After Monoculture: Mini-Mainstreams, K-Wave, Brainrot, and the Search for Belonging

Monoculture died the moment algorithmic feeds stopped broadcasting one big story to everyone and started handing each of us a private, personalized stream. Because of that loss, we’re yearning for the mainstream more than ever. We don’t live in broadcast monoculture anymore—but the hunger for a shared pulse hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just reorganized itself.

Look at the K-wave: synchronized releases, choreography challenges, lightsticks glowing in stadiums from Seoul to São Paulo. Inside that world, the experience is strangely unified. It’s a mini-mainstream—not the entire planet, but a massive global cohort living the same story in the same rhythm. Then look at the other end of the spectrum: brainrot, meme “slop,” slang that flips every week. It’s easy to dismiss, but underneath the noise is a desire to catch any wave that offers a moment of connection—I’m here with you, now. In a year when “Song of the Summer” arguments feel quaint, people chase micro-rituals for a quick hit of togetherness.

This essay is long on purpose. It’s a map for culture teams, creators, and brand leaders who need to operate in this reality without losing their minds—or their audience’s. We’ll trace what actually ended (and what didn’t), why platforms engineered the new terrain, how K-pop built a portable mainstream, why brainrot feels like a relief valve, and how to build a modern content strategy that balances presence and spectacle. We’ll talk automation, AI editing, analytics, social media management, scheduling—but not as a sales pitch. As infrastructure that lets the human part of your work breathe.

What Died, What Didn’t

If you grew up with radio countdowns, network TV slots, and Friday album drops, you remember the shape of monoculture. It wasn’t just that we liked the same things—it’s that we encountered them together. Appointment viewing and broadcast distribution created a shared calendar. Even arguing about the one true song of the summer was a social ritual.

The streaming/social flip changed the plumbing. Personalization replaced broadcast. Your feed learned you; mine learned me. We still collide around big events—sports finals, record tours, the occasional blockbuster—but consensus is now an outcome, not a default. That’s why think-pieces keep declaring “the song of the summer is dead.” The better phrasing is: the baseline for shared experience is lower; peaks still happen. When they do, they feel momentous precisely because they’re rarer. (Wired and TIME both wrote versions of this argument in 2025 from different angles—mourning vs. celebration.)

This has costs and benefits. The cost: thinner common ground. The benefit: range. Niche scenes now have the tools to thrive globally; catalog listening gets endless second lives; regional styles travel further. It’s not that monoculture “died” and we’re left with rubble. It’s that culture redistributed itself into thousands of vibrant side streets—and we’re learning how to navigate by neighborhood rather than highway.

The Machine That Fragmented Us (And Why That’s Not Purely Bad)

Two technical choices reshaped everything:

1) Streaming as the dominant mode of listening and watching.
On-demand libraries made preference king. Recommendation systems learned what you finish, skip, and repeat. Industry trackers like Luminate and IFPI frame the 2025 landscape as overwhelmingly streaming-led, with genre fluidity, catalog resilience, and region-to-region cross-pollination. Personal taste wins; consensus recedes.

2) Social feeds tuned to “relevance,” not reach.
Platforms trained themselves to show what your network is likely to engage with. Pew’s research on social/news consumption underlines that feeds are now a core discovery layer, especially for younger audiences. That shift doesn’t lock us into sealed bubbles—serious work on Facebook’s News Feed found cross-cutting exposure still exists—but it does thin out the public square. Your daily diet is heavy on your scene; lighter on the nation’s.

Is this bad? It’s… different. The same machinery that reduces mass consensus also carries more worlds to more people. Fragmentation is a tax on shared rituals, but a stimulus for creative variety. If you design for it, you don’t lose reach—you change how you earn it.

K-Wave as Mini-Mainstream

K-pop is the clearest example of a subculture behaving like a mainstream: coherent, synchronized, global. Inside the cohort, it feels like the center of the world. That’s not delusion; it’s design.

Cadence. K-pop doesn’t “drop content”; it runs seasons—comeback schedules, concept photos, choreography teasers, variety segments. Fans know the calendar and tune their lives around it. It’s TV logic applied to music: create anticipation with pre-release beats, then keep warmth with post-release content and behind-the-scenes.

Artifacts. Mascots, lightsticks, emojis, colorways, photocard lore—these are portable identity tokens. They make the invisible social layer visible. Hold a lightstick in Mexico City or Osaka and you’re instantly inside the same ritual.

Rituals. Hashtag storms, stream parties, synchronized chants, birthday projects, charity drives—participation is the point. The community isn’t an audience; it’s a co-author.

Format mastery. Fancams, dance practices, choreography mirrored for learning—K-pop turns documentation into a form of fan service. The more angles you publish, the more ways fans can enter the world and add to it.

The lesson for creators and brands isn’t “be K-pop.” It’s architect a world: a cadence people can count on, artifacts they can carry, rituals they can perform, and enough POV that the world feels worth inhabiting. That’s how you achieve a shared pulse inside a fragmented landscape.

Brainrot, Slang Churn, and Why “Slop” Still Feels Good

There’s the other end of the spectrum: what people call brainrot. Meme formats that proliferate, slang that flips so quickly you can’t keep up, AI-ish clips that are obviously fake and somehow still fun. It’s tempting to write it off as cultural decay. Resist that instinct. Something useful is hiding in the mess.

Fast rituals. A meme is a ritual you can perform in 15–30 seconds. Repeat the phrase, reference the template, duet the sound—suddenly we’re doing something together. The content quality matters less than the act of co-participation.

FOMO relief. In a summer with no single tentpole, micro-rituals create a low barrier to “I’m in.” Even silly trends function as social glue. Business coverage this year called it “brain rot summer”—a chaotic, niche-heavy season without one clear anthem—and the label stuck because it matches the vibe: fragmented but buzzing.

Creative play. Constraints are a gift. A dumb audio. A simple visual prompt. The joy is in the riff, not the origin. That’s why half of TikTok feels like improv theatre; the scene gets more interesting the more voices try it.

The mental health caveat. There’s a line between playful ritual and doomscrolling. Research has linked heavy negative-news consumption to worse mood; anyone who’s caught in a reel loop knows the feeling. The practical move for creators and brands isn’t to sanitize; it’s to pace. Offer connective beats, then offer oxygen—content with breath, texture, and meaning. (And yes, this is where longer-form, art-adjacent moments help people reset.)

What People Actually Want (And Why the Middle Is Collapsing)

We see it across categories: the beige middle is starving. Polite content with nothing to say used to work when distribution was scarce. Now that distribution is infinite, only expressiveness survives. Two poles dominate:

Expressive realism. The “friend energy” post: handheld, place-anchored, slightly chaotic, emotionally legible. “I’m here; this is happening.” No fake casual—actual presence. Social platforms are literally leaning into this with features that surface what your friends liked and where things happened.

Expressive artifice. The “art energy” moment: installs, theatrical lighting, flavorful design choices, a sense that “this set is a character.” Not pretending to be real—proudly staged. The internet is a stage, so build a set worth stepping on.

The middle—the “casual but corporate” and the “spectacle but soulless”—feels dishonest. Audiences scroll past it because it triggers nothing inside them: no intimacy, no wonder, no signal of “we’re together.”

Your Working Stack: Routine + Ritual

A modern brand system has two engines:

The Routine (living brand feed).
Short, frequent, real-footage posts that prove you exist in the world. Behind-the-scenes. Micro-how-tos. In-studio notes. The cadence matters more than the gloss. Design posts to survive reposts (message on frame), to earn saves (utility or narrative hooks), and to trigger friend-like momentum (content your clusters want to cosign).

The Ritual (artful spikes).
Time-boxed installs, pop-ups, collabs, capsule drops—moments that deserve to be filmed. Give them one photogenic anchor (shape/color/texture), a clear participation cue (“touch this, stamp that, write here”), tasteful signage, and an aftercare plan: UGC permissions and a “best of” reel shipped within 24 hours.

Routine amplifies ritual; ritual recharges routine. Together they create something audiences can live with—daily intimacy punctuated by rare, theatrical highs.

Instagram’s Friend Turn (And How to Use It)

Instagram’s recent moves—Reposts (with attribution + profile tab), a Reels Friends view (see what your friends liked), and Friend Map (opt-in content + place)—all emphasize who shared it, who liked it, and where it happened. That is the platform saying the quiet part: social proof and context are back up front.

Here’s how to work with that:

Design for repostability.
Make “borrowable” frames: 3-step fixes, templates, checklists, annotated stills. Embed core value in the video itself so it can travel without the caption. Keep the tone cosign-safe: helpful, human, non-cringe.

Trigger friend-tab momentum.
Post in cohort prime-times—the windows where your clusters are co-active. Run tandem drops with a creator or partner (20-minute offsets) to maximize overlap. If a post starts rolling, publish a quick follow-up to ride the same cluster wave.

Use Friend Map with care.
Location is a creative primitive when there’s something to anchor. Announce a pop-up with place, film it with people, and consider delaying posts for privacy. Reshare the best local UGC (with permission) so the map becomes a story, not just a pin.

These tactics don’t fight the algorithm; they collaborate with it. (Meta’s own feature pages describe the intent—connecting through friends and place—not just raw reach.)

The Creator/Brand Playbook (Deep Cut)

Below is the practical spine. Think of it as a content-ops layer that lets taste and voice lead.

Audience modeling.
Ditch generic “personas.” Map micro-cohorts: the Madrid design crowd that comments at 22:00; the sneaker-art school overlap in Seoul that shares on Sundays; the K-adjacent fashion cohort that saves lookbooks. You’ll find these by reading comments, geotags, and DMs—not just dashboards.

Format portfolio.
Carry 6–8 reliable templates at all times: “3 ways to ___,” “Before/After,” “What I got wrong,” “In the studio,” “One texture, three looks,” “Tools of the week,” “Ask me anything (but make it weird).” These are your scaffolds; the content stays human.

Repost magnets.
Reserve one weekly slot for a post specifically engineered to be borrowed—clean, useful, beautifully minimal. If it performs in Close Friends, ship it public.

Collab choreography.
For tandems, script the offset posts so they’re complementary: one timelapse, one reactions; one wide, one close; one “the build,” one “the reveal.” Include a light-touch mutual nod without making it a brand hardsell.

Ritual calendar.
Plot the year as beats, not just launches: mascot birthdays, studio open days, city-only drops, design-your-own nights. These give your routine meaning and your spikes rhythm.

Localization.
When place is part of the story, commit to it: film faces, landmarks, vernacular details. A map tag without texture is a pin with no plot.

Ops, not voice.
Automate trims, ratios, subtitles, exports, and scheduling. Keep captions, replies, and on-camera tone human. If your AI tool wants to write your voice for you, say no.

Measurement that matters.
Track reposts and saves (and who amplified you), overlap comments (“saw this via ___”), watch-through on the first three seconds, and local lift (foot traffic, RSVPs). Measure spike aftercare: UGC volume within 48 hours, permission rates, and time-to-recap.

K-Wave Lessons, Generalized (Without Cosplaying as a Boy Band)

You can borrow the architecture without wearing satin.

Stable rituals.
Pick two recurring anchors that fit your world: First-Sip Fridays (coffee brand), Bench Test Tuesdays (audio gear), Stitch Circle Sundays (fashion atelier). Rituals reduce planning overhead and teach your audience when to show up.

Portable artifacts.
What’s your “lightstick”? It could be a color block, a mascot sketch, a sound sting, a typeface quirk. It needs to be simple enough for fans to reproduce and distinctive enough to signify your world.

Cadence mastery.
Treat launches like comebacks: set pre-beats (concept, detail, behind-the-scenes), drop the thing, then keep warmth (Q&A, remix, fan reactions, making-of). Cadence is a form of care; it tells people you’re thinking about their attention.

Co-authorship.
Give edit rights—literally. Publish raw texture loops, alternate angles, or clean product shots under a “steal this” license for fans to remix. Feature the best work and credit loudly.

Global-local switch.
Translate captions, subtitling, and key frames fast; then add one local detail per market—landmarks, slang, a micro-collab with a neighborhood account. Shared ritual, local flavor.

Brainrot Without Burnout (A Practical Middle Path)

If you never touch trends, you risk aloofness. If you touch every trend, you become noise. The middle path:

Borrow the form, not the brain.
Adapt trend frames to your world—same rhythm, your content. If the format is “things I’d never do again,” do “things I’d never compromise in this craft.” It scratches the same itch but stays on-brand.

Soft meta.
Acknowledge the trend in the caption or the first second, then deliver a real tip, a texture close-up, or an unexpected cutaway. Respect the viewer’s time.

Set an exit date.
Decide up front when you’ll stop. Post one or two riffs, then walk away before fatigue sets in. Leave room for the next ritual.

Give oxygen.
Schedule slower, reflective pieces after trend bursts—studio ambience, longer copy posts, a “why we made this” monologue. The alternation is what keeps audiences healthy and loyal.

Measurement That Actually Moves Strategy

Dashboards are full of stats that don’t predict anything. These do:

Leading indicators.

• Reposts: count and who they came from (which cohorts).
• Saves: your long-tail predictor.
• Overlap comments: “saw this via Ana / via my coworker” is the friend-signal gold.
• Local lift: RSVPs, “how late are you open,” DM directions.

Diagnostics.

• High likes, low reposts → you’re likable but not cosignable. Add clarity or utility; embed value on-frame.
• Weak cluster pickup → your timing is off or overlap too thin. Retune posting windows; run a tandem.
• Map posts flop → no local texture. Film faces, landmarks, small rituals.
• Doom drift (negativity/fatigue comments) → post a slow piece, pause high-stimulus beats, and check reply tone.

Cadence math.

• Routine: small posts often (presence > polish).
• Ritual: deliberate spikes with a runway and a recap.
• Budget: put money behind the best “repost magnet” each week; measure incremental overlap, not just CPM.

The Psychology Layer (Why This Feels So Intense)

Two impulses are grinding:

Coherence hunger. We miss the feeling of one story everyone knows. That’s why K-wave feels so good inside its universe and why pop culture keeps trying to name a single “song of the summer.”

Personal resonance. We also want feeds that reflect us precisely. That’s the promise of personalization—and the reason your best friend might not see the clip that wrecked you yesterday.

Brainrot is a messy reconciliation. When consensus wanes, fast rituals provide cheap togetherness. Your job as a creator or brand isn’t to scold people out of it; it’s to offer better rituals—things that are fun and nourishing. Sometimes that’s a dumb, joyful riff. Sometimes that’s a beautiful set built for wonder. Both are forms of care.

The Brand Reality Check

Let’s be clear about what operations look like when you commit to this:

Team topology.
Small, cross-functional pods beat siloed departments. A pod = producer, editor (or AI-first editor), designer, and a community lead who actually replies like a human. Everyone touches both routine and ritual.

Governance without glue traps.
You need brand guardrails—the “no list” and the “why we exist” paragraph—but you can’t run every caption past legal at 2 a.m. Set escalation paths for high-risk posts and empower pods to ship routine content fast.

Creator partnerships as R&D.
Don’t just hire for one-off deliverables. Bring creators in early to test concepts as Close Friends drafts. Pay for thinking, not just posting.

Budget reframe.
Shift a chunk of spend from big single shots to spike infrastructure (set design, lighting, good audio) and ops automation (AI editing, versioning, scheduling). The goal: scale the right work, not the volume for its own sake.

Privacy and safety.
Get explicit about location sharing, minors, and consent. Delay map posts where appropriate. Treat UGC credit like a contract, not a favor.

The Role of AI (Do the Dishes, Not the Cooking)

AI is brilliant at the parts of content work that kill momentum: batch trims, subtitles, ratio exports, light stabilization, multilingual versions, scheduling to cohort windows, auto-foldering footage. Use it there. That’s social media management in the best sense—ops that free your taste.

Where AI shouldn’t lead: your voice, your community replies, your sense of place, your craft choices. And never use it to fake reality. If you’re staging, be proud and make it artful—don’t pretend a set is a confession.

Framed this way, AI is a force multiplier for content creation and brand strategy without turning you into a content mill. It makes the right work easier.

Where Rkive Stands

Rkive is our answer to this era’s needs. Not a buzzy feature set—infrastructure. We’re building for two truths:

1. The feed should feel alive—which means real footage, quick edits, multilingual versions, and scheduling that catches friend-signal waves without burning teams out.
2. The big moments should feel artful—which means you need a system that helps you prep, capture, and publish the recap while the feeling is still warm.

We’ll keep expanding in both directions: the unfiltered everyday and the expressive, theatrical spike—always on the side of meaning over slop.

Closing

Monoculture didn’t vanish so much as decentralize. The price is a thinner baseline of shared experiences. The payoff is a wider map—more worlds, more paths in. People still want the together feeling. That’s why K-wave rituals feel like home. That’s why brainrot rituals (even silly ones) are so sticky. It’s not that taste died; it’s that participation won a larger share of the pie.

If you’re a creator or a brand, you don’t need to resurrect the old mainstream. You need to host mini-mainstreams with care: a living feed, occasional art, coherent rituals, and enough operational excellence—automation, AI editing, analytics—to keep pace without losing your voice.

Automate the friction, not the feeling. Give people something they can cosign and somewhere they want to go. That’s how you build belonging in the age after monoculture.

Read our articles The Rise of the Ghost Viewer and Art & Friends: The New Era of Marketing to learn more about this cultural shift.

And check out Rkive AI for Editing to learn how you can leverage AI to produce organic content with your own footage.

Sources

• WIRED. “The Song of the Summer Is Dead.” August 2025. https://www.wired.com/story/the-song-of-the-summer-is-dead/
• TIME. “The ‘Song of the Summer’ Is Dead. Thank God for That.” May 2025. https://time.com/7287405/song-of-the-summer-is-dead-essay/
• Business Insider. “Welcome to brain rot summer.” August 2025. https://www.businessinsider.com/brain-rot-summer-coldplaygate-jet2holidays-monoculture-movies-songs-2025-8
• Luminate. “2025 Midyear Music Report.” 2025. https://luminatedata.com/reports/midyear-music-industry-report-2025
• IFPI. “Global Music Report 2025.” 2025. https://globalmusicreport.ifpi.org/
• Pew Research Center. “Social Media and News Fact Sheet.” September 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/
• Science (Bakshy, Messing, Adamic). “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook.” 2015. https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.aaa1160/suppl_file/bakshy-sm.revision.1.pdf

About the author

Alberto Luengo is the founder and CEO of Rkive AI. He writes about culture, technology, and the future of the creator economy.