The contradiction of ‘monoculture’: the word Americans now use to mourn Colbert’s finale and describe how AI is damaging creative output

Algorithms promised infinite variety. A new AI study finds they're producing "visual elevator music" instead, and that's only half the monoculture problem.

When “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” aired its final episode on May 21, 2026, critics lamented more than the end of a television program.

It was a nightly ritual that millions of Americans participated in, with Bloomberg media reporter Lucas Shaw describing its cancellation as one more sign of “the decline of monoculture.”

Eulogies for “the monoculture” have appeared elsewhere. In fall 2025, BuzzFeed announced “the death of celebrity monoculture.” The Ringer asked whether summer 2025 was the “summer without monoculture.”

In all of these uses, the word describes a vanished era of shared cultural experience, a time when most people watched, listened to and talked about the same things.

But “monoculture” gets pulled in a different direction, too. Other writers, like cultural critic Kyle Chayka, have used it to describe the opposite problem: a sense that the culture today is becoming too uniform, too flattened, too much the same everywhere you look.

When the same word is used as a lens to view the world in different ways, something else is usually going on.

As a marketing professor who studies culture and consumer behavior, I find the current usage of “monoculture” telling. The word comes from agriculture, and tracing its journey from the farm to the algorithm reveals quite a bit about a tension many people are feeling right now: a craving for connection and community that coincides with a longing to stand out as unique.

From the farm to the feed

“Monoculture” began as an agricultural term in the early 20th century to describe planting a single crop across a large area of farmland. The practice was efficient and profitable, but it was also risky. Single-crop fields are more vulnerable to pests, disease and weather shocks. They also displace the smaller, scrappier ecosystems that once occupied the land.

The word migrated into cultural criticism in the 1980s and 1990s. Music writers like Robert Christgau and later Chuck Klosterman used it to describe a media landscape dominated by a handful of TV networks, magazines and record labels.

Much of the agricultural meaning came along for the ride. When people complain about “creeping monoculture” today, they’re often referring to the way the algorithms, artificial intelligence and the economics of the attention economy have flattened popular culture the way industrial farming flattened the prairie.

For example, urban studies scholars have traced how independent coffee shops across North America have come to look strikingly alike, with the same exposed brick, vintage furniture and tattooed baristas.

“Whether it’s popular fashion, architecture or interior design, idiosyncrasies are collapsing into a generic, hegemonic aesthetic,” they write, and it’s due, in part, to the way “social media algorithms promote the visuals that users are most likely to engage with.”

Generative AI is starting to foment the same dynamic. A study published in January 2026 found that when generative systems are allowed to run on their own, they quickly converge on what researchers call “visual elevator music” – generic, familiar outputs that strip away quirks and kinks. The technology that promises infinite variety, it turns out, has a strong pull toward sameness.

The original problem with monoculture in farming is the same one people now see in culture: Efficiency at scale crowds out the small, the spontaneous and the strange.

What people are actually responding to

But there is another way the word gets used, and it points in a different direction.

People mourning the loss of monoculture are rarely mourning the loss of aesthetic diversity. They are mourning the experience of shared attention, the sense that a lot of people were oriented toward the same thing. When commentators eulogized “The Late Show” as the end of a nightly ritual, this is largely what they meant.

In 1983, the series finale of “M-A-S-H” was watched by an estimated 106 million Americans. Finales from other shows – “Cheers” in 1993, “Seinfeld” in 1998 and “Friends” in 2004 – were also watched by huge swaths of the public.

There’s still the Super Bowl, which reliably pulls in 100 million-plus U.S. viewers. But in terms of weekly television and pop music releases, the shared cultural experience that once defined American life appears to have gone by the wayside.

So while some people worry that the culture is becoming too uniform, others worry that it is becoming too fragmented. “Monoculture” gets used in both cases because the word captures something a lot of people are struggling to name: a sense that the relationship between individuals and the larger culture they live in has become harder to navigate. https://www.youtube.com/embed/rmfC7EOPbDA?wmode=transparent&start=0 Nearly half of the U.S. population in 1983 watched the series finale of ‘M-A-S-H.’”

Standing out and belonging

This is where my own field has something useful to add.

Consumer researchers have spent decades studying how people balance two competing desires that turn out to be central to almost every cultural choice: the desire to belong to a group, and the desire to express something distinct about oneself.

My research on bicultural consumers – people who hold two cultures at once, like a first-generation Chinese American who navigates the traditions of family life at home and mainstream American culture at school or work – looks at how they manage this tension.

In my research, I found that biculturals prefer and choose “paradox brands” – brands that hold seeming contradictory meanings – more often than other consumers do. Burberry signals both centuries-old heritage and modern fashion. Range Rover holds rugged utility and luxury refinement in the same vehicle. For people who already live with contradictions every day, brands that don’t force a single identity choice feel right.

That tension is exactly what all the monoculture talk is reaching for. When people lament the death of monoculture, they are often missing the experience of belonging, of sharing references and emotional beats with millions of strangers. When they lament the rise of monoculture, they are often worrying about the cost of that belonging, the way being part of a mass audience can feel like a flattening of who you actually are.

The agricultural metaphor captures both sides. A monoculture is productive precisely because it concentrates resources. It is fragile precisely because it leaves no room for what doesn’t fit.

What the word can’t quite say

There is one thing “monoculture” struggles to capture, and it shows up clearly in events like Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.

By raw attention, the performance drew 128 million U.S. viewers and set a global cross-platform record with more than 4 billion views in 24 hours.

But the reception was far from uniform. To some viewers, it was a Spanish-language celebration – long overdue – of Latin Americans, both inside and outside the U.S. Some conservative critics, however, objected to a predominantly Spanish-language performance headlining America’s biggest broadcast.

Scholars of culture and branding have long understood that shared cultural moments work by giving a range of different people a common cultural experience, not by forcing them to interpret it in the same way. Marketing scholar Douglas Holt’s foundational work on iconic brands showed that the most powerful cultural symbols succeed because they let different audiences find different meanings in the same thing.

The word “monoculture” cannot quite hold that part of cultural experience – and it might be why people keep reaching for the term, only to see it slip through their fingers.

Maria A. Rodas, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com