How the US lost its stronghold on global culture and the new geographies of soft power

Popular culture shapes attraction, attraction shapes reputation, reputation shapes influence, and therein lies soft power – or so the theory goes. For most of the twentieth century, the US dominated this space, understanding well that attraction opens the way before any trade delegation or diplomatic effort. Through widespread distribution networks and a deep concentration of talent and capital, US media houses exported billions of dollars' worth of 'cultural products': Hollywood, sitcoms, blue jeans, rock 'n' roll, the many portrayals of 'the American dream'. Their influence was pervasive, capitalism's advance guard, in the eyes of anyone who subscribes to the theory of cultural imperialism. But popular culture, and the rise of streaming, have started to reveal a different temperature - a retreat from globalisation that global leaders and corporates have also been echoing.   

Streaming didn't just increase the flow of content; it revealed preference. Algorithms let people admit, for the first time, that they'd rather watch or listen to something that feels more like home. By one tally of streaming activity across dozens of countries, local artists are now topping their own charts in their own languages far more often than a decade ago. Netflix learned this lesson the expensive way: a string of costly, deliberately borderless blockbusters that failed to travel, causing streamers to rewrite the rules. A show now needs to work at home first, and only then does it earn a passport. This democratisation has given way to a genuine contest for cultural influence, with new power centres emerging from the East and Global South.  

Hard power and soft power tend to rise together. Second only to America in the size of its NATO army, Turkey now also ranks among the world's three largest television exporters. Its dramas reach close to a billion viewers across 170 countries and bring in over $1 billion a year, but the bigger prize is what they've done for the country's image and its tourist numbers. Ankara now offers producers subsidies of up to $100,000 an episode for storylines that showcase Turkish heritage. Similarly, it has been hard to escape the massive rise of South Korean TV shows, films, music and art in recent years. And this is no accident - South Korea ran the same playbook in the 90s, redirecting crisis-era state investment away from its military and into the fledgling entertainment industry that would become K-pop.  

But what makes these products so appealing? Where American pop culture exported the values and norms of individualism, capitalism and globalisation, Turkish dramas, for example, export narratives built around community and hard-won love, where tradition and modernity walk hand in hand. A value system traditional enough to feel authentic, but modern enough to travel. From a corporate communications perspective it's the same fine line corporate diplomacy has to walk to build a reputation that holds globally and still resonates locally.  

Popular culture is seemingly innocent but look closely and it reveals the cultural temperature of the global population, and the economic and political forces moving beneath it. As fragmentation accelerates, the old culture clubs of shared ideas and references that once gave strangers an instant shorthand, the lazy intimacy of already knowing what someone else had read or watched are vanishing, replaced by algorithms sorting people into rooms of one, with only one exception: sport. The World Cup remains one of the last rooms left where the whole world shows up. What the US can no longer take for granted is that it now has to host a room guaranteed to have the whole world in it, even if only for a month…