The edges did not get smaller

Scroll any feed for ten minutes and it is easy to believe the whole world has started liking the same things. The same filters on the same faces, the same sound under a thousand clips, the same pale café interiors from Riyadh to Lisbon. It can feel as though taste is collapsing into one.

I understand the worry. But it mistakes the surface for what people actually spend their days on.

Ask the people around you what they really care about and the answers scatter at once. One watches amateur falconry filmed in the desert. One listens almost only to old Sudanese recordings. One spends weekends rebuilding bicycles from the eighties. One knows more about fountain pens than anyone should. None of these is a hit. Each is somebody's main thing.

That is the pattern almost everywhere. People take in more culture than at any point in history, and very little of it reaches everyone. In most fields the largest group is not the leader at all. It is the long scatter of everything else, added together.

The pull toward sameness is real. Feeds reward whatever is already working, and copying costs almost nothing, so the top of every screen looks like the top of every other screen.

But sameness at the top of a screen is not sameness in people. Someone who grew up before feeds remembers a time when a whole country watched the same programme on the same night. That was a narrower world than this one, not a richer one.

The middle got louder. The edges did not get smaller.