AI and the End of Common Culture

The year is 1983. At 8pm sharp on 28 February, 106 million viewers tune in to watch the M*A*S*H finale. The next day, everyone from truck drivers to corporate attorneys had the same reference points. For years, M*A*S*H functioned as a national ritual, allowing families across the country to laugh at the same jokes and debate the same plot twists. Of course, it wasn’t just M*A*S*H. Everyone could assume that nearly everyone else had seen shows like Seinfeld or Dallas. In France, Bernard Pivot’s Apostrophes, a literary talk-show, regularly reached six million viewers, or ten percent of the population. This anchored social life in common references and fostered a sense of collective identity. This logic could also be applied to cinema (the Oscar ceremony attracted 85 million viewers in 1973), music (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Springsteen, and Queen appealed across demographics), video games (entire generations grew up with Tetris, Zelda, Pokemon, or Super Mario) or even software (everyone used the few available corporate tools).