American Power is (mostly) Cultural

It has been a wild week for US international relations. JD Vance made news for widely criticizing Europe’s approach to speech, defense, and basically everything else. Trump called Putin, planned a summit together, and put plans in motion to remove the US from involvement in Ukraine. Elon Musk has been taking a cleaver to the Federal workforce, issuing more threats over the weekend to remaining employees.

But there was another conflict taking place between the US and our European allies, this time in the UK. And there were likely more eyeballs on this non-political fight than in all of the above stories combined. And that was Keith Lee’s trip to London:

Keith Lee’s review videos in the last week from London restaurants; already totaling over 41 million views

Keith Lee is one of, if not the most popular food content reviewer online today. He often travels to new places to review recommended local delights, famously reviewing the food scene in cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas, Houston, and so on. While racking up hundreds of millions of views for local businesses, his honest reviews and humble approach can often make or break a single business’ future, something Lee frequently talks about and takes seriously as a content creator.

And his reviews in London over the last week took this dynamic overseas, where one of the dishes, a jacket potato with tuna (and beans?), sparked a flood of secondary reactions, recipe videos, criticism and compliments from both sides of the Atlantic. Despite all the very real shifting tides of our official bureaucratic relationships, it’s a testament to the power of both the internet & the American consumer for a food reviewer to steal the scene.

With the rise of the internet, the cultural shift from America to the rest of the world has only accelerated. 66% of Spotify’s global top 50 artists were American, despite the US making up only about 26% of its overall traffic. The largest tech company platforms across Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon, etc are all of course American companies. And while we used to export culture through TV shows and radio programs, the internet age has removed red-cup laden teen movies & spaghetti westerns from those exports and instead slotted in an unvarnished view into the American mind.

If we take a look at some of the largest social movements of the last twenty years, to Occupy Wall Street and a focus on economic inequality, to #MeToo and the fight on normalized sexual harassment, to BLM and a desire to root out racial inequality, the left wing social movements that have predominated online have — in faster and faster succession — spread to the far corners of the globe. Occupy Wall Street protests in SE Asia, #MeToo protests in the Balkans, & BLM clashes in South Africa are just a few examples of how American movements start copycats abroad.

The same dynamic that followed discrete social movements is now exploding online with the ascendancy of right wing parties finding electoral success around the world in 2024, a year with over 74 national elections and over 1.6B ballots cast around the world. While there has always been a conservative media verse online, it has often kept itself fairly separate from the mainstream social media ecosystem and acted as a reaction rather than a catalyst to wider digital-first social movements.

But that tide is definitely changing. Much has been written about Elon Musk’s takeover and algorithmic changes to Twitter/X, but it’s a wider sign of a changing tide when the arguably three most powerful men in the United States — Trump, Vance, and Musk — feel compelled to turn to digital platforms as their first & foremost method of communication. With the power of hindsight, watching the development of the left wing social movements online, the trio are playing a similar song in different tunes to the masses versus the bureaucratic leadership of other nations.

This move has undoubtedly created a wider global adoption of American social thought online, just as before. But this time the ideological trends decamping abroad are anti-immigration, free speech law, distrust in mainstream media, and general national isolationism. Yes, these dynamics have been percolating for years, but consider that Trump has only been in office for about a month. The speed at which these ideas have spread around the world has been truly mind bending.

For every Keith Lee and Joe Rogan, there’s thousands of far less popular creators pumping out the background noise of cultural content pushing or pulling these ideas closer or further away from the ideological center — of both attention and political axis. Even if Donald Trump decided tomorrow to arm Ukraine to the teeth and invade Russian territory, it would take the cultural milieu far longer to follow, if it ever did.

In an age where digital currents increasingly shape global narratives, we must recognize that politicians often amplify, rather than initiate, the social movements born online. The choices we make as consumers, creators, and citizens — our reactions to the ever-evolving online landscape — will ultimately define the trajectory of our culture and, more and more, the world’s. We are not merely passive recipients of these changes; we are its architects.