Whose Taste Is It Anyway

Matt Birchler on what makes you interesting:

Whether it's Tomotometer scores or your online clan deciding something is good or the worst thing ever, I find these systems to make us all dumber and more angry.

I've been thinking about this alongside a recent Vergecast discussion about what happens to taste when everything we consume is mediated by algorithms. The conversation kept circling a question I can't shake. When you open TikTok or Instagram and just let it show you things, is that actually your taste or is that just what the algorithm decided you should see based on keeping you engaged?

I don't think most people can answer that anymore. There's no active choice happening. You're not seeking things out or deciding what you want to consume. You're just accepting whatever appears in the feed. The algorithm does all the work, and you scroll.

We've been outsourcing things to the internet for years now. First it was memory. Why bother remembering facts when you can just look everything up? The information age meant we stopped retaining things and started relying on search. Now we've gone further. We've outsourced decision-making itself. We've outsourced taste.

The influencer age has taken this to another level. It's not just about looking things up anymore. It's about being told what to think, what to like, what to buy. Your favourite tech YouTuber tells you which phone is good. Your online clan decides which film is worth watching. The algorithm decides what music you should listen to based on what kept other people engaged. At every turn, someone or something else is making the choice for you.

The problem isn't that algorithms know what you like. The problem is they're replacing the process of discovering what you like. There's no exploration involved. No stumbling across something weird that becomes a new obsession. No making bad choices and learning from them. Just here's what you liked before, here's more of the same, here's what everyone else who liked that also liked. A closed loop that narrows rather than expands.

I'm guilty of this too. When I stopped using social media properly, I realised how much of my interests were just whatever the algorithm decided to show me. My taste wasn't really mine, it was shaped by what kept me scrolling. When I actually had to seek things out, when I had to make choices about what to consume rather than letting the feed make them for me, everything changed. Turns out I like different things when I'm choosing rather than just accepting.

Taste develops through friction. Through being exposed to things you wouldn't naturally pick. Through actual curation by actual humans who care about the thing they're sharing, not the engagement metrics. That's what's missing from algorithmic feeds. The humanity. The personality. The quirks and obsessions that make someone's recommendations actually interesting rather than just algorithmically relevant.

Your taste is what makes you interesting. Not the things everyone else likes too. Not the consensus opinion. Not whatever TikTok has decided you should see today. The messy, personal, sometimes inexplicable preferences that develop when you actually have to seek things out rather than having them delivered to you. That's taste, and it's worth protecting.