The Apotheosis of American Cultural Hegemony

It bothers me more than it should when I hear Irish people, or anyone outside of North America, call a Mega Drive a Sega Genesis. It’s quite common among people younger than me; people who didn’t grow up with the machine itself. They know about it from the internet, from the video game history that gets talked about and passed down online, and that is generally the American history of video games. The great video game crash, the dominance consoles over home computers and the dominance of the “Super Nintendo”¹ among consoles—all things that did not really happen here. There were only two countries where the Mega Drive was called a Genesis but one of those two countries is the United States of America which is, of course, the only country that matters.

This is a pretty trivial aspect of the general cultural imperialism of the U.S.A. and this is nothing new. The U.S. is a huge country, the largest economy in the world and has spent the last hundred years dominating the media and cultural output of the rest of the world. It drowns out all other voices and perspectives, especially in a small English-speaking, and up until recently, very poor country like Ireland.

And as the internet allows us to be more connected and allow other voices to get out this it also accelerates this. Now the world is not only watching the same Holywood movies but following the same big accounts on U.S.-based and -designed social media networks, having the same conversations about the big American political news. Which, to be clear, there is good reason to do². America is, again, the biggest economy and most powerful country in the world. What it does impacts all of us but also what its tech companies do shape the information we see and the ways in which we see it.

How we access information and what information is prioritised is controlled largely by companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms, policies and moderation are responsible for genocide. I perhaps cannot as easily level such a claim against Google yet but its search, the most common tool for accessing information in the world, has gotten worse and worse at doing that, prioritising profit, advertising and keeping you enclosed within a Google ecosystem. And now, of course, funnelling you away from links to other sites entirely, links to other resources and perspectives, and towards their chatbot output.

Large language models are swallowing so much of the internet right now and lot of people already swear by them, turning to them for questions, for help with writing, for ideas for when they’re stuck, for therapy and for companionship. There is a lot to be worried about with this but one thing I have been thinking about is how these chatbots—whether Google’s or Open A.I.’s or whoever’s—is that they are probably all going to call a Mega Drive a Genesis unless specifically prompted against it.

These models are trained using the internet as a corpus, an internet already dominated by American perspectives. They are made and shaped by American tech companies who are increasingly cosying up to an ever-more chauvinist U.S. state which is itself embracing “A.I.” tools as much as it can.

There is reason to think that the current bubble is unsustainable (and I do hope it bursts), but if these tools become normalised as a primary way of attaining answers, of seeking information and perspectives, I think it will have a horrifying flattening effect and accelerate the general Americanisation of the world beyond what is already happening.

And everything I said above is assuming no outright maliciousness. Twitter has repeatedly shown us that the people who make these chatbots can deliberately steer them to avow certain perspectives, from promoting South African white genocide myths to conspiracy theories about Jews. There is nothing really stopping Google from, say, deliberately trying to seed racist, anti-vaccine or anti-transgender propaganda into its chatbot and search summaries if it thinks that might get it points with the current regime which is already demanding idealogical purity from such systems, in effect ordering the limitation of acceptable perspectives.