The contradiction of ‘monoculture’: the word Americans now use to mourn Colbert’s finale and describe how AI is damaging creative output

When “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” aired its final episode on May 21, 2026, critics lamented more than the end of a television program. It was a nightly ritual that millions of Americans participated in, with Bloomberg media reporter Lucas Shaw describing its cancellation as one more sign of “the decline of monoculture.” Eulogies for “the monoculture” have appeared elsewhere. In fall 2025, Buzz Feed announced “the death of celebrity monoculture.” The Ringer asked whether summer 2025 was the “summer without monoculture.” In all of these uses, the word describes a vanished era of shared cultural experience, a time when most people watched, listened to and talked about the same things. But “monoculture” gets pulled in a different direction, too. Other writers, like cultural critic Kyle Chayka, have used it to describe the opposite problem: a sense that the culture today is becoming too uniform, too flattened, too much the same everywhere you look. When the same word is used as a lens to view the world in different ways, something else is usually going on. As a marketing professor who studies culture and consumer behavior, I find the current usage of “monoculture” telling. The word comes from agriculture, and tracing its journey from the farm to the algorithm reveals quite a bit about a tension many people are feeling right now: a craving for connection and community that coincides with a longing to stand out as unique. From the farm to the feed “Monoculture” began as an agricultural term in the early 20th century to describe planting a single crop across a large area of farmland. The practice was efficient and profitable, but it was also risky. Single-crop fields are more vulnerable to pests, disease and weather shocks. They also displace the smaller, scrappier ecosystems that once occupied the land. The word migrated into cultural criticism in the 1980s and 1990s. Music writers like Robert Christgau and later Chuck Klosterman used it to describe a media landscap