Digital Deep Culture

One day we will drive home for the last time

Years ago I sat next to my wife on the N7 out of Dublin, glowering behind the wheel at a huge traffic jam. I didn't know it at the time, but I bore witness to an act of Deep Culture that night 

I'm capitalising it because I think Deep Culture is part of a nation's soul. It's what's left after you scour everything else away, resisting every excavation, too sturdy and too deep-rooted to be shifted by the casual Netflix-ization of our free time. This traffic jam, a causeway of angry red stretching into asphalt infinity, was one such example.

I'm not speaking about the traffic jam itself; everyone has those. I'm speaking about why everyone was on the road out of Dublin at exactly the same time on a Friday evening: They were leaving the city, some with kids in tow, to see their parents in the country.

It should have been unremarkable, and to my wife it was, but I have a badly-kept secret: I'm actually British. A blow-in, thrown up on these shores, accepted but an Irishman by citizenship only. I'll never really be Irish like my children are and there's no bitterness about that, it's just the way it is.

That's why I noticed the Friday night exodus, because back where my accent fits, even in friendly Yorkshire, we don't take the weekly pilgrimage to see our parents on the farm, or wherever. We're an atomised bunch, seventy million Dick Wittingtons buggering off to the big city to make our fortunes, visiting the folks at Christmas to see how the dog’s getting on. 

The Irish aren't like that, and this attachment to the family, the old parish and its GAA club is very much to their credit.

It's not the only example of Deep Culture. Ireland has Gaelic sports (hurling being the most amazing, and difficult), the English will keep their distance out of ‘negative politeness’, (and I apologise if you walk into me), the Norwegians have ‘hygge’ and so-on. Every country is jammed full of stuff like this, so engrained that it's only obvious to outsiders. “Why has this tiny hamlet got its own sports stand with immaculate grounds?” And so-forth…

Deep Culture, played at a million miles per hour.

We spend a lot of time decrying the dilution of our unique regional cultures by the blandness of the online world, or the featureless Americanisation of streaming TV. My better half audibly sighs now when a US accent oils its way out of the telly box, and that's no slight to my friends across the pond: It just makes it more likely that a program has passed through the kind of marketing machine that committee-writes to a profitable but dull global average.

But the Deep Culture remains, often because it was born in blood. Gaelic sports were brutally repressed in Ireland by the occupying English, so now they're a cultural nervous system of an entire nation. Likewise, rigid English politeness is the product of a centuries-long class structure that was only recently dismantled. And the Norwegians have brutal winters. There's madness behind the method.

So where does this leave the Pocket Demon? Surely something as powerful as the smartphone must have a distorting, averaging effect on culture everywhere, as everyone nods along to the dopamine demon. 

Maybe, maybe not. As I squint across the garden in a scorching Irish summer, the Galtee Mountains look at me through an eternity of dead air. The online world seems a bit silly and distant. And yet…

When George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis policeman in 2020, the riots, demonstrations and bizarre knee-taking rituals weren't limited to America but sprinted around the developed world. I recall a Black Lives Matter protest in Dublin which simply made no sense at all in a country without any of America's history of racial tension or authoritative policing… well, not for the past century anyway. There was definitely some stuff that happened before then. Moving on.

So perhaps this is evidence that the online world does have a deep culture after all? I'm not convinced: The worldwide mania around the Black Lives Matter protests felt like a weird consequence of the Covid lockdowns, which restricted everyday life so much that the online mirror-world swelled to devour everything.

This way to Wonderland, please. 

It was isolated, weird and manic, a product of too much free time, too little to do and unlikely to be repeated, at least unless AI makes everyone unemployed screen-addicts in the next few years. Never say never.

There are echoes of wonderland still with us. The swipe-right metaculture of an entire generation raised to screen their romance through a catalogue instead of through the misty bottom of a Jägerbomb glass. The stupid meme with the cat and the woman (any of them). The vocab that ur 2 old 2 get UwU. The word ‘doggo’. FFS, it's all so banal.

What it isn’t is culture.

But it is an accelerant. We are too human, too messy too physical and too bloody soaked by rain or sweat to get too connected to the online world. It's a hall of mirrors distraction that you leave, and what you leave it for is real people. Deep Culture wins again!

You can’t always get what you want. (Photo mine.)

But what if your physical world was… changed?

Deep Culture holds us with giant calloused hands, and its feet are lost under the soil. It's rooted, sturdy and unassailable, but immovable.

Pull a man out of the Burren, dump him in New York and a little  of the ancient soil sticks to him, but it doesn’t stay forever. Little by little he becomes lost to the urban vortex, his history annihilated by the ever-swirling present.

We don't need the Pocket Demon or online wonderland or even AI to destroy our local cultures, because we invented the perfect tool for it generations ago.

The megacity.

The story of the last century has been one of urbanisation. As late as 1960, fully two thirds of the world's population lived in rural areas and only a third in urban ones. Today those proportions are reversed, and even now the mid-sized cities feel a terrible pull as they are drained, vampirically, by the biggest. The economic and social logic of agglomeration is irrefutable and the bargain is set: We will all become richer, but only if we give ourselves to Mother Metropolis.

You gave me your heart, now I'm here for your soul!

So hold on tight to your local ways and parish promises. Remember the old sports grounds and the sea spray or the smell of cut silage. Your parents, and their dog, will grow older each time you see them. Your habits will change and your memories will fog but this is the bargain you made.

A billion Dick Whittingtons on the move.

The tree of Deep Culture, starved, starts to die. You're feeding another beast now.

Unless, with the fading of the Friday light and your work shift concluded, you step into your car, travel bags packed, and drive to somewhere distant and familiar at once.

Hit the road, pilgrim!