Whose statues are we going to build in 2040?

Collective idols are harder to come by, and that's a problem for Marketers

Passing through Union Square in New York last month I came across the impressive sight, and indeed site, of a 8ft, bronze version of Abraham Lincoln.

His beard looked well pruned, his military uniform neat, his shoes detailed, and I concluded that a well-paid artisan must have been responsible.

I then wondered which public body commissioned this expensive statue-maker, which left me with another question: how do people decide whose statue is worth building?

This question has followed me on my visits to see customers in Toronto (with the statue of Egerton Ryerson), Madrid (Don Álvaro de Bazán), and London (Millicent Fawcett), and I now realise that a statue is a unique tool.

Unlike putting someone on the front page of a newspaper, or writing a book about someone, or making a TikTok to hero a celebrity, the implicit claim of a statue is both that this person transcends the contemporary moment and that their future adulation should be opt-out rather than opt-in; you have to actively choose to read that book, or watch that TikTok, whereas statues exist in the public sphere regardless of your individual choices or beliefs.

As such, inherent in the creation of statues is a claim that the public, by-and-large, as a broad collective, would see that person the same way. In other words, a statue is a symbol of cultural accord.

Few Americans would argue that Abraham Lincoln was a great person. Even fewer Londoners would rail against the reverence of Millicent Fawcett.

What is concerning though, using that heuristic of cultural accord, is that our world no longer produces people of whom we will make statues.

The simple reason being that every decade since the 90s we have seen a weakening in the alignment of the public’s collective psyche.

The Overton Window - that useful phrase which means the one-way spectrum of what’s acceptable in culture - is become more like more like an Overton Motorway, with traffic going in all different directions.

Behind this shift is a technological and secular one-two punch playing out across the West.

The first blow has been that we increasingly live in an omnivoric society of media. In the 20th century humans were akin to herbivores, feeding on a simple green-grass diet of a few newspapers, a couple of radios stations and a TV channel or two.

Whether it was the arrival of the iPhone, SVOD platforms, all social channels, and now GenAI, every major technological shift of the first quarter of the 21st century has infinitely and unimaginably multiplied the smorgasbord of cultural content on offer for our individual consumption. More than that, it has helped define those choices negatively against the rest of the world’s choices.

Of course I’m paraphrasing, but “How are you an Apple Maps person?! Google Maps is so much better”, or “Why do you bother subscribing to Disney Plus, everything good is on Netflix!”, or “How can you not be following TOPJAW?! What even is MOB Kitchen?!” are routine refrains. They might seem trivial, but downstream from those surface-level differences comes a slow erosion of misalignment in who are the greats among us.

Our preferences, in this sense, are not light like grass but weigh down on our character like a 350g bife de chorizo from Don Julio in Buenos Aires; still the best steak in the world, by the way!

This direction of travel is set. The Apple Vision Pro appears to be the next form factor shift that expands the wealth of choices that we can make, and the ripple effects of division that they create.

What this means is that, little by little, we live in an anti-polar world. My north is your south. Trump is the greatest phenomenon to happen, or he is the worst. Barbie was Oscar-worthy, or it was trash. But this extends beyond the lightning rod that is Trump or the colour pink. Even those people who once felt terminally and universally safe, like Winston Churchill, have been subject to criticism from individuals that see him as a racist.

As our cultural compass gets scrambled, individually we feel even more misaligned in our coordination with the collective, and that misalignment creates fear which makes us that much more tribal about our choices. This is the second blow.

The fact you haven’t seen *insert show about important topics such as immigration, beauty standards, trans equality, education etc* matters. In reality, it is most likely because you don’t have another $14.99 to spend on a SVOD platform and therefore have never heard of it!. But to someone else, more and more it instead denotes that you don’t take that topic seriously, and that deep down we must see the world “oh so differently. “

One app download at a time, the once-mundane, light-like-grass decisions to stick the TV on to Channel 1, feel like important, meaty ones. As common ground slips away, and everything is controversial to someone, the chances of the big human collective coalescing around commonly accepted greatness also slips away.

All of this is to say, I don’t know whose statue we are going to build in 2040. Imagine a government is tasked with building a statue of a great figure in 2040: it’s hard to imagine there will be someone who a majority would accept to be that great. More likely, a bunch of niche groups of fans will all have their one idol.

For marketers at brands looking to stand for something that appeals to ever larger groups of people, the fact that fewer and fewer people see statues the same way is a problematic new paradigm.