TLDR: For everyone outside the United States, our collective art/media consumption and therefore socialisation is increasingly just Californian. (I will concede that London is often a stopover on the way to California.)

This is shifting social expectations in the publics and towards American norms

Notably, I see very little coverage of this phenomenon. I also hope to add to the list of examples in this article over time.

What's happening in Global Media

Global media consumers are plugging ever more into the US media ecosystem creating a super-sized Global English-Language Content Audience.

Media producers are increasingly making content aimed at the Global English-Language Content Audience.

Global consumers are consuming ever more American (read: Californian) content

People outside the United States are starting to consume a lot more American content, specifically Californian content (Hollywood, Social Media etc).

For those with specific interests, the best content in their particular space is likely to be American. For example, if you're into cooking, the best recipe content is going to be American.

Alternatively, if you're the type to go for high quality content in general, then you also end up watching increasingly American content.

A friend, RS, who lives in Sydney, recently said that hadn’t been paying attention to NSW politics because they hadn’t found a good podcast on it. Interestingly, he had been listening to a bunch of American podcasts that he found really interesting. (Tbf there was some British content included in there)

Producers are making content for the Global English-Language Content Audience

Content producers are increasingly online, and online content is aimed at a global media audience aggregated through social media. Trying to optimise the production of this content often ends up driving producers both physically and psychically into California.

• Physically: Today, anyone who gets successful at communicating to a global media audience ends up moving to California. Even your non-American content producers are just moving to LA.
  • Back in the 90s, we had artistic waves that came from places other than the US- think the Spice Girls with Britpop or Eurodance. Today, 4 out of 5 members of the original One Direction have homes in the US. (3 in the LA, 1 in Pennsylvania and 1 in the UK)
  • [I will add more examples as I think of them]
• Psychically: Think and sound American
  • The Jolly Swagman Podcast rebranded to The Noel Walker Podcast specifically to make it more intelligible to Americans. The host has moved to the UK, but just completed a set of interviews from San Francisco.
  • PeachPRC talks about singing in an American accent as a way to ensure that her music is palatable to the broadest possible audience
  • [I will add more examples as I think of them]

Even when producers aren't directly aiming at this audience, every incremental expansion of their audience pushes them into catering for an expanding subset of the Global English-Language Content Audience.

Knowledge of the rest of the world is therefore reflected through California. The whole worlds comes to California to produce what the whole world then watches. 

Long run consequences are now being seen

 It's happening.

Politics is becoming deeply shaped by American norms 

• The Right to Slience: Prof George Williams, as part of his talks on the erosion of protections for those accused of crimes (largely due to the expansion of Australian anti-terror laws), has commented on how surveyed Australians often believe they are still protected by an ability to “plead the fifth”. He suspects that the abundance of American cop shows gives Australians an expectation regarding their right to silence that exists nowhere in Australian law.
• Free Speech Norms: The free speech norms of the general public are increasingly American. This is likely to be the most active frontier of the Californian colonisation of our minds for the foreseeable future. Specifically, the public expectation around what you can and can’t publish online is increasingly shifting towards American defaults. I suspect that there will be ongoing political conflict on this front in liberal democracies that consume lots of American media and censor according to the local legal norms.
• Local political salience is downstream of American political salience: We are all downstream of American memes. Political argumentation about "wokeness" both for and against went global. The US had Black Lives Matter and so Australia had Blak Lives Matter. The US had an anti-woke backlash, and now Vladimir Putin talks about how JK Rowling is being persecuted because she's anti-trans. I've lost count of the number of non-American politicians who are trying “Make x Great Again”.
  • Disturbingly, the most efficient way to run an Australian social movement might be from LA through a global media channel.

Stray thoughts: Is Australian news somewhere between US local news and US national news?

Our political memory lives in the shadow of the US

Even here, historical political achievements are assessed according to an implicitly American metric.

MTK recently threw up a word cloud of what people thought of as successful political achievements. It's notable how many of them are really about comparing Australia to the United States.

Big themes included:

• Gun control: Australia likes Howard’s gun control because of the constant reminder of what the US is like.
• Healthcare: Australians feel good (smug?) about our healthcare system because of the dysfunction in the US healthcare system. Other developed countries do this too. As a contrast, I would observe that Australians are not proud of our healthcare system because it's better than the NHS (even though it is) because, honestly, who gives a shit about the NHS.

It's about the US as it's imagined in Californian media, not the US as it's lived.

The mentions here of the US are really about the US as it appears in the media. So school shootings, the George Floyd riots, American hospital bill stories, the opioid epidemic, mass homelessness, allegedly out of control crime, In-N-Out burger, Elon Musk shenanigans, US Supreme Court justices ... that sort of thing.

Notably, Australian's don't compare themselves to the United States on metrics that are harder to present in the media, like corporate taxes, income taxes, retirement savings programs, house prices, the availability of sugary cereals or the cost of personal services.