Taste Not Want Not

By Sammi Gale

‘The painting / is going on, and I go, and the days / go by.’ 

Frank O’Hara, Why I Am Not a Painter

The people who have spent twenty years destroying the conditions under which taste is formed now believe it is the most important human quality. ByteDance engineer Cong Wang says ‘personal taste is the moat’ – a term for a company’s competitive advantage. As all fellow cool human beings know, sprinkling business jargon into chatbot live (or as the luddites call it, normal conversation) is the apex of adult human coolness. AI-powered surveillance company Palantir have put out a blue denim chore jacket, which sees them cosplaying architects cosplaying 19^th century manual labourers. With free baseball caps and spots to hang out with your laptop, Anthropic dropped its zero-slop pop up coffee shops. Mark Zuckerberg made sure to be seen in the front row of Milan Fashion Week while Jeff Bezos bought his way onto the top table at the Met gala. Everywhere you look, the world’s wealthiest are snapping up traditional signals of prestige and cultural legitimacy.

This is different to your average halo asset acquisition. Kyle Chayka has called it ‘taste-washing’, an attempt to give the technologies that many people experience as threatening, alienating or anti-humanist warmth, the veneer of liberal humanism.

ChatGPT’s latest ad campaign shows it starkly: while the product is computing power, countless water-guzzling, windowless warehouses, ozone and dust, the adverts push lifestyle. In one, a couple look under the hood of a classic car broken down on a country road, shot in the yellow tones of analogue film. It could have been generated by the prompt ‘2010s hipster catnip’. This is ChatGPT slamming the bonnet down on your hip, discerning fingers and running off with your mason jars and microbreweries, commandeering the aesthetics of the handmade and hardwon. We are the new arbiters of taste, say the LLMs. This is your new identity – spat out by a magical mimic, an infinite parrot, now have a cracker. 

"ozone and dust"

Of course, companies using culture to make power more palatable is par for the course: oil supermajors sponsor museums, as Big Tobacco funds avant-garde art exhibitions. As far back as when taste was first being formulated as something you did with your mind, rather than just your tongue, the East India Company was commissioning art and architecture in an attempt to clean its reputation. At its most explicit, Britannia Receiving the Riches of the East (1778) is barefaced imperial propaganda, an attempt to spin its military subjugation into an allegory of simple gift exchange. For Karen Hao, AI companies are modern-day colonial empires, bearing all the hallmarks from resource extraction to labour exploitation, and a quasi-religious scale-at-costs ideology. But rather than being importers of chinoiseries, ceramics and tea, Big Tech seems set on colonising taste itself – the idea being that when AI can make more and more things instantaneously, what you decide to make will become all the more important.  

Can money buy taste? Pierre Bourdieu argues that ‘good taste’ cannot simply be bought; it is a deeply ingrained cultural mindset that must be inherited and learned over a lifetime, policed by the ruling class over generations and weaponised to keep lower classes in check. Many slammed Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez's Venice wedding extravaganza, for instance, as a tone-deaf display of obscene wealth in the midst of a global cost-of-living crisis, as vulgar. All the money in the world can’t buy cool.  

Yet, there is a weakening consensus on what taste actually is. Rachel Aroesti describes how technologies have ‘wrecked our capacity to form our own preferences’. While we used to experience culture via ‘a combination of community, geography, mass and specialist media, and serendipitous accidents’, now ‘We increasingly encounter most aspects of the world through a single aperture: streaming and social media platforms’. 

"All the money in the world can’t buy cool"

Certainly it passes the vibe test: on those platforms, we ask ourselves less and less ‘Do I like this?’ More and more: ‘Is this something that someone like me would like?’ Spotify keeps playing you the same tracks while another magazine you love collapses. Recommendation newsletters try to address the problem, but the sheer number of them is fatiguing, digging ever deeper, so many On My Radars on my radar that navigation is impossible.

If you’d said twenty years ago that you could buy something as ineffable as attention I wouldn’t have believed you, but now the attention economy is widely understood. Perhaps it’s naïve to think that taste isn’t up for grabs too. How about a Choose Your Own ending, since I’ve lost my ability to decide? (1) The tech bros are right, taste is the moat, curators and editors like me will be super important and everyone will love them and hire them to tastewash all their enterprises. (2) Get real, an LLM can gobble up lifetimes’ worth of taste-making in a heartbeat. You there with your actual heart beating will have to do more and more to make a living as the perceived value of what you do decreases. No-one cares that you can feel things. (3) It’s worse than you think but that’s liberating. Writing and exhibition-making are marginal activities for most of us in any case, and by embracing that as they become even more so, taste – the real stuff, taste no moat – becomes something even riskier, messier – ‘The painting / is going on, and I go, and the days / go by’ – and all the better for it on the ol’ nerve-endings. 

Phone a friend? Ask the audience? Which do you like? How about someone just like you?