taste

Marisa Aragón Ware.

All year I’ve been reading about taste. Someone somewhere identified that one of the things AI can’t do is “taste.” Now it seems a certain part of the world can’t stop talking about taste, and much of it is trying to define taste, presumably to boil it down into a useful prompt.

This is a bit of a shift from the prevailing notion of “you’re allowed to like stuff,” which turned into “can’t we just let people enjoy things,” which quickly warped into “you have to like everything or you are a monster.” Especially if lots of other people seem to like it, which is one reason why the mainstream culture is so completely flat right now. Taste was demonised by poptimists who defined themselves as victims of those with taste.

And now everyone’s turned around and gone, oh shit, the robots can create everything I said I liked and I’m a slop-eater. There is no status or cultural cache in that. People are freaking the fuck out. They’re trying to find out what taste even is.

Tastemakers have discernment. They know they don’t have to and aren’t supposed to like everything, and they immediately distrust anything so flat and edgeless that it screams of being designed to be liked by the largest number of people. They have knowledge and powers of recognition, they have context and they own their idiosyncrasies. They don’t like what other people like, because they have taste and other people don’t. Other people sit on the kerb of a street in a town that isn’t pretty enough for Instagram influencers, their skin aged prematurely by their phone screens and the digital billboards all around them, googling for peptides to restore the collagen their own phones are evaporating out of their faces and being told by the Google AI summary that tobacco reduces skin cancer. Goldfish with tits of congealed microplastic fuck in the black water sludging its way down the gutter. A “celebrity,” which they understand to mean “someone who is on a screen somewhere for a period of time longer than fifteen seconds,” appears on the nearest digital billboard. Its teeth are white. Taylor Swift white, Rylan white, bone-white, skull-white, nothing-white. The alien teeth seem to swell on the screen, as an inhuman voice drones from the frame about low-cost funerals to the musical accompaniment of something Spotify has inserted into eight million playlists this year. They know the song intimately but they don’t know what it’s called or have any context about it beyond the fact that it must be popular because all the machines make them listen to it over and over again. The teeth seem to invert and bend, twisting inwards to become the event horizon of a black hole that emits only the elongated howling word ddddeattttthhh in an utterance that sounds eerily like Pedro Pascal’s because he had a spare three minutes to ensure he was literally fucking everywhere. They run from the town into the countryside, because “people” on X have told them to “touch grass.” But the grass bends away from their feet, because even vegetal microintelligences can tell when something approaches that is essentially Wrong and no longer of this world. They fall to their knees and whisper for mercy to a seedling in the undergrowth, as an AI gardening podcaster had once told them to talk to plants. But the seedling blackens and crumbles under their graveyard breath. They crawl through the undergrowth to the shore, and look at the water, but they do not know how to feel about the water because no mathematics has told them how to feel about it, for they are basically just a meat coffin containing a low-voltage ghost that knows nothing and feels nothing beyond a faint, fearful urge to spend money on tokens to feed huge calculators that might tell them what to like. In the weeks and months to come, even the carrion eaters reject the corpse by the shore, instinctively recognising that its grey fibres contain no nutrition. Because they have taste.

TODAY

• Britain is wrong to ban speakers like Hasan Piker
• The UK could see a warmer-than-average summer, and I am tempted to add “says journalist who hasn’t looked out the fucking window,” but it is only June 3, I suppose.
• There Are Only Four Great Powers: according to this, it’s the US, China, Russia and… the United Kingdom.

TELEMETRY:

• this is a fun thing: the fashion styles of Tintin and Herge.
• Via socmod:

OPERATIONS: got a pitch off the desk yesterday, got some prose down, but not enough of anything else. Wiped down the boards, expired some hanging projects
STATUS: the curse of putting the winter clothes away: woke up to a rainy 13C day, so I’m in a grey waffle-knit henley and a grey Wrangler snap-front. A lightless day.

Swatch Metropolis.

READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: AJ Brady warned me weeks ago that a new Boards Of Canada was coming, and I’m only just now giving it a listen.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.