Ontological Fragmentation and the Death of Mass Culture
What is happening around us is often described as polarization. That word is too small. Polarization assumes a shared axis. It presumes that people are still standing in the same world, merely facing in opposite directions.
What we are dealing with instead is ontological fragmentation. Not disagreement about opinions, but a fracture in the assumptions that make disagreement possible in the first place.
Large groups of people no longer share a moral universe. They do not merely differ on values. They differ on what counts as harm, what counts as truth, what history means, what authority is, what guilt is, what freedom is, what humor is allowed, and whether irony itself is legitimate. They inhabit different models of reality.
Once that happens, mass culture as it existed in the twentieth century becomes structurally impossible.
Earlier societies argued inside a shared frame. Conservatives and progressives fought, sometimes viciously, but they still assumed a common world. They recognized the same historical references. They reacted emotionally to stories in comparable ways. They understood when something was meant seriously and when it was meant ironically.
Conflict existed, but it existed within a common symbolic order.
That order is gone.
Today, a pro-Trump voter and a woke activist are not simply positioned at opposite ends of a spectrum. They disagree on what constitutes violence. They disagree on whether words can wound. They disagree on whether the past is something one inherits or something one must atone for. They disagree on whether silence is neutrality or complicity. They disagree on whether ambiguity is intellectual honesty or moral cowardice.
They are not watching the same film, even if it is projected on the same screen.
Now widen the lens.
Add audiences for whom religious red lines are non-negotiable. Add audiences shaped by state censorship and nationalist framing. Add societies still living under inherited historical guilt. Add postcolonial contexts with different assumptions about power, victimhood, and narrative time.
Ask a simple question. What story survives all of that intact?
Almost none.
Faced with this level of fragmentation, large cultural systems do what systems always do. They simplify.
Not because executives are stupid. Not because they lack taste. But because complexity becomes exponentially risky when audiences no longer share interpretive ground. Irony presupposes shared distance. Ambiguity invites incompatible moral readings. Moral tension is read as endorsement by someone. Cultural specificity does not travel cleanly across fractured moral landscapes.
So these layers are stripped away.
What remains is spectacle. Clear heroes and villains. Emotions that require no historical memory. Values that are stated explicitly rather than discovered through conflict. Stories designed not to offend anyone deeply, which means they no longer move anyone deeply either.
This is why contemporary mass cinema feels hollow. Not because it is poorly crafted, but because it is engineered to survive maximum exposure in a world without shared meaning.
Cinema once worked as mass culture because it assumed a shared audience. It assumed a shared attention span. It assumed a tolerance for discomfort. It assumed that viewers could sit with moral ambiguity without immediately translating it into political accusation.
Those assumptions are gone.
In a fragmented moral landscape, every serious story becomes political whether it wants to or not. Silence is read as complicity. Complexity is read as evasion. Ambiguity is read as betrayal. Even restraint is interpreted as a stance.
So studios retreat to what cannot be argued with.
Physics. Explosions. Fantasy. Pre-modern myth.
Dragons do not vote. Aliens do not cancel. Superheroes do not trigger theological disputes.
These worlds are not chosen because they are childish. They are chosen because they are insulated.
This is also why mass culture feels increasingly infantilized.
It is not that adults have disappeared. It is that adults no longer agree on what adulthood means. There is no shared definition of maturity, responsibility, authority, or transgression that can be assumed at scale.
So mass culture regresses to childhood structures. Clear moral binaries. Stimulation instead of reflection. Emotional immediacy instead of delayed meaning.
Not because this is better, but because it is neutral.
The reflective adult viewer still exists. The viewer capable of holding contradiction still exists. But that viewer cannot be aggregated into a mass without producing conflict. Statistically speaking, that viewer is inconvenient.
Here the damage deepens.
Shared stories once forced people to endure discomfort they did not choose. Tragedy did not ask permission. Irony did not check sensitivities. Moral tension trained judgment precisely because it could not be customized away. One had to sit with it, argue about it, misunderstand it, live inside its unresolved space.
That training ground is disappearing.
As culture shifts from shared narratives to risk-managed content, moral capacity begins to atrophy. Judgment weakens. Interpretation is replaced by literalism. Discomfort is treated as harm rather than as a signal that something worth thinking about has occurred.
This is the quiet loss beneath the noise.
The paradox is this.
The more plural and global an audience becomes, the less shared mass culture is possible. Pluralism expands freedom. It allows multiple ways of life to coexist. It limits enforced conformity.
It also destroys the conditions required for blockbuster storytelling.
What survives under these conditions are franchises, ideology-lite morality, fantasy worlds, and content engineered not to fracture. Everything else migrates to the margins. Meaning does not disappear, but it localizes.
This is why national cinemas still feel alive.
Iranian, Korean, Romanian, Polish, Senegalese, Argentine films do not try to speak to everyone. They speak honestly to someone. They assume a shared context, a shared history, a shared emotional grammar.
And paradoxically, that is what makes them travel. Universality emerges from specificity, not dilution.
Hollywood did not lose its mind.
It lost the idea that there is a shared audience.
What remains is an engineering problem. How to sell one object to people who no longer share reality. The solution is the lowest common denominator. The cost is depth.
You are not nostalgic.
You are noticing a structural limit.
Mass culture cannot survive once meaning itself splinters. And something else follows from this, rarely stated clearly. In such conditions, bad faith outcompetes good faith. Literalism beats interpretation. Moral signaling beats judgment. Systems begin to reward those who flatten meaning fastest.
What comes next will not reverse this process. It will accelerate it.
The future of visual storytelling is not a return to shared narratives but their final dissolution. Movies will no longer be made for audiences. They will be generated for individuals. Systems already know what you like, what you avoid, how much ambiguity you tolerate, which kinds of moral tension soothe you and which irritate you.
The step from recommendation to construction is small.
Stories will adapt themselves to the viewer. Tone will soften or harden. Conflict will be reframed. Endings will resolve according to preference. Discomfort will be adjustable. Identification will be optimized.
At that point, the distinction between film and game collapses. Consumption and interaction blur. Narrative becomes conditional. Agency becomes a feature. You will be offered a choice: remain a spectator, or intervene. Stories will respond. Worlds will branch. Meaning will become procedural.
This will be sold as freedom. And in a narrow sense, it is.
But the cost is final.
When stories are individualized, there is no longer even the illusion of a shared symbolic experience. Two people will not have seen the same film in any meaningful sense, even if the title is identical. They will have traversed different moral paths, encountered different emphases, emerged with different intuitions.
Comparison becomes impossible. Argument becomes pointless. Reference collapses.
Mass culture does not merely die here. It becomes conceptually incoherent.
What follows is deeper fragmentation, not only of politics or values, but of imagination itself. A society that no longer rehearses moral intuition together loses one of its last shared training grounds.
There will be extraordinary art in this future. Intimate, responsive, technically astonishing art. There will also be unprecedented isolation, because meaning will no longer be something discovered together, argued over, or painfully negotiated in common.
It will be delivered privately. Perfectly tuned. Frictionless.
And once that happens, there is no going back.
What has broken is not taste.
It is the shared world that taste once presupposed.