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.

These days, it's common to hear that the imperialist excesses of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin hark back to the 19th century. But, imperial issues aside, there are other, perhaps deeper, similarities with that century. The first half of the 21st century, like the first half of the 19th, is an era of romanticism and fear, of technological advances and social crises, of distrust in parliamentary systems and unbridled capitalism.

It sounds a bit strange to speak of the "Catalan soul," or the "Spanish soul," or the "Swedish soul." And yet, it's taken for granted that a "Russian soul" exists, that "dark place" spoken of by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, and almost all the other writers of the golden age of Russian literature. Vladimir Putin also frequently appeals to the "Russian soul," in opposition to the supposed soullessness of Western Europe.