The Undesigned Function

September 29, 2026 — James Henry

I was talking with family the other day about the last post and the discussion unearthed an observation that hadn't quite made it to the surface yet: my kids don't have a common culture with their peers.

When I was a kid we all watched GI Joe, everyone knew who Cobra Commander was. As I got older, we all watched MuchMusic and that's where I first heard Moxy Früvous, The Tragically Hip, and The Barenaked Ladies. By 2000 I was working at a cable company, of all places, and the only thing anyone talked about in the lunch room was Survivor. Survivor, survivor, survivor.

My boys don't watch what other kids their age watch, I've done no studies but I don't think any of their peers share all that much common media amongst themselves either. When I tried to ask what they do have in common with the kid on the bus with them, they came up short. My boys don't watch movies, they read books, play Minecraft, No Man's Sky, and Wildermyth. Their friends do other things.

This through line reminded me of something from my own high school. Shakespeare was full of references to Apollo and to Christian scripture, and it struck me as strange then that people could take those in from the reeking floor of The Globe without a classics degree. Then it hit me that calling a rich technocrat Tony Stark and calling a warlike man Ares is the same move--reaching for the common substrate to carry nuance. One name delivers a whole character to a stranger who already knows him. The only difference is which shelf the name came from.

The Designed Functions

Churches existed to transmit doctrine. Schools existed to teach kids to read. The TV networks existed to sell soap. The Chinese imperial examination system existed to staff a bureaucracy--from the Sui dynasty until 1905, if you wanted the job, you sat exams on the Confucian classics.

You can point at people who tried to build that on purpose. Tolkien wrote to his publisher in 1951 that he'd been "grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own," and that he wanted to make a body of legend he could dedicate "to England; to my country." He got a global fandom. My boys are part of it. They share Tolkien with whoever else loves Tolkien, which is not the same thing as sharing it with their cohort--my boys spent a year delving into those books, watching every YouTube Lore channel they could find--but they had no interest in the movies that their friends watch, and their friends don't care who Iarwain Ben-adar is--that's Tom Bombadil, Oldest and Fatherless--but my boys will talk your ear off about him.

L. Ron Hubbard started a religion, and it launched an organization to perpetuate it. Asimov wrote Foundation and got a book, a very good one, and no institution.

The Undesigned Functions

Every one of those machines handed out a common vocabulary anyway, as exhaust. That's what I mean by a reference layer. You say one word and the person across from you understands, and neither of you had to agree on anything first.

The exams gave an empire the size of a continent officials who shared a common literary culture. Nobody had to be persuaded. The canon was the price of entry. The Apollo and the scripture in Shakespeare weren't chosen by his audience either. They came from church, which was compulsory in Elizabethan England, and from grammar school, where the old trivium--grammar, logic, rhetoric--was taught in Latin.

Did the groundlings on the reeking floor get every reference? I don't know, and I doubt it. The ones with a grammar school education would have caught the Ovid, and the ones without probably caught the dirty joke sitting next to it. Shakespeare seems to have written for both. That's its own point about a common substrate. It doesn't have to be universal. It has to be wide enough that a writer can assume it, and lose a few people without losing the room.

It doesn't always come out gentle. Manifest Destiny, the push west, the colonization of the globe by Christian Europeans--those were doctrines, pushed by states and churches. As far as I'm aware no individual twirling their mustache thought up Manifest Destiny. It manifested. It emerged. But once it had, institutions carried it, and it was imposed on the colonizers as well as the people colonized, and it cost a great deal, mostly to people who hadn't signed up.

Look at what those machines had in common. Three networks, so there was nothing else on. A church you were required to attend. An exam you had to pass to get the job. Scarcity in one case, compulsion in the others.

Common culture at scale has always been a byproduct of a machine built for something else. It showed up whenever the machine squeezed everybody through the same opening. Which brings me to the machine we have now, which squeezes nobody through anything.

The Allocator

Five radio stations in a city. Two newspapers, one from each side of the divide, shilling their editorials. The selection at the central library (try finding certain books in 1939 Berlin). When there's room for only a few things, everybody ends up with the same few things. You didn't choose to share a culture with the kid down the street. You both took what was on.

I wrote about curation in The Shaping of Knowledge and said it was often good, then moved on. I didn't ask what it was quietly holding up. This is that.

A feed doesn't have that problem. There's room for everything, so the only question is what to show you, and the answer is whatever keeps you, specifically, watching. Whether you and the stranger sitting across from you saw the same thing last night isn't part of the question, so nobody maintains it. Nobody set out to break it. It just isn't anyone's job.

The numbers are what you'd expect. In May 2026, streaming was 48.6 percent of American TV time, cable was 20.4 and broadcast 19.2. YouTube alone was 13.8. As for how much of that is served to you instead of chosen by you, the only figure I could find is YouTube's own claim, from 2018, that about 70 percent of watch time comes from its recommendations. That's eight years old and it comes from the company. I'd like a better number and I couldn't find one.

What Survives

Here's the thing that still beats the Beatles. Super Bowl LX drew 125.6 million viewers and a household share of 80. The Beatles on Sullivan had a share of 60. Live sport is a broadcast event, and it's still an aperture. What survived is the thing that still has a door.

There are other carriers. Minecraft gives kids a shared vocabulary, but by platform, and a platform isn't a canon. Memes travel, and they're dead in days. Every so often something breaks through. I'd call that an event (kids aren't saying "SIX-SEVEN" now...). Nothing I can find gives a kid the equivalent of everyone knowing Ares.

One more thing, and I'll keep it short. Ares belongs to nobody. Tony Stark belongs to Disney. The reference layer went from unowned to licensed, which is a fence going up one layer down, the same move I wrote about in The Third Enclosure. I have opinions about copyright and this isn't the post for them.

What Forty Years Builds

I don't know what my kids' culture looks like when they're my age. I could guess that cohesion moves from shared content to shared format, or to shared affinity group, and I could tell you it might or might not be enough to hold a country together. That's a guess. I'd be making it up.

I don't know what my boys' version of Ares is going to be. Judging by the rate of change in my lifetime it's going to be vastly different from anything I can currently wrap my head around.

But I've spent a good while now poking around inside language models, and one result keeps pulling me back. Models trained on different data, in different languages, seem to give the same idea the same shape (by shape I literally mean a geometric structure, which I wrote about in The Shape of Thought). If that holds (that's a big if!) then there may be a layer underneath all the feeds that most of us share without knowing it, and something that can translate across it.

Ares is a pointer. We all had to carry the same ones because there was no way to hand each other the thing pointed at. A layer that could resolve a pointer for someone who'd never seen it wouldn't be a canon, but it might make sharing the pointers unnecessary. It wouldn't make a kid in Ottawa and a kid in Osaka both know who Tony Stark is. It might make it easier for them to explain to each other why they don't. I'm not sure that's enough to hold a country together...perhaps it's a sign that the lack of a common culture means the nation state as we know it is dissolving...a post for another time, I suppose.

All in all, I'm a little surprised to find I'm hopeful anyway. Among all this Large Language Model doom and gloom there's a pure structure that I believe is underneath it all, a common substrate shared by all things that learn in the particular way that human brains learn.

James is a security engineer whose sons spent 3 hours talking with him about Tom Bombadil's mushroom cartel. He publishes at waypoint.henrynet.ca.