Taste as Resistance to Algorithms

Taste dictates what music you listen to, your favorite food, your drink of choice, your clothing style, the books you read, the TV series you follow, the movies you watch — and rewatch. How you speak, how you flirt, how you react to other people. How you present yourself to the world.

Beyond that, taste dictates who you're friends with, and that's either because they match what you value, or because you appreciate their own taste. In some wonderful cases, it's both of these things.

Social media goes against all that.

There are two agents in social media that facilitate finding cool things: influencers and the algorithm.

Influencers

Influencers pretend to be the modern equivalent of a tastemaker, the old character that curated things related to their passion: records, restaurants, movies, books, clothing. These individuals put a lot of work into finding gems and proudly showing them to the world. They had a reputation earned through their effort and their taste.

Current influencers rarely find things. They're advertising channels for brands. They will happily recommend any shitty product, brand, or restaurant as long as their fee is covered. Even in the case of them finding cool stuff, the promotion of said stuff requires a monetary transaction to happen. I've seen good restaurants say no to food influencers. It makes me wonder how good are the ones that said yes.

To be fair, before being influencers, they probably put in the work and effort to create a good reputation, but once a certain threshold of status and/or fame is reached (and if we all know them, this threshold has indeed been reached), the fee, the monetary transaction, is already mandatory for their content. And that transaction negates their bona fide curation efforts.

"The Algorithm"

There's not much to argue about the algorithm going against taste. A recommendation algorithm is designed to detect the content you'd probably be interested in in order to maximize engagement, but it does this by grouping you in sets of "interests". Our taste is irrelevant, because instead it is replaced with what would keep us glued to the screen, and for that, there are things more effective than taste: on the negative side there's fear, disgust, and anger. That's why Threads is filled to the brim with rage-bait, and Twitter (yes, "Twitter", suck it up, Elon!) is outright hate-speech. It works for engagement.

The positive side is no better: our "interests" are basically a set of tags added to our identities programmatically, which results in an homogenization not only of what's served to us in our feeds, but also of the content that it's being generated to begin with. Observe how every time a TikTok or an Instagram Reel goes viral, especially in the humor space, there are thousands of clones, more videos with exactly the same idea and execution from thousands of different content creators trying to cash out on the trend.

The algorithms give us just the right mix of homogenized feel-good content and negative bait to keep us scrolling. It's sad, and it's lame. And it's very profitable for social media companies.

Taste is deeply human

Personal taste requires intention, effort, curiosity, and, at some level, disagreement with what's popular. Taste is formed slowly through obsessive exploration, by discovering things that give us joy and sometimes feel serendipitous, but really are informed by our experience, our baggage, by all our previous discoveries. It can't be automated, it can't be crowdsourced, and especially, it can't be distilled into a series of interests and put into steps to follow.

Taste is resistance way more than compliance. It brings to my mind the phrase "A thousands no's for every yes", from Jonathan Ive talking about intention. And consuming with intention is not compatible with any of the current social media platforms.