How to Make Culture Interesting Again

Nobody set out to make the world boring. There’s no villain to blame. Just a series of rational decisions that, taken together, produced a world that more and more looks and sounds and tastes the same everywhere you go.

We track this pattern closely at Example. In 2025, Sydney saw dozens of near-identical bistros and Italian-inflected restaurants open within walking distance of each other. Operators who believed they had struck gold with an original concept discovered that their “original concept” was trending simultaneously across three continents. The algorithm had done its work.

The Machine That Makes Everything the Same

Social media’s most damaging contribution to culture isn’t disinformation or political polarisation. It’s the engine of aesthetic convergence it created, where a user can absorb and replicate the style and trends of another in real time, driven by engagement metrics that structurally reward copying.

The result is visible everywhere. Songs are shortermaverage track length dropped from 4:12 in 2000 to 2:50 in 2023. Fashion microtrends that once took 18 months to cycle now cycle in six to eight weeks. Hollywood sequel and franchise films grew from 27% of box office in 2010 to 61% in 2023.

And in hospitality and brand marketing, the same forces have produced a sea of activations, venues and campaigns that would be indistinguishable from each other if you changed the colour.

The Friction Advantage

De-risking everything has made brands more boring and interchangeable. The things that make a brand, a place, or a piece of work genuinely interesting, roughness, locality, a commitment to a specific point of view that not everyone shares are the same things the algorithm penalises.

At Example, we call this the Friction Advantage. The deliberate choice to be specific when everything rewards being general. Local when everything rewards being global. Uncomfortable when everything is designed to remove discomfort.

This is not nostalgia. It’s a structural decision: to build brands that stand for something precise enough that some people won’t get it, instead of building brands designed to offend no one and remembered by no one.

What This Looks Like in Practice

In hospitality, the antidote to monoculture is the cultural narrative that places a venue in a specific time, place and community, rather than a category. Not “Italian restaurant” but the cultural lens that makes this specific Italian restaurant the only one of its kind.

At Bar Allora in Sydney, that lens was post-war Milanese optimism. At El Vista, it was 1960s Acapulco glamour. These weren’t aesthetic choices overlaid on an otherwise generic concept. They were the concept, every decision made from music to uniforms to service choreography was governed by a specific cultural intelligence that made copying impossible.

In a market saturated with sameness, specificity is scarcity. And scarcity, in the attention economy, is the only form of genuine value.