culture doesn’t trickle down. it compresses.
Why cultural influence isn’t top-down or bottom-up—it’s a collision in the middle.
If you’ve ever watched a 17-year-old underground artist go viral on TikTok, only to end up in a high-fashion campaign six months later, you’ve already witnessed it: culture doesn’t trickle down, and it doesn’t really bubble up either. It compresses.
Let’s unpack that.
culture = tension, not flow
Forget the clean arrows of top-down and bottom-up diffusion. That model might’ve made sense when we had clear lines between “high” and “low” culture. But today, those boundaries are blurry at best, and performative at worst. Culture isn’t a stream—it’s a pressure point. A compression zone.
On one side, you have the underground: raw expression, urgency, experimentation. On the other, elite institutions that scale and aestheticize: museums, luxury brands, creative teams. And in the middle? A battlefield. A remix lab. A negotiation table. That’s where culture is really made.
Andy Davis calls it out in Promotional Cultures: branding and marketing don’t just reflect culture. They generate it. Think of it less like a mirror, more like a filter that warps the original signal (Davis, 2013).
the compression zone: how it works
What actually happens in this in-between space?
The underground brings the soul—emotion, urgency, risk.
The elite brings infrastructure—reach, design, packaging.
Brands translate—turning art into product, rebellion into marketing, sound into lifestyle.
This three-way tension is where we get the streetwear drop in a MoMA exhibit. The pop-up on Rodeo Drive with graffiti on the walls. The rapper dressed like a skater, performing in front of billionaire tech execs.
It’s not “culture meets commerce.” It’s collision. And the aftermath is influence.
why everyone is copying everyone
You’ve probably seen it: athletes want to be rappers, rappers want to be athletes, CEOs want to dress like skaters. Compression explains that too.
Everyone is chasing the symbolic capital they don’t have. Status isn’t what it used to be—it’s now coded in aesthetics, not assets. In The Sociological Quarterly, Gartman argues that post-Fordist culture is no longer about class but about style, mood, and identity performance (Gartman, 1998).
Compression collapses these archetypes into each other. We live in remix mode. Everyone’s trying on everyone else’s costume.
you can’t curate compression
A warning to brands: you can’t “curate” culture from a distance. By the time you’ve labeled it, it’s already moved on. As Holt says, iconic brands don’t chase trends—they make ideology with people who are living it (Holt, 2004).
This is why Andjelic criticizes the churn of brands constantly playing catch-up, scrambling to stay “on trend” instead of being present in the process (Andjelic, 2024).
Compression is messy. You have to be in it, not above it.
real-time culture > trend reports
The most culturally fluent people right now aren’t sitting on panels. They’re behind cameras, in Discords, at pop-ups, or literally in their bedrooms editing reels.
Streetwear and street art thrive because they’re immediate, emotionally intelligent, and real. They don’t wait for validation. They just do. As Meamber and Joy put it, these forms flip traditional influence on its head (Meamber & Joy, 2022).
This is why the smartest brands today don’t commission “insights.” They co-create. With dancers. With meme creators. With kids who’ve never heard of a “brief.”
references
Davis, A. (2013). Promotional Cultures: The Rise and Spread of Advertising, Public Relations, Marketing and Branding. Google Books
Holt, D., & Cameron, D. (2010). Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands. Google Books
Carlotto, F. (2024). Luxury Brand and Art Collaborations: Postmodern Consumer Culture. Google Books
Shi, C., Warnaby, G., & Quinn, L. (2021). Territorialising Brand Experience and Consumption: Pop-up Retailing. Journal of Consumer Culture. PDF
Gartman, D. (1998). Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Post-Fordism?. The Sociological Quarterly. PDF
Holt, D. (2004). How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Google Books
Andjelic, A. (2024). Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture. Google Books
Meamber, L.A., & Joy, A. (2022). Wearing the Writing on the Wall: Streetwear and Street Art. De Gruyter. PDF
Enjoyed this framing of contemporary cultural processes. Compression as a dynamic feels much more accurate than the old top-down/bottom-up binaries. It reminds me of postmodern bricolage, but hyper-accelerated and commodified. Where bricolage once implied resistance or subcultural play, compression feels speculative, market-aware, and platform-driven. It’s Warhol meets TikTok: aesthetic traction over authorship.
There’s also a sonic quality to this idea—overlapping frequencies of underground signal, brand interference, and affective noise. A notion of compression resists curation in the same way sound resists grounding—it’s messy, lived, negotiated in real-time. Perhaps it's also indicative of or schizophrenic experience mediated subjects.