Your Bubble Is Not the Culture
I posted this awhile ago. But since we take tweets as reality I think this article should be posted again because we all need a reminder.
I don’t have anything against cultural and ideological bubbles. My family is a bubble. We have a host of in-jokes that no one else will get, and a bunch of tastes that many others do not share. We regularly eat a dish called “tuna quiche,” which brings us joy even as it causes others to break for the nearest exit. This dynamic holds true on a larger scale, from religious communities to pop-culture fandoms: Most bubbles are a wonderful way to unite people through shared experience. They only become toxic when their members start believing in toxic things and then attempt to impose them on others—sort of like if my family got really into cyanide quiche and started bringing it to synagogue and insisting everyone try it. In the real world, this looks like conspiratorial cultures, from QAnon to societal anti-Semitism to 2020-election truthers. Thankfully, most bubbles are not like this.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t have negative impacts. Some bubbles don’t literally poison the minds or bodies of adherents, but they do disconnect individuals from the broader community and make it harder for them to relate to the people around them, which has negative consequences for society at large.
Lately, something like this has been happening in our cultural discourse.
https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61e06b2c55e52500217add01/your-bubble-is-not-the-culture-lin-manuel-miranda-harry-potter/
