The parts of America heavily inhabited by people are generally not thought of as beautiful places—in fact, they’re famously ugly, and have long been the source of dismay for artists and intellectuals from around the world. Critic James Howard Kunstler even compared our aesthetic indifference to societal suicide:

“The immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal ‘death trip,’ of a society determined to commit suicide.” – The Geography of Nowhere

But a half-century later, in an era of AI and intractable cultural divisions, what’s left of these once-despised spaces might actually have some surprising things to teach us. Compared to the inhumanly smooth, ubiquitously-branded, digitally-overlaid neighborhoods of now, these gritty, analog junkyards have somehow become something to savor as the last shreds of a common American culture. The motel, the shopping mall, the diner and the road are, indeed, overused tropes, but what if they’re the only concrete things we still share? The millions of Americans who bask in nostalgia—with huge implications for our politics—and the hordes of international tourists who cosplay midcentury families along Route 66 every year are proof it’s worth looking deeper.

I grew up in a bilingual family in rural northern New Mexico watching American television shows and aspiring to quintessentially American things. It was a place more invisible than flyover country, with scrambled cultural dynamics, ancient lines of division, and a thoroughly complicated history. I then spent most of my early adult life outside the country, only to return and find that I remained an outsider. As a result, I continue to be fascinated by what makes this society tick: interplays of design and culture, planned obsolescence on every scale, status symbols and virus-like fads, and the architecture, objects and other cultural byproducts of a society at once totally hegemonic and precariously fractious.