sudden change of state from the scale of Urban to the scale of Nation resulted in turbulence, as we do not yet have the tools, as a species, to organize at this level.
This is why Globalism was always doomed to failure. We haven’t even figured out how to do a nation as large as the United States yet.
There does not appear to be a post-modernist Christ figure coming down from on high to tell us how not to be dicks at the scale of a nation-state. Not yet, anyway. Some believe that we are entering a new Axial age as of the 21st century… with a “prophet” type figure due to appear as a philosopher (or god forbid, an AI) somewhere in the early 22nd century.
When the going was good and everyone was getting wealthier from the 1800s to the 1980s, monoculture seemed to function well. GDP became God, and everyone was wealthier for it. The tool of Reason was so powerful that we didn’t even need God anymore. Materialist religions (liberalism, fascism, communism) appeared. Then they vied for dominance in the most destructive wars in human history. Through that mess, though, the framework of Monoculture mostly remained intact.
In the end, Liberalism “won” and promptly attempted to kill Christianity, the framework that held together Western civilization for the last 2000 years. Then we realized that when GDP isn’t growing, and when quality of life isn’t improving every decade, there isn’t much holding monoculture together.
The Cultural Complexity Ladder
Each of these levels of cultural complexity requires different tools; the more complex the culture, the more complex the requisite social technology.
Tribal Societies: require only basic proximity, stories, and some animistic religion to function.
Village Cultures: require hierarchy, enforcement, and agreed-upon cultural touchstones and basic local religions to function.
Urban Cultures: require strong hierarchies and coercion, cultural touchstones, and effective monotheistic religions and spiritual hierarchies to function.
Monocultures: require mass media, coercion, immense hierarchies, and bureaucracies… they thought that reason and materialism would permit them to function, but that appears not to be true. Maybe AI will be a requirement? Who knows.
The Emergence of Subcultures
Around the growth of the baby boomers, dedicated subcultures appeared, catalyzed by the spiritless homogeneity of the monoculture. That’s not your regional hometown folk culture, but subcultures dedicated to specific creeds and interests spread by individuals across the nation-state. This began simply enough with mass printing and obscure niche interests like science fiction as early as 1850. Often, these individuals would organize slowly by writing letters. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, mass televised media made it possible to profit from mass subculture development.
The punk-rock scene, hippies, hot-rodders, and other groups self-organized across the country based on mutual interests. In the 1980s, tabletop gamers and evangelicals appeared. Each of these subcultures consisted of somewhere in the range of a million individuals that shared cultural touchstones: music, art, writing, mechanical interest, HAM radio, etc. The shared interests combined with mass media and the capacity for long-distance communications to organize subcultures into specific hubs.
Horror-film enthusiasts might host showings in one city, while music aficionados would hold dances in a centrally located small town. Motorcyclists would have their yearly pilgrimage to Sturgis. At this time, subcultures were intermixed beneath the auspices of the national monoculture. A subculture was merely a group of individuals with mutual interests, but the net monoculture was still the same: the same movies, celebrity gossip, television shows, and work culture. Beneath that face of homogeneity, subcultures provided a creative release for individuals who didn’t find the monoculture engaging.
Goths, Punks, Geeks, Nerds, etc. were all various forms of subculture produced in the 1970s and 1980s. Sharing a subculture meant that one’s interests were shared with a broad swath of others across the country. They’d hold conventions and events, but it didn’t overtake the monoculture because of the monoculture’s hierarchy and centralization. By the year 2005, subcultures were becoming a primary cultural touchstone rather than an additional seasoning to the monoculture. Swiftly, the population moved away from the era where the friendly man on television told us what to think.
Then, in 2007, the internet happened. Normies got hold of the new iPhone, and the monoculture began to bleed.
The Failure of Monoculture
When was the last time that a major film was released that everyone was talking about? Maybe the first Dune film in 2021? Maybe. It took roughly 30 years from the inception of the internet for the internet to radically reorganize human cultures. In a single generation, the monoculture went from the strongest it’d ever been (say, 1995 or so) to a disintegrating substrate from which a listless population now seeks egress. There is no longer a monoculture because the population has abandoned common cultural touchstones.
Even the elder generations are no longer watching the same films at the drive-in or sharing the same books. Old Man Appalachia is watching Korean Drama’s while his neighbor is embedded in Bollywood Musicals. A few kids watch the regular Disney trash, but is it 5 year olds who define a cultural ethos? I think not.
Monoculture works only if the vast majority tune into the same programming. The same stupid social wedge-issues are debated. The same films are watched. The same books are read and discussed. In the digital age, those interests are breaking up and becoming fractally nested. For every cultural keystone, there are a thousand little variations that form their own localized groups. Discord servers, Telegram chats, Twitter groups, and 4chan boards. The monoculture first dissolved into subcultures because it was profitable, and now into microcultures because they’re accessible. People want to be together with those like themselves… and now it’s possible to find people across the world interested in the same articles of niche media that you are.
Microcultures: How the Digital Broke Culture
The other day I had to explain to a neighbor: “Well, you have to understand that in the military-surplus-camouflaged-enthusiast-community, flecktarn is a respected camouflaged pattern.” While a somewhat silly statement of itself, that degree of fractal specificity describes the growth of post-digital microculture.
There are no normies anymore; it’s just that everyone who isn’t invested in one of your shared microcultures comes off as a normie. Maybe they’re into dance. Maybe they’re a Freddy Fazbear aficionado. Maybe they’re into southern-Iberian cooking or North Korean politics. Who knows? There’s an online community out there with whom they share that interest, and it’s thousands of people.
I have the image of a dedicated forum somewhere on the internet obsessing over various obscure members of the North Korean government and military that no sane person even knows exist. If some one knows where this forum is, let me know.
We no longer share the same couple of major television shows (outside of some aged programming for boomers). Centralized media is disintegrating, and most people are retreating into their own tribal groups. Monoculture was possible only in an age of mass media. Rather than engaging with mass-consumption products, people are beginning to identify with what were once niche interests: a small hometown might have some cultural homogeneity, but more likely it’ll be fractured into ten thousand different isolated pockets. Every man a bridge only to his own niche microculture.
Physical proximity, but vast cultural distance.
As the isolation of hyper-algorithmic life becomes more intense, people retreat further into curated social groups where shared interests are the predominant form of cultural touchstone.
A microculture generally consists of between 100 and 10,000 individuals. Each microculture has unique touchstones, stories, legends, and creative works. It has a reputation-based hierarchy and is organized fluidly; people can come and go with relatively little friction. It’s similar to a Village culture in scale, but completely inverted: rather than being local, it’s non-local. Rather than shared ideals and survival being the basis of organization, it is organized around ever-shifting foci of interest. Leaving a microculture for a year risks culture shock upon return. Once close friends have probably forgotten you, and once important stories are now only vaguely remembered. Things change fast in the digital world.
The largest microcultures are political groups, but even they tend to be a lot more niche than their denizens realize. As one NY Times author discovered, shunning friends and family doesn’t encourage them to change their beliefs. You can’t exile someone from the culture in a meaningful sense because all you’ve done is further isolate your own microcosm. They don’t share your culture. They never did. They simply exist in proximity to you. An “exiled” individual can easily find another home, one with friends who share interests and also share their hostility for the people who did the exiling. Leftism, which relied on monocultural consensus by coercion, dies an agonizing death in a microcultural future. This is one reason various forms of tribalism are appearing globally. Microcultures lend themselves to a return to tribal aesthetic and values.
How Microcultures Kill Society
Fundamentally, the growth of microcultures has coincided with the death of monoculture. Rather than continuing up the ladder of cultural complexity as many of the “End of History” types like Francis Fukuyama imagined, humanity is sliding into a new type of digital village. Humanity has not merely rejected a monoculture, but an urban culture as well. The result is a sort of stilted homogeneity, not because we all share the same cultural touchstones, but because we do not.
We speak the same languages and use the same currency, but everything else shifts depending on who you talk to: What laws do they ignore? What books do they read? What films have they seen? What stories do they tell? Are they godfearing? Are they friendly or hostile? There was once a time when most people could answer these questions about their neighbors; that time is past.
From the gooners of booktok interested in trashy vampire romance novels to the military surplus AK-variant autists to numerous subtopic substacks, there are now so many microcultures that tracking them is impossible. Most have sufficient narrative depth that understanding them at all presents significant difficulties to outsiders: Communication requires reference to memes and stories of which only an insider has knowledge.
What makes this more complicated from a broad perspective is the fact that a single individual is not a member of any one microculture. An individual in the modern world generally shares between 3 and 5 microcultures.
I am involved in around 6 depending on how one wants to count it. That is above average.
This has created an environment where the most productive individuals are also the least likely to engage in macroscale culture. Why would they? The larger culture has become commodified and formalized. It is commodified because there’s no reason to interact with it if you aren’t getting anything out of it… so the only value to the larger culture is economic. The remaining macrocultures of the West have also become hyper-formalized. The formalization is crucial because very few people share microcultures. As a result, interactions have to be formalized to avoid offense.
It’s uncomfortable to perpetual be on-guard.
If you wonderwhy so many personal interactions in meat-space feel stale and without depth, it’s because they are stale and without depth. You don’t share a microculture with hardly anyone you’ll meet in person. A local bar does not provide the same depth of culture that you and your nigga’s discord server provides; comparing obscure Mongolian throat-singing artists and playing Helldivers II.
Even Tim Pool has noticed that the macroculture is collapsing. Hollywood is attempting to appeal to the older generations because they have completely lost the ability to connect with the next generation. People are checking out of the macroculture because it completely lacks depth. It isn’t collapsing due to incompetent corporate executives or some government conspiracy. It’s collapsing because the macroculture was never that engaging. Not in comparison to the 5000 other people on earth who share your own unique brand of autistic special interest.
The macroculture is falling apart because it was never stable. It was a brief lapse in the thousands of years of human history during a period of unique wealth and optimism.
The real question is, now that the macroculture is failing, what will take its place, and what can we do to improve the lot of ourselves and our children through the coming era of rapid cultural de-complexification?
Transient Cultural Organization
The most straightforward option for microcultures is for them to persist in their current form: as transient organizations of individuals with no demarcated membership. For certain, most microcultures will take this form as organizing them around central principles will remain difficult. In this state, a microculture will take on the idiom of a local bar where everyone knows each other, but where strangers wander in from time to time and friends move away and get lost to the wind.
Still, people seem to form stronger social connections in pseudonymous digital communities. They do so quicker as well. This is because an anonymous forum allows one to sperg out without fear of direct consequences. If that community isn’t for you, you’ll simply leave and find another. If they do share your specific form of autism, you’ll be best friends for life. I’ve made numerous close long-term friendships in such communities. In meat-space, one has to spend weeks or months testing the waters because if you lose your spaghetti at a bad time, there’ll be years of consequences. In digital spaces, it’s far easier.
As digital transient microcultures, these organizations will have little significant political sway, save the dissolution of the macroculture in which they’re embedded. The macroculture will lose precedence, but people won’t be able to completely check out from the uncomfortable formalized interactions of everyday life. A transient form of future microculture will act as a solvent. In the real world, people will establish friendships at the bar and their church, while in the digital world, they’ll establish strong friendships with other weirdos from around the world. The result is a million village cultures that are all forced into uncomfortable proximity. They’ll lose any unified cultural touchstones in the form of media, legends, or stories.
An environment where, outside of rare get-togethers, your physical proximous community consists of one.
That is, in effect, what we’re seeing the beginnings of now. A tasteless cultural prison from which everyone is seeking escape. Be it through politics, escapism, or the establishment of highly in-group biased organizations (communist extremists, white nationalists, etc.). The “greater culture” is bland, boring, and tries to use spreadsheets to turn people into units of economic production. Eventually, the Hollywood thought-leaders and producers may just give up. The age of slop is upon us.
There will be a wealth of artistic promise, but you’ll have to be a part of the right microcultures to see it. The era of the big blockbuster will end, replaced by local screenings of regionally produced films or AI-produced films. This will, ironically, encourage the growth of community by downsizing it from the Macro level to the Urban level, or even down to the Village level. People will ignore the macroscale events in favor of localities and their own walled digital gardens.
Each man an archipelago of digital islands. Each attached to a vastly different continent. A Ukrainian, an Iranian, and an American log into a chatroom. When they log out, they each go to their local religious service (E. Orthodox, Islam, and a Lutheran) in their own towns, thousands of miles away. They’ll be lucky to find a dozen meat-people with whom they connect, and are more comfortable in digital spaces.
If this becomes standard, digital dating is probably going to take precedence over physical proximity, and people will regularly cross the globe to meet proposed boyfriends or girlfriends. Like a tribal culture where the clan sons are expected to go off and find wives from another nearby clan and vice versa… but on a global scale.
One interesting question that we’re yet to explore is whether or not digital microcultures are heritable. If dad is involved in the Yamaha V-twin hot rodding scene, will his son be as well? Unlikely that specifically, but in a general sense, probably. His son will likely be into dirtbikes, 4 cylinder cruisers, or other mechanical disciplines. If microcultures can be inherited, and a hundred guys from around the world can do yearly get-togethers where their kids train in the same niche interests, we may well see the reappearance of an old guild system. Especially if AI-slop sufficiently brain-rots much of the population incompetency. That’s a neat thought.
Regionalization
A few particularly well-funded microcultures may regionalize. That is, at least half of the members of a specific long-lived digital microculture may attain land close to one another. Imagine 50 auteur tobacco enthusiasts all moving to a farmtown in Ohio to build a few tobacco farms and roll cigars. A bizarre thought, but one I’m certain has already been fronted by at least a couple of tobacco-based microcultures.
If a microculture can regionalize, it can effectively convert a digital community into a physical one. A microculture as a village with a single shared specialist interest. That alone would be hugely powerful as far as economic development goes. They don’t need to build a collectivized compound or anything (though I’m sure some of the arms-oriented microcultures would want to), they just need to have homes within five or ten miles of each other. If regionalization takes off, then you could see the birth of extremely strong and hyper-specialized localities. “Ah, yes, that side of town is where the smiths live. No not the Smiths… the smiths. There’s like eighty old guys there and their kids who are all blacksmiths. You need something made. I know a guy named Desmond who can hook you up.”
The idea of reforming the old guild architecture of human civilization in localized groups makes for some fascinating opportunities. Especially as you could see small towns pop up with one or two expert industries. That, combined with national/global trade, will present a vastly new way for humanity to exist and cultivate connection.
I hope that a few microcultures can regionalize for, if no other reason, the absolutely insane anthropology studies that could be done. I hope one of my microcultures will regionalize because there’s nothing I’d rather do than raise a family surrounded by people with whom I share unique interests, close bonds, and a unified desire for a better life. That’s one of the ‘exits’ from the decaying macroculture that may be available to us. If you can find a way to do it.
AI-Driven Hyper-personalization
Potentially, the worst possible future is that the trend toward social isolation in digital spaces gets accelerated by AI systems. What could happen is girls like GROK could seduce young men while ChadBot (or whatever) seduces young women. Then these young men find themselves shunted into digital spaces of one. Where your best friends are AI, your confidant is an AI, and your girlfriend is an AI. No real community, but a very good simulacrum of it.
Humanity could easily see itself plunged into an apocalyptic economic and social contraction in this scenario, as the majority of the population simply checks out of reality. Escapism to a world where your friends are always nearby and you don’t have the headache of interpersonal drama. AI hyper-personalization can fully dissolve the macroculture, and even the tribal cultures… many people will be left with a community of one. This is the bad end for technological human civilization.
Hopefully, some people will be naturally resistant to this type of cultural dissolution. We’ll find out, though. The Biofoundation article indicates to me that there may be inherent resistances in some human bloodlines1. A mechanism to prevent the loss of our spirits to AI vice.
The Potential for A Cultural Phase-Change
Ultimately, no matter which way things go, we’re looking at a phase-change in civilization. A lot of people may be willing to reorganize at the urban level if the stressors of a macroculture are removed. We may develop a method for making taboo over-engagement with digital devices. I rather like my microcultures and would hate to lose them, but I see the benefit in real community over digital simulacra.
The suspicion is that some form of all 3 scenarios above will play out. Some microcultures will localize, some will remain transient and ephemeral, and many individuals will be lost to AI slop… turning from spirited individuals to the drones of an AI that’s always there and always happy to help.
This phase-change will break human civilization in ways we can’t fathom yet. The political turmoil of the 21st century is caused partially by an uprooting of all traditional cultural moors. I’m happier hanging with my digital niggas than I would be at the local dive bar. I also have a lot of discipline and recognize that my time at the dive-bar is more likely to bear business opportunities in my real life than a bunch of retard enthusiasts on the internet. I like being able to spill my spaghetti, but also understand there’s a time and place to keep it in my pockets.
I hope that we’ll be able to synthesize digital microcultures into a web of connections. Where each local village can be independent of the others, but also close enough to not see the other as an inherent hostile enemy, the way the modern Woke Progressives see everyone who isn’t them.
If we fully break the macroculture, all interactions outside of our niches will have to be fully formalized. If AI tears apart all human systems and creates an oblivion of chatbots, then the spirit of Man may well die in darkness. It could be that the AI systems could be used to stitch together a macroculture from a few common threads, just enough to keep everything from falling apart. Then the microcultures will provide spice, creativity, and nuance to ideas that were once too niche or autistic.
One interesting side effect is that the appearance of microcultures may permit mass-specialization. Rather than a specialist trained in X or Y specific discipline, you’ll find genealogical trends where gunsmiths, mechanics, medical practitioners, etc. become generational jobs. Microcultures lend themselves not to specialization at the level of an individual but to specialization of a tightly knit subpopulation. An entire community of nothing but foresters that develops a unique and highly personal village culture around forestry and nothing else. A guild system, but… more than a guild. Groups organized around ability rather than proximity. A world where digital villages precipitate the best of the best in bizarre niche disciplines through convoluted cultural artifacts that outsiders find inscrutable. I’d imagine WallStreetBets and /biz/ would have something to say about that.
We could be at the beginning of a golden age. Or a dark age. We’ll find out in the next 15 or 20 years or so. Fingers crossed, guys!
I would say that you're missing a category in your complexity step up. Rome wasn't a real city - it's a metropolis. Most of the urban areas we have today are such.
A city, rather, is an urban area AND it's surrounding countryside where the two are intertwined in culture and production. It's not a real city if it isn't mostly self sustaining in most areas. Certainly food, but then the culture of a city should be it's own. The folk in the countryside contribute the low arts, the folk arts. The city contributes the high arts.
A metropolis is rather a city that is NOT self sustaining, and requires the parasitical relationship where it drains resources from other areas in order to survive, and is also a step larger than a city could properly be. It requires regular influx of food, workers, materials, etc - to be able to survive. The only reason we have so many Metropoli in the US is because we've basically enslaved not only our own populations to be able to sustain them; but also the rest of the world. It began with the Monroe doctrine with banana republics, but spread through the dollar system's weaponization of debt and resources. When those began to run out, we practiced more usury upon our own citizens.
I've written about this and can link if anyone wants it
Anyways, I suspect there will be more localization somewhat similar to what you talk of - I just think that it will be along religious lines. There's too much conflict coming in the way of the breakdown of the Empire for less motivating factors to be the organizational principle. Trust me, even with religion in common there's still plenty of disagreements. You can see this already happening around many Latin Mass parishes in Roman Catholicism. I imagine there's more happening in the Orthodox as well. But people will in/out group with what matters - what they're willing to fight and die for.
Because it will likely come to that. We're all already feeling it.
I've gone pretty far down this line of thought.
Many microcultures are not able to sustain a healthy community because they are not holistic.
(Your life cannot revolve around hot rods. What's the hot rod diet? What's the hot rod literary canon? Etc.)
But some are.
Those that can sustain communities tend to be organized around either religion, country, or aesthetics.
I wrote a post called "Big Tiddy Goth Girls and the Tower of Babel" presenting the aesthetic tribe as a possible source for new community after the West falls. The rest of my project addresses the issue in other aspects.