Monopoly Kills Cultural Mythmaking

When a single cultural institution eliminates rivals, it often stops investing in the risky work of creating new public myths, producing nostalgia and a symbolic void. That vacuum gets filled by reactive or performative narratives (guilt, purity, technocratic rituals) that reshape civic legitimacy. — Concentration in media and cultural institutions therefore has downstream political effects: it changes what stories are available to bind publics, making societies more susceptible to symbolic instability and populist reweaving.