CONCEPT
Cultural Imperialism
Young's face of oppression in which the dominant group's experience becomes the unmarked universal standard — enforced not through active suppression but through the more effective mechanism of normalcy.
Cultural imperialism occurs when a dominant group's experience, values, and cultural products are established as the universal norm, and other groups are marked as deviant, inferior, or invisible. The dominant group does not need to actively suppress other cultures; it simply occupies the default position — the unmarked category against which all others are measured. The English speaker does not know she speaks a particular language; she speaks 'language.' The viewer of Western oil painting does not know she is viewing a tradition; she is viewing 'art.' The normalization is so complete that it becomes invisible to those who share the normalized perspective.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Young's face has become the most analytically productive for understanding AI cultural politics. Large language models trained predominantly on English text encode the assumptions embedded in that text as universal truths. Image generation systems trained predominantly on Western visual traditions produce outputs that default to Western compositional conventions. Music generation systems reproduce the harmonic structures of