If it is a "most complex system of systems" that is more complicated than "even the free markets", and "includes all of our bodies and personal processes" there must be a serious way to quantify exchange and define value. My hot take is that we exchange information to create beliefs. This can be anything from statistics to inform policy voting preferences to a character's arc on a television show which informs moral character.
that emerges through often thousands of years wrangling with nature for survival.
A "first" idea of how culture is influenced (from my perspective) is that when the rule of law/authority changes, that affects how people live practically - sometimes economically, sometimes simply in their trust of authority. People (artists, often) exalt or denounce how things are going, their ideas spread and are either accepted or rejected based on their veracity.
Another idea is that through scientific discovery and/or technological innovation people respond. Very often major cultural movements in response to progress in STEM are positive (Renaissance, Enlightenment) up until the bomb (IMO)1, which gets to my next hot take:
A huge shift is a possible majority culture which openly criticizes whether the direction we're going is inherently good.
For me a major "shared history" story which supports this is the history of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, which represents an inflection point when even the state acknowledged "maybe we need to remember this differently."
Plenty of responses from various disciplines support this perspective: From Marxism, to subjectivity in anthropology, to neuroscientists criticizing Cartesian duality, for example. Historically there has always been dissension in fields as disciplines progress in their knowledge but generally “history is written by [the] victors."
So, history itself as a discipline is much more recently coming under this consideration as evidenced by the quote "all history is contemporary history."
You need to describe and name it, otherwise I assume you are spreading panic and part of "the problem" from my perspective. An idea that I wish to share with you is that your interaction with the internet creates a narrative or a story of the world. You are the hero of this story, and therefore, the internet must present you with a villain. Do you know how "manipulative tech" has come to be, and therefore, who is responsible for this "fake culture"?
I strongly believe that the sane, old should inform the synthetic new
What does this mean? Christian values? Classical Greco-Roman values? Constitutional scholarship? Better historians?
Footnotes
Something I've considered for the first time is that like our historical counterparts in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment we are actively grappling with the consequences of our progress and real-time filtering out the good from the bad so that we can write the cultural history of our moment in time and space...Which is a bit of a "we're going to be fine" take, but is a salient observation for my own sanity. ↩
What is the currency of culture?
Who are the globalists?
What is the fake culture?
Footnotes