In 1962, Everett Rogers published Diffusion of Innovations. His model became gospel: innovations moved from early adopters to the majority, then to laggards. Linear. Predictable. Efficient. It worked when media channels were few and cultural gatekeepers were centralized. But that was a world of broadcast. One-to-many. A single story, shouted into a passive crowd.
That world doesn’t exist anymore.
Today, the crowd talks back. It fragments. It forms collectives on Discord servers, Substacks, TikTok corners, and obscure blogs. Culture is no longer a tidal wave - it’s a thousand boiling pots on different stoves.
When James Joyce wrote Ulysses, he knew most people would never finish it. Maybe not even start. But he wasn’t writing for most people. He was writing for a microculture of obsessives. Readers who would go on to found societies, argue over annotations, build shrines to a single book. In 2025, that same impulse builds Substack communities, indie game fandoms, and anonymous Twitter cults. Not because they scale. But because they mean something to the people inside them.
Big culture tells us to chase scale. Bigger launches. Bigger audiences. Mass appeal. But the most interesting things - the most alive things - happen at the edges. Subreddits of 2,000 people reshaping political discourse. Zines with a print run of 300 defining the aesthetic of a generation. Tiny underground scenes in Berlin or Lagos or Seoul birthing sounds that global pop co-opts five years later.
Is it harder to find these cultures? Maybe. But they are more durable. More loyal. And more dangerous to the status quo.
The Tea Party didn’t need to win over the whole country. It just needed to dominate a few primaries. Momentum was built in Facebook groups and local town halls. Microcultures aren’t fringe anymore. They’re operating systems for how people live, vote, and work.
Most companies still market like it’s 1999. Demographics over psychographics. Billboards over message boards. They chase broad categories and miss the tribal affiliations that actually drive decisions. You don’t buy Patagonia because of the fleece. You buy it because you want to signal that you care about the planet - without shouting. You buy Liquid Death water because it’s punk. Not because you’re thirsty.
And that’s the shift. Microcultures aren’t defined by utility. They’re defined by identity.
In The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot mourned the collapse of cultural coherence. A fragmented world. Shards of meaning. It felt like a tragedy. But maybe it was a beginning. Maybe coherence was always a fantasy, a luxury of centralized media.
Now, there’s no monoculture to speak of. Just scenes. Rooms. Loops of shared language and reference. The goal isn’t to go viral. It’s to matter.
And if you matter to the right 100 people? That’s enough.
That’s culture now.