Walk through any airport bookstore and you'll notice something curious. The shelves are full. The audience isn't.
Twenty years ago, many of those books would have been written for everyone. Leadership books. Travel books. Business books. Cookbooks. A handful of bestsellers that almost everyone had heard of.
Today, the covers seem to whisper to increasingly specific people. A guide for backyard mushroom growers. The history of brutalist architecture. Recipes from a single region of northern Japan. A memoir by someone famous only within a tiny corner of the internet. Somehow, there are enough people to fill each of these worlds. Just not enough to fill the same one.
For most of the last century, culture worked like a campfire. A few television shows. A handful of magazines. The same radio stations. Monday morning conversations began with, Did you watch it? Most people knew exactly what "it" was. We often remember that era as simpler. It wasn't simpler. It was simply more synchronized.
Technology has changed the shape of culture. Not by creating more interests. By making it easier for interests to find each other. Somewhere out there is a community obsessed with vintage synthesizers, Japanese stationery, abandoned shopping malls, or restoring mid-century fiberglass boats. Not only do they exist. They've found one another. And once people find each other, something interesting happens. Taste accelerates.
When you're surrounded by people who care deeply about the same obscure thing, average disappears remarkably fast. The conversation moves on. Standards rise. References multiply. What looked niche from the outside becomes incredibly sophisticated from within. That's true whether you're talking about coffee, typography, climbing, watches, filmmaking, or fermentation. The deeper the community, the more invisible its expertise becomes. Which raises an interesting question. If everyone belongs to increasingly specific worlds, what happens to the middle?
The average restaurant. The average clothing store. The average publication. The average software product. Average used to be safe. Now it often feels forgettable.
People don't seem to be searching for the best anymore. They're searching for their best.
Something that feels unusually aligned with who they already are—or perhaps who they hope to become. That's a different kind of marketplace. One driven less by mass appeal than by recognition. The companies that understand this don't try to appeal to everyone. They become unmistakable to someone. There's courage in that. It means accepting that some people won't get it. Or worse, won't even notice it.
But the alternative is becoming so broadly acceptable that nobody feels particularly attached. Taste has always been personal. What's changed is that it's now economically viable. A tiny audience, scattered across continents, can sustain a business that never could have existed before. A magazine. A furniture maker. A software company. A coffee roaster. A monthly gathering in the back room of a bookstore. They don't need millions of customers. They need their people.
Perhaps that's the promise of the internet. Not infinite scale, but infinite neighborhoods. Places where shared interests become shared language. Where strangers recognize each other through small details. A camera. A notebook. A pair of well-worn hiking boots. A certain way of arranging books on a shelf.
Culture hasn't become more fragmented. It's become more precise. The challenge isn't finding something everyone loves. It's creating something that makes a small group of people feel like it was made specifically for them. Because when that happens, average taste disappears. And belonging takes its place.