Local, an aesthetic: the deglobalisation of fun

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1:04The Economist

1:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

1:14Rosie Blau:And I'm Rosie Bloor.

1:20Today on the show, our America at Age 250 series tackles the 1980s and 90s and why mosquitoes might not be repelled by repellent.

1:34first up though

1:42Denmark's Roskilde Festival is kicking off this June and the musical line-up there is as international as ever

1:50Rosie Blau:Tom Wainwright is our media editor it features The Cure from Britain Addison Rae from America Jenny from Blackpink, which is from South Korea, and loads of other worldwide acts from Australia's folk bitch trio to the Pilly Pilly Girls of Tanzania. But if you eavesdrop on the private playlists of Danish festival goers, you might hear a more local soundtrack. The country's most streamed song of last year, He Le Vijn, or All The Way, was by Omar and Umla, a pair of Danish artists.

2:25And in fact, nine of the top ten tracks in Denmark in 2025 were by Danes belting out lyrics in Danish.

2:35It might seem surprising that in a world of global stars, a country of just six million people, many of them fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music. And until fairly recently, they didn't. In 2019, when artists like Ed Sheeran and Lady Gaga were riding high in the charts, only four songs in Denmark's top 20 were in Danish. By last year, that figure was 18. A similar trend is underway in other countries and in other entertainment formats. Worldwide platforms are driving a surprising surge in homegrown entertainment.

3:08Rosie Blau:Tom, we know The Economist loves a Nordic model, but what's really the global trend that's going on here? Well, it's not just in the Nordics. This is happening all over the place. From Asia to the Americas, we see music charts are increasingly dominated by local sounds. And it's not just happening in music either. We're seeing something interestingly similar happening in television, where people's viewing habits are moving away from Hollywood, and in video gaming, where increasingly gaming trends in different regions of the world seem to be quite distinct from each other. And for people who thought that globalization would lead to a stale worldwide monoculture.

3:42This local revival is a bit of a surprise. What we're seeing is that local culture is proving very resilient. And as that happens, America's grip on worldwide popular culture is loosening.

3:52Rosie Blau:So we've got quite a cultural array to cover here. Let's just talk about music. First of all, how is the industry changing? Well, it's changing in two quite different ways. Streaming services like Spotify seem on the one hand to be making the biggest stars bigger. So people like Taylor Swift have got a deeper global reach than they ever would have done in the pre-streaming era. But at the same time, it's making the long tail of smaller musicians longer. It's making it much easier for smaller acts to produce music and to distribute it. And so what we see is that although these big acts are getting bigger, the fact that it's easier for smaller acts to get published and to get distributed means that there's been this explosion in local music, which has seen charts from Europe to Latin America and Asia fill up with a greater share of locally produced songs.

4:43Rosie Blau:Aren't the barriers to entry much higher in TV? What's going on there? Well, yes, they are in the sense that it's more expensive to make a TV series than it is to make a song. But we're seeing something similar going on here as well. Hollywood's share of all global streaming commissions is falling. And we're seeing streamers like Netflix, for example, pushing hyper-local series, like, for instance, there's one called 1670, which is a sort of Monty Python-esque comedy set in 17th century Poland. It's the year of 1670. I had a chance to get a slag in Poland, the most powerful country in the world.

5:20And it's not just Netflix. Amazon has made some big bets in regions like Latin America, for example. What we're seeing is that as streamers push deeper into foreign markets, they're commissioning local shows to help them reach subscribers beyond the elites who might previously have been happy just with American series. Making television abroad is cheaper than making it in the States. We know that Hollywood is grappling with inflation at the moment. And what TV executives seem to be finding is that local hits really work because they have this real sense of place. And so things like, for example, Adolescence, which was this smash hit series set in Britain, wasn't really tailored for a global audience.

5:55It's a very British show, but it seemed that that essential Britishness of it was part of its appeal to people all over the world. And we see this as well on new video platforms like YouTube. There was quite a good study done which tracked all the trending videos on YouTube across 100 countries over three years. And what it found was that of all those hundreds of thousands of videos, three quarters of them trended in only one country. And the number of videos that trended in every country in the world was four. So it's incredibly rare, even on a global platform like YouTube, that you have a truly global, truly universal hit.

6:29Rosie Blau:What you're talking about there is partly about the authenticity of being properly local. What about the gaming industry, which is really about virtual worlds, not necessarily of particular places? The key change here really has been the transition from PC and console gaming to mobile gaming, which is now the biggest way in which people around the world play games. And that change has been accompanied by a kind of diversification of the way in which people play games and out of the titles that people play in different regions. What we see is that on PC and console, there are still a handful of big mega franchises which are popular almost everywhere.

7:07Things like what used to be called the FIFA football series, for instance. But on mobile, things are more diverse. And I did a bit of research on this looking at the five largest mobile gaming markets. And I looked at the top 10 most played games in each of those countries last year and there is no single game that features in the top 10 of all five of those countries in fact across those five top 10s you have 34 different titles so quite a lot of variation in gaming from region to region again what we're seeing is that as more people take up gaming there are audiences big enough in different countries for developers to make it worth their while making games aimed specifically at for example latin americans or indians who previously had to put up with the same games that were being made principally for Americans.

7:52Rosie Blau:Tom, when we talk about globalization, we're often really talking about Americanization, particularly in the entertainment industry. For so long, it was the US that dominated all of these entertainment industries. So does that mean that America's dead when it comes to soft power, that American sway is really over? Not dead, but certainly weakening in a big way. I mean, over the years, as you say, a lot of people have been recruited to American ideas and American goals by the soft power of film, of music, and maybe to a lesser extent, gaming. And America's dominance over these industries is definitely in retreat.

8:31We see the share of viewing of television, the share of listening of music, and the share of playing of gaming of American titles all in decline. And I think this does matter to America. It has the consolation of still controlling a lot of the means of distribution. So platforms like YouTube, platforms like Apple Music, not Spotify, of course, which is Swedish, and platforms like the two main app stores are still American owned. And so America controls the pipes of distribution, if you like, and thereby controls a lot of the profits. But when it comes to the content itself, America, which used to be so mighty in this area, is a fading force.

9:06Rosie Blau:Tom, thank you very much. Thank you.

9:37We'll see you next time.

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10:27Rosie Blau:As you may have noticed by now, this July, America celebrates its 250th birthday. In the run-up to that, we've been delving into The Economist archive to look at how we've covered the country over time. Today, we reach the 1980s, the AIDS crisis, and the start of the war on terror.

10:57In the 1980s, a mood of national decline hung over America. Annie Crable is a senior digital editor. The country's economy had suffered in the decades prior, after successive oil shocks led to stagflation. If we're going to stop inflation, we must do it now. Not with bigger government. It takes better government. That's what we owe ourselves and our children. That's why I'm running for president. Enter Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor of California, who seized the moment and won the 1980 election on a campaign of renewal. Only one man has the proven experience we need, Ronald Reagan for president.

11:45Let's make America great again. He called for pulling back the state and giving markets a freer hand. Inequality widened, as did the budget deficit, but economic growth rebounded. Reagan also significantly boosted defense spending. and escalated America's nuclear arms race with the Soviets. But much to the surprise of his critics, he pursued peace at the negotiating table, striking major nuclear reduction treaties with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Reagan's policies hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.

12:34In 1981, in Reagan's first year in office, doctors in Los Angeles and New York began reporting a baffling pattern. Young gay men were dying from rare cancers and infections that normally posed little threat. This was the start of the AIDS crisis. The Economist wrote, There has never been anything quite like this, and researchers are at a loss to explain it. Most doctors studying the disease think it is caused by a new virus or a new type of old virus. Fear and misinformation spread quickly. A mystery disease known as the Gay Plague has become an epidemic unprecedented in the history of American medicine.

13:20Religious conservatives, now a major political force, framed AIDS as the consequence of immoral behavior and resisted pragmatic responses like sex education and condom distribution. For years, Reagan stayed silent on the crisis. It was only when his friend, Rock Hudson, was dying of the disease that he started speaking out. AIDS is surreptitiously spreading throughout our population, and yet we have no accurate measure of its scope. It's time we knew exactly what we were facing. Tens of thousands of people had already died of AIDS in America, and more would follow.

14:09In the 1980s, finance displaced industry as the dominant sector of the American economy. The financialization of the economy coincided with deindustrialization. As manufacturers outsourced to foreign countries with cheap labor. But industrial towns became hollowed out. It seemed to many middle class Americans that the rich were just getting richer while they languished. A backlash against globalization was coming.

14:53Under Bill Clinton, a more polarized era of politics emerged. Mr. Clinton supplied his opponents with ample ammunition. I did not have sexual relations with that woman. The president was impeached after he lied under oath about an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a young White House intern. The economist called on him to go. A government headed by a man who is reckless, and worse, whose recklessness and moral weakness are indulged, is running on empty because it has no claim to the public trust. In the end, he survived. But as America entered the 21st century, its politics looked much harsher.

15:51In the 1970s and 80s, innovation set the stage for a boom in the internet and tech stocks. Two computing enthusiasts, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, built a user-friendly personal computer in a garage in Silicon Valley. After the World Wide Web took off in the 90s, Americans were the first to realize its massive business potential. Jeff Bezos founded an internet bookstore from his garage. Two Stanford doctoral students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, wanted to make information easier to access with their experimental search engine, Google.

16:49September 11th, 2001. A plane strikes the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

17:02Oh my goodness, there's another one. It seems to be on purpose. 17 minutes after the first, a second plane hit the South Tower. Then another hit the Pentagon. And a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The attacks were carried out by 19 hijackers from Al-Qaeda, an Islamist terrorist group. In all, nearly 3 ,000 people were killed. The economist said, This week has changed America, and with it, the world once again. President George W. Bush declared a war on terror.

18:01Within a month, America had invaded Afghanistan. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Bush was soon arguing that Saddam Hussein, Iraq's dictator, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and America invaded Iraq six months later. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. Saddam Hussein was toppled, but America's government had not prepared for the task of installing a new Iraqi government.

18:54No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. In the vacuum, a deadly new jihadist threat emerged in the Islamic State group. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would die in the years to come. We'll see you next time for our final chapter, Liberalism in Question.

19:41The End

19:57Methylm-toluamide, or DEET, which is way easier to pronounce. DEET is supposed to be the gold standard repellent against mosquitoes. Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for The Economist. And researchers are working out that mosquitoes not only can learn to resist DEET, but actually come to finding it attractive. So what kind of research are we talking about that has borne this out? The stuff we're talking about is research done by Claudio Lazari, where he ran an experiment with mosquitoes, a lot like the research that we know Ivan Pavlov did with dogs. He would make a noise and feed the dogs.

20:40And then eventually, he just made the noise and studied what the dogs did. The answer is, when you ring a bell and feed dogs, and then you ring a bell and don't feed dogs, the dogs come to learn that the bell means food, and so they salivate when they hear the bell. It's a conditioning experiment. And Dr. Lazari wanted to know, could you do the same thing with mosquitoes and DEET, the insect repellent? Okay, so how does the dog work translate to the mosquito work? Lazari, instead of ringing a bell and feeding the mosquitoes, he wafted either pure air with no scent in it through the mosquito chamber before giving the mosquitoes was either sugar water or sheep's blood, or he wafted the gentle odor of Deet through the insect's chamber and then fed them sugar water or warm sheep's blood.