Sublime

In guiding us into particular categories through soft coercion, the Netflix algorithm ends up defining our taste as only one fixed thing, made more rigid by every successive interaction…

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describing how algorithmic recommendations and other digital communication routes can silo Internet users into encountering only…

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On the other side of our algorithmic anxiety is a state of numbness.

As consumers become increasingly passive, failing to exercise distinctly cultivated tastes, artists are forced to contend even more with algorithmic pressures, because working through the feed is the only way they can reach the scale of audience and engagement that they need to make a living. They need to reach us where we are, and where we are is

Their personal desires also resemble the results of a marketing survey: they like what they are supposed to like. Perec’s sketch of their fictional aspirational apartment includes jade ashtrays, cane-seated chairs, Toile de Jouy wallpaper, Swedish lamps, and Paul Klee drawings. I admit, it still sounds nice to me today.

crisis of taste,

Taste is inescapable; it involves “the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing, or decoration,” the French sociologist Pierre