I do believe social media may be the latest, most distilled form of industry directing culture, in this case, hollowing it out like you said.

As we as a species began to study and better understand human thought, weaknesses or "bugs in the software" were discovered. That knowledge was then weaponized to wage psychological warfare on society at large. They learned like that if you can persuade someone to fear something, you can then leverage that fear to make people think with their amygdala instead of their prefrontal cortex, making us behave more like predictable animals that can be conditioned to do things that our not in our interest because we are afraid something bad will happen to us if we don't.

Logically, even a child could see the ploy, but they got us using an older, simpler part of our brains that does not enjoy the benefit of logical, critical thinking.

I think that marketing and advertising has leaned on this for generations, but the difference now is that they have teams of psychologists on staff to maximize the manipulation. They learned that it is more affective to "hack" minds so they feel they need a product or service, rather than trying to persuade them to want it. In that environment of fear, more advanced human pursuits like cultural and social interaction are diminished. I am less inclined to form a community with my neighbors and countrymen if I'm afraid or jealous of them.

I think that this is the primary mechanism that stunted American culture and continues at a rocket propelled pace today. As you aptly pointed out, what passes for culture here is a collective concern about how we're doing in life compared to everyone else, based on who's got the most best stuff or biggest army of followers or rarest collection of Funko Pops.