The cultural hegemony of the 21st century

We think and make decisions from mental frameworks conditioned by digital media and the global agenda, rather than by tradition or the classical public sphere represented by the work and family environment, traditional media, or informal networks and public space. Everyone has their own leading cultural references, often because they are the most cited, or simply because we find them fascinating. Citing is, in a way, revering, making a certain way of doing culture appear and – why not? – of making a country. This cultural vision of citation clashes with the academic and mercantile vision, which strive to turn it into a metric, the metric into a ranking, and knowledge into a pole position. The snowball of citation is growing bigger and bigger, and it's no longer known whether authors are mentioned to create a genealogy, to do intellectual penance, to feed a private business based on academic impact journals and bestsellers, or a bit of everything at once. That's why, when I was able to interview the philosopher Judith Butler years ago, I ended up asking her how she could escape "Judith Butler". Academia and agents in the cultural and educational sector act as cultural bubble filters. These filters have become a framework that works to position a series of topics and authors on the public agenda. In the book Marge de maniobra (2025, Bòlit) I called it "premium epistemology", that is, the capacity and privilege that cultural and educational institutions have to generate forms of knowledge and capture public attention towards certain topics, a type of language, and values. Cultural policies and academia orient creation towards an agenda; this discourse is ratified by the press and social platforms, where it encounters the mainstream –hegemonic culture– as the primary site of symbolic production and, therefore, of generating culture. As with any intensive cultivation, after the initial fervor, the topic devalues or shifts to a low frequency. The mainstream, however, is not the street corner; rather, due to the impact of platform capitalism, we can say it is its underlying engine. Platform capitalism, with its networks and metrics, has managed to convert cultural consumption and the production of academic knowledge into data and reintegrate it in order to orient symbolic capital and user behavior, their tastes, and affiliations.

What do Butler, Lasswell, Lippmann, Zuckerberg, Musk, the Wyley Agency, the University of Chicago, Yale, Harvard, and the Philosophical Review? Its cultural origin. Both the academic and cultural filters, as well as the technological infrastructure filters, share a common characteristic: the culture being shared is fundamentally of Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon origin and ownership. In fact, it is stipulated that more than 85% of the journals at the top of the academic ranking (according to indicators created by Anglo-Saxon companies like SJR) are anglophone, not to mention the university prestige, the monopolies of the "big tech –including those related to AI– that manage social platforms and technological infrastructures, or the big entertainment stars. Perhaps, for this reason, we take children to learn English and not Chinese or a Semitic language, because we have accepted, under the promise of a better job in a worse world, cultural imperialism. It must be said that Anglo-Americans are excellent at creating what Walter Lippmann was called "pseudo-environments", that is, engaging cultural fictions capable of creating consensus, smoothing over cultural differences and frictions, but also their specificities. As members of a minority culture and language like Catalan, this ecosystem should set off some alarms for us. The great intellectual powers of the past (Greece, Italy, France, Germany...) must also be observing their own decline in the face of Anglo-American cultural dominance.

Filmmaker Pasolini, when in the sixties he spoke of "cultural homologation", referred to the cultural annihilation produced by American consumer capitalism. Today we accept that our academies, our cultural agenda, and our symbolic capital have this same linguistic and cultural form. This fact distances our sensibility and our alliances from other countries that are – historically and culturally – closer to us. For all these reasons, a group of European philosophers and intellectuals of different generations (Laurent de Sutter, Krzysztof Katkowski, Ilan Manouach, Igor Štiks, Srećko Horvat, Andrea Colamedici, among others) have launched the project The Peripherical Constellation, to create a platform for the exchange of ideas, for intellectual and hospitable alliances, with the aim of better knowing the intellectual and human capital of cultural peripheries, especially European ones, and contributing to their production and circulation. We could say that the entire world has become a periphery of Anglo-American culture. What do we know about Albania, Serbia, Ukraine, Finland, Italy, Montenegro? Currently, there are many transnational initiatives that function as strategic nodes for transforming intellectual and cultural infrastructures, even though English is, once again, the vehicular language, but not the agenda or its members. The New Center of Research and Practices, The New Institute, Global Dialogues, The Autonomy Institute... are just a few examples, not to mention countless cultural and educational initiatives with a national vocation that can be expressed in their own language.Saving distances, other countries that are far from being considered democracies, such as Saudi Arabia, are doing so institutionally and capitalistly as a socio-economic model transition, moving from an economy centered on fossil fuels to the construction of an intellectual and technological power. Creating sovereign technohuman platforms is important. Situated thought was also this: assuming the consequences of the cultural model we decide to create, maintain, or sustain. The survival of European languages and cultures, or of all non-hegemonic cultures, will depend on the solidity, diversity, form, and autonomy of their technological, cultural, and intellectual networks and infrastructures.