In engineering and technology strategy, this is called the “curse of the early adopter” or the “tyranny of the installed base”. For example, for decades the U.S. had the crappiest standard for colour television (NTSC) because when it was developed in the early 1950s it was the best scheme that could be built with costly vacuum tubes and made compatible with and installed base of millions of black and white receivers. By the time other countries adopted colour broadcasting, the superior SECAM and PAL systems, which do not have the colour phase shift problems of NTSC (which caused wags to say the acronym stood for “Never Twice the Same Colour”).
IBM completely missed out on the minicomputer revolution in the 1960s due to fears that a radically cheaper and simpler computer with the endorsement of IBM would cannibalise their installed based of mainframes, many of which were rented and could come back if customers had a lower price replacement. It was the same fear by workstation CAD companies of cannibalising their market that created the opportunity for Autodesk to sell CAD systems that ran on personal computers.
So it is with cultural phenomena. One advantage of being a backwater is that you get to observe what happens to early adopters when they “pioneer” a new fad such as destroying the family, making the dole more attractive than working, making parenthood unaffordable, or importing masses of unskilled, difficult-to-assimilate savages and encouraging them to preserve their quaint “authentic” ways. The backwater can pick and choose the ones that do not wreak havoc on the early adopters. Unfortunately for the latter, there is no “Undo” button on mass social innovations.