The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste

This shift towards a global sameness, driven by digital platforms' algorithms, challenges the very notion of personal taste. As these platforms prioritize content or products that resonate on a mass scale, they nudge us toward a homogenized cultural landscape. The result is a world where diversity of thought and creativity often gets drowned out by... See more

So there’s a weird thing going on where there’s abundance, and yet, at the same time, we’ve become really conservative about our own styles, because people fundamentally don’t want to adopt things that feel inauthentic to them, or will be judged inauthentic.

And because culture is so ephemeral, there’s just more stuff that people are worried that —

... See more

The playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar described our “click-bait consciousness,” trained to interact with anything in the feed designed to be triggering. “The worship of algorithms is mutilating creative industries,” the television writer Cord Jefferson complained. “Culture is no longer made. It is simply curated from existing culture, refined, an

... See more