Welcome to the tasteslop era

31:01Totally. Or who's better at visual communication? Yeah, totally. Another layer to this is like how much of the taste obsession is a defensive move to sort of improve a bad PR picture or a reaction against slap discourse. Like we've definitely seen a lot of AI companies, for example, sort of trying to lay claim to these more like Luddite aesthetics, hipster artisanality, nostalgic imagery. And like I see this a lot in like OpenAI and Anthropics commercials, the viral like Polymarket ad. They're not AI exactly. But like you see a lot of like their AI ads that like don't actually show very much tech.

31:48Yeah. And it's like I think it's like digital imagery usually used to look like film. And it's like people who are out like on a road trip or playing chess or making dinner. These are open AI ads. So like they might consult AI to like make this sort of like vivid technicolor IRL experience more adventurous or more fun. But I wonder how much of it is that, too, where it's like, oh, it's like the hipsters who are upset. So we're going to like do what very cynically just pander to their backsteers. And it's yeah, it's like we're just going to talk about the opposite of what we actually expect to have happen and hope that nobody notices that that's the contradiction.

32:30Anthropic creating like a coffee shop where I think maybe you couldn't have any screens or something. It was like a thinking zone, the sort of like analog coffee shop in partnership with Airmail that happened last year. That's right. I remember that. And that kind of brings us back to the whole definition of taste that we've been working through, where if all these things about how judgment is going to be what's left after AI automates everything else, but isn't the way AI is being marketed the opposite of that? I always thought that AI was supposed to progressively get better at making every single decision until it's basically able to like replace human intelligence so if you're arguing that taste is going to be what humans retain after ai takes everything else you're kind of implying that ai isn't that powerful if it can't do that which i don't i mean i'm sympathetic to that but i don't think that the people making the ai tools are i don't think they believe that like taste should be something it kind of brings me back to my original definition of taste as something that's personally edifying like I want to retain it because I want I want to decide like what music gets played I don't want the algorithm to just play random stuff for me because that's what I care about but if you don't care about that AI can already do plenty of that type of thing for you so I think taste is actually going to be more optional and maybe the the kind of anxious talk about taste is is trying to like pretend otherwise right so bringing that back to kind of what we were talking about with is this like valuing humans more or less this whole conversation at the top of the year we did our cultural predictions episode and which we tapped like 36 different people experts on a variety of topics to send us a voice note about what they thought was going to be a prediction on whatever topic for 2026 and one contribution from trevor mcfadry's was i'm just going to read a little excerpt of it was you're going to start to see a real dollar premium for folks, especially those in the culture industry who have a real point of view and for lack of a better word, taste that is meaningfully differentiated.

34:36It's funny, like six months later, revisiting that, especially in context of this conversation that got Emily and I thinking like, do we think this is actually going to happen? And maybe are like, are we already seeing it? I think we are seeing it. I hate to just reduce it to social media and like kind of influencer stuff. But I think that a lot of the individuals that have like gained relevance in recent years are, I mean, not always, but a lot of the enduring appeal of like the human face or like individual people doing things is like the personality embedded in them. And like, whether that's online or offline, we crave that.

35:16And I use the term point of view, which I think is really useful and interesting because the term point of view implies a specific perspective. It's not generalized. AI is all about just mushing everything together and making an average of, you know, everyone's point of view. But to have a specific point of view is, again, what makes something interesting. Even if it's not perfect, it's better than this kind of distributed non-point of view that AI encourages us to have where everything is more the same than it would otherwise be. And I think that's why it's so hard for, you know, whatever definition of taste you adopt.

35:53I think it's so hard for people who are getting all of their cultural knowledge from the internet. You're more likely to have consumed a lot of the same stuff as other people. Whereas if you're just doing your own thing, before the internet, it was easier to just organically end up with some weird idiosyncrasies that were specific to your taste or point of view. And now you just kind of see all these people that have all consumed the same information and ended up more in a similar spot. So I think he's right. I think that the value of that will endure and probably become more scarce. And I don't have as many predictions about how that will manifest itself.

36:33But I do think that broadly that's an accurate prediction. Yeah. I think even anecdotally, I can only speak from what I've seen or experienced. But I do think we're seeing it at play already a little bit. Like just for me, when I peruse like job listings, I'm seeing what I feel like is an uptick in things like creative director, creative producer, like words like curator. When these were like hard roles, you're seeing more of these like soft human touch iterations of roles emerge. I guess they feel less lateral and more vertical. Like have a big overview to sign off on this kind of stuff rather than have like a specific skill set to help with this part of the development process.

37:13Does that make sense? Absolutely. yeah like you're seeing a lot more like director of blah blah blah like i'm even thinking of how like masthead titles have changed at publications or places like condé nast you know what i mean there's no longer like editor-in-chief it's now just like editorial director you know and i think maybe that speaks to like this person is our taste sign off guy i don't know yeah yeah it could either be that you do everything and you're like an executive editor type person or it could just mean that you don't really do anything you're just like a face or something you're like a figurehead I mean, I don't say this in like a cynical or dismissive way, but just being the face of something kind of as an extension of what we were talking about, I think that will be valuable unto itself.

37:54And I mean, maybe a cynical version of that would be like you're almost laundering like AI output to make it seem more human. But I think that there's even like a more substantial version of it where you're there's just such a need for things to be humanized in this current environment that if you can humanize something, then you're doing valuable work. And I mean, maybe that requires taste as we're defining it. If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day.

38:43We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas. You can get access to Cujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. I want to go back to the fashion thing a little bit because I think it's such a useful tool and example for talking about all this and the piece that you mentioned that you wrote in 2021 that was about tech bros and their relationship with fashion.

39:24How have you seen that relationship evolve since you wrote that piece? Take us from all bird sneakers to the Palantir chore coat. Right, the Palantir chore coat. All birds are good, are funny because I mentioned those in the piece and that was sort of the that they still seemed pretty fresh you know that was like i feel like i associate all birds with 2018 2019 and then it was like everybody got the memo that that was what you didn't do so all of these people that were probably wearing all birds recently at that time suddenly knew they got like the update and they knew not to wear all birds and then they they started doing i won't even try to like catalog all the different you know post street wear whatever stuff that succeeded it.

40:08But it got, I use this in air quotes, more tasteful pretty quickly. I think it did become very, also this was, I mean, importantly, this was around the heyday of NFTs and the metaverse stuff, which was all kind of taking shape. And it felt like there was this idea of like ownership and being able to capture all of the value that something creates. And it seems like that logic was sort of implicitly applied to how people thought about fashion. It's like, I need to get credit for having this rather than just, I'm going to like try to dress well because it creates, you know, a richer public environment.

40:45And I talked a lot about the idea of a commons and how fashion actually is this shared public space that we all can partake of. And if someone dresses interestingly, that, that everybody kind of wins because you see it on the street and you're like, oh, that like, look at that. That's, that's cool. And this idea that you, instead of that, we're kind of, we would move in the direction of, I'm just going to be wearing like a Rolex or whatever, and you're going to see it and just know that I have a Rolex and it's not going to be that interesting or artful. I felt like that time was when I was seeing a lot of that.

41:20And again, I mean, it was related to like an influx of money into certain people's pockets and an ability to spend that was maybe somewhat new. But it felt kind of like a very self-aggrandizing attitude towards something that should be more fun and shared. And I think that fashion obviously lends itself specifically to that because there's these consumer objects that are, I don't like other art and music has versions of that. But fashion, it's inherently physical objects that cost money that may be more or less expensive. So the uneasy relationship between consumption and taste has probably kind of been refined more and more recently into something where it's all about consumption.

42:02Or if you're trying to use it to be better at work, then there's an output component to that, too. How do you explain something like Mark Zuckerberg's hypebeast churn? Oh, yeah. So, I mean, I think that's just a reflection of the whole 2010s to 2020s change that we've been discussing where he's trying to be friends. I don't think it really has anything directly to do with the fact that he's, you know, having meetings with Trump or whatever. But like that whole idea of a bid for cultural relevance that didn't seem that important to someone like him in the past. He now wants to be like, I kind of thought of it as a midlife crisis type vibe, but I don't think it's even that.

42:43added some sort of rebranding that someone probably recommended that he do just to seem I don't really know what he got out of it I mean maybe like people in tech think that he's cool now but it didn't feel like many people I knew were were very impressed by what he did for me it felt a little bit like in line with the kind of like a manosphere type thing like a assertion of masculinity his like anti-woke turn it felt kind of like a piece of or it makes sense that if he's trying to sort of rebrand himself and the company that way that he would align himself with like vaguely Manosphere style aesthetics and macho like something a little bit more macho I don't know yeah like all that stuff where he was on the surfboard with the American flag it's very like Manosphere but also patriotic and probably a right-wing dog whistle so much of this stuff just feels like it's just all about it's just like a brand cleanup exercise for silicon valley and like the need to have a brand right like brand and taste are pretty aligned terms right yeah yeah and i think so much of this is silicon valley like realizing it hasn't had a brand or it has just like a lot of negative associations like words like slop and control and like hard tech and you know that are often either negative or just like kind of in the middle ground of like the political polarity yeah or vibe and taste polarity you know and i feel like it's them being like shit we gotta like pick a lane and have have an identity if we actually like want yeah and we gotta we gotta add like human discernment and distinction into the formula here it's not gonna work i just can't help but wonder if that's what all of this really comes down to i think it is and they they realized uh that they neglected that whole realm too long and thought that it just didn't matter and dismissed cultural relevance and cultural capital as something that wasn't their problem.

44:38And then it just kept coming back to bite them. And I think they're trying probably too late to reassert control over their cultural perception. And I mean, there are like examples of success within that, but I don't think it's really reaching that far beyond the confines of people that are in the industry. I could be wrong about that. It might just be the echo chamber that I'm in. But also the number of people employed in tech is contracting because of AI. There are fewer and fewer people that are a part of that industry because the industry is laying people off pretty continuously. So it feels like just the number of people that care will be shrinking, but they have to kind of offset that with, I don't know, making podcasts that more people want to listen to that are about dc stuff um and maybe again maybe maybe that'll work but um but yeah all the branding and the aesthetic turn that we've been discussing is part of that it's so funny because all of the things that like andre and i have experienced for example in journalism where it feels like the work we do has by that industry been just devaluated yeah so much for so many years, like all that stuff is like being elevated as, you know, the cutting edge of industry.

46:00Like all the things that the media industry itself is dying, but then that thing of culture that we create is like the thing that the companies now view as a thing that will save them. Yeah. Well, it's kind of a, there's a dark interpretation of that, which is that they, or just a way of framing that as they burned down all of these cultural assets and now are just trying to rebuild their own version of them. Yeah. And obviously what they're rebuilding is worse than what it replaced, but it's just a tragic thing to see. I mean, it's a bummer, you know, I mean, at least there's good stuff happening still, but it's like, yeah, the media of 10, 20 years ago has been actively dismantled by that industry.

46:45I mean, I can't help but think about how a lot of this too is like, I think they're running out of inputs, you know? Yeah, yeah. I remember seeing a video from some scholar who was in the humanities department at Harvard talking about how she's not really worried too much about AI because it's already getting sloped because of the info input Ouroboros. What's happening? Yeah. It's feeding on it. She's like, they're always going to need humanities. They're always going to need human coming up with that stuff. And I think another branch of like what we're actually talking about here is just like they're realizing they need taste because otherwise this stuff, it's already, yeah, like I said, it's already running out of input.

47:24It's like taste is what AI builds the new things off of and what it pulls from. Yeah. Ultimately, you know, taste is what creates innovation, what creates new things. It's like at the root of the friction, which is, you know, generative for ideas. So. Yeah. And it has to come from humans to be compelling. I mean, ultimately, people don't care about something that they can't connect to a human origin. You can fake that to some, you can get like a certain distance faking that, but ultimately, it runs out really quickly if it doesn't seem human, you know? It has to carry a meaning in social context.

47:59I think the article by Emily Siegel was very gracefully articulated that. Totally, yeah. It has to be in response to other people. It has to, and also in your piece on fashion that like, it has to be seen by other people in order to actually mean anything. Yeah. And it can change and it's actually more dynamic and fluid than the rigid definition of taste that's seemingly adopted by Silicon Valley would acknowledge. Like, it's not just getting the list of the tasteful things and then referencing them. It's how is this being done? Does it make sense? Is it still working? Is something else replacing it?

48:39And that's all, you know, that's what we, you know, we in the humanities are comfortable with that complexity and that's what makes it fun and interesting. Yeah. All right. I want to bring my dude, Pierre Bourdieu, a little bit more explicitly into the conversation. I mean, he's, a lot of these pieces that we've been referencing, of course, in turn reference Bourdieu, including the Segal piece that we were just talking about. but he's one of my favorite thinkers ever. Pierre Bourdieu, of course, if you're not familiar, is the French sociologist whose work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society.

49:14He's fascinating and his stuff really helps explain a lot of what's happening today. And so with something like Taste AI, you know, ostensibly on the surface, it's maybe this is about trying to democratize taste. Like, is it about really trying to democratize taste? Or I'm going to apply kind of a Bordeuian reading to this. Is this really about Silicon Valley trying to close the gap maybe on the last thing they don't have over us, i.e. taste, like to finally be able to exercise taste as like kind of the final frontier of class violence. Like I wonder how much of this is actually maybe a form of class violence.

49:51I think there's an important Bordeu... For getting revenge? Yeah. And I think there's an important Bordeu quote to think about here too, which is that taste is first and foremost distaste. It's disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others. It's of course much more than that, but I think that's a really powerful and important reading of it. And I can't help but wonder if they're like, this is the last piece that we need to exercise full class power and the power of asserting class violence and stratification upon the rest of the non-Silicon Valley 1%. It does feel like taste is invoked in a sort of aggressive or like tense way it doesn't feel like it's being discussed in a way where it's like we can all have this it's it does feel like it's talked about in a like i mean taste is the moat is kind of the opposite of democratic it's this is how i'm going to win exactly they're thinking about taste as a moat what does a moat do you know yeah yeah that's i mean like you said it's um the final piece of the puzzle and it's the thing that is hardest to buy with money i think the taste slot article mentioned you know you can kind of you can fake it or simulate it by buying up supposedly tasteful things but ultimately the the people that create the cultural capital will be one step ahead um and that's what they have that the financial capital can't buy yeah yeah yeah and the funny thing about all this of course is like one cliche that people like to repeat about silicon valley ceos is like what makes them different is that they're not like they would never put their name on like a concert hall like the old the difference between the Silicon Valley CEOs of today and the like robber barons of the like 19th century is that the someone like Mark Zuckerberg I don't think he would put his name on a concert hall I don't think he would you know be investing his money into museums and other kinds of like cultural public goods they always seem like weirdly averse to it I have heard of like a kind of underground economy where there are like certain people in Silicon Valley who do funnel their money to artists and like charitable contributions like I know some people who are yeah making money that way but in general it hasn't really been about that and then now after that entire arc has sort of been completed they're circling back to being like actually we want this so like with the robber baron era the whole stereotype was like these people were nouveau riche and they invested in classical culture in order to gain cultural capital and to fit in with the upper classes, you know, the old money upper classes.

52:41And I wonder if there's something similar going on now. They kind of just reach that realization themselves again, or if it's something different that's going on. Yeah. It's almost like they missed the whole explanation for why that was worthwhile and suddenly they realized it and it's got to catch up um i also i always thought this the whole obsession with space was related to that it's like we're instead of built instead of putting money into like institutions that are shared among everyone we're gonna literally like take the money and get it off the planet and gonna i mean that's a whole separate conversation but it feels related to that whole idea of like escaping from the commons or like distrusting public society and not wanting to be embedded in it.

53:28Yeah. And like, do you see like that viral tweet by Mark Cuban that was going around recently about what he thinks that AI companies need to do in order for people to hate them less? Did you see that? I don't think I saw it. He made some really legitimate points where he was just like, the way to get artists not to hate you is to like sit down with them and meet with like all of the like creative labor unions and ask them what they want and you know agree to give a portion of your company's profits every year to funding these endeavors for the arts but it's like and I think he's right but I can't I can't see that actually I mean maybe it will happen but I can't really see them that happening.

54:15No, it's hard to imagine. Like releasing some of this money as a, I guess, to form some sort of artistic public good. I don't really see it. I think the sub-question of that is just like, why would they care about whether or not artists hate them? Yeah, I mean, it also feels like the class antagonism is more open now where it's like, I'm not going to do it because somebody would benefit from it. And that's like the only reason. Or like, I'd rather put my money into a arts adjacent or creativity adjacent business that will make money or something i don't know like a self-sustaining business yeah i guess that that makes me just wonder i'm just in a way like i mean it's funny that they're concerned with taste because you could almost make the argument like or wonder like are we post taste because they just all everything they've been directing their money towards feels like they're just done with that model or or using that to like close that gap which i guess like kind of leans to the next question that we were thinking of which is like is the fact that silicon valley that they've even been able to capture so much of the current discourse around taste prove that taste is just in a weird place more broadly like outside of silicon valley does taste as a concept even function the same way that it used to yeah i mean i do think it's i do have a sense that it's like i mean maybe it always has been but that it's kind of optional, you know, like you, you have taste if it's something that matters to you and you, you just have things that you're really interested in that you care about and you have like a discernment and you have your own point of view and that's great.

55:51But in some ways it's like not a, I mean, depending on what you do, it might not even be economically like necessary. Like I never felt like having whatever I would describe as taste would help me like at work or whatever. Um, but that's kind of how they see it now. But I feel like if you just chose to opt out of taste altogether, you would be okay. I mean, I wouldn't want to do that, but it feels like you could just be, I mean, especially with the way that we, our lives are saturated with media. There's no like part of what I would have defined as taste when I was a teenager was about like entertaining myself and getting good material in so I could like have stuff to do and and now you can just be inundated with whatever is coming at you and and you have no risk of being bored so I think in that sense it is something that people can can maybe opt out of but I don't know if it will be it might put you in a bad spot just as a as a human being to do that I also feel like it's just harder and harder to define even for those of us who are like cultural critics who think a lot about this stuff i think it's becoming harder and harder to define what good taste even is like and even within one's own milieu like i feel like things used to be a lot if i think of like the yuppie generation in new york city who i like grew up observing growing up in brooklyn there was like a much uh simpler sort of like starter pack for like being that type of person and that was like maybe there were like fewer types of people that people like code like social milieus that had their own like taste yeah system and now it feels like what a millennial creative class person looks like is different in different uh cities like when i go to new york and i look at like what people are wearing i couldn't even say like what what the there's no sense of like there's the dominant fashion or when i'm in philly people look completely different than they look in other cities that i go to and it feels like taste has become just much more like things have become much more niche nicheified or something where maybe you're like part of a subculture but i don't know i can't really explain it you can't like it's it's harder to cut to classify it feels more particular to maybe how people look in a given neighborhood or something i don't know yeah do you see what i'm saying i find that really fascinating i mean there's there does seem to be a lot less of an idea of like a canon where whether it's a subculture you're opting out of um whatever domain your taste is operating in there'd be this idea of you might not agree with it all but they're these are the things that are good so you at least should know about them and you might decide you prefer some to others but you but I feel like now you can just bypass that and and have your own version of it that's part of your digital physical world that that you occupy it just yeah it feels up for grabs everything feels kind of up for grabs and contextual and more constantly in flux to the point where if Silicon Valley people want to decide that like something is good taste, then they can, and that will just exist in their world.

59:19Yeah. And you can just create your own world around that. And as long as you, you know, the people, you know, or people you encounter believe it, it kind of becomes its own reality. I mean, I felt that way a little bit. I don't know. I don't fully understand the phenomenon, but the thing with the band geese where like suddenly you were hearing about them all the time. And I know there was the whole astroturfing thing, but whatever part of it was real. I mean, you know, the music's fine. Like I, I, I like it. It's not like my favorite thing ever, but it's okay. But like, it was presented as like the next Nirvana or something.

59:54And then suddenly it just kind of went away and I couldn't assess how much of a footprint that had in outside of the internet or who, whether anyone really was part of that, or if it was just some kind of illusion. But yeah, I feel like a lot of things are like that where you just start hearing about them and some people you know will be into them. And it's not really assimilated in the kind of like broader narrative of what's going on in culture. Like something would have been in the 90s, but it just comes and goes. I can't really like, I mean, maybe this exists, but I just don't see it. But I can't like associate Geese with like a specific scene or social milieu even within New York City.

1:00:35And I don't see, you know, Cameron Winter might be the equivalent of like what a Julian Casablanca was or something 20 years ago. But like you don't see like everybody just like dressing like Cameron Winter all of a sudden. Yeah, it just doesn't have as much. It's not as sticky or something. It doesn't get as much traction. Like people know about it, but it doesn't like with the strokes. There was like a very powerful image that you just couldn't. You couldn't really like forget. and it stuck it had pretty um powerful like influence and stuck around and then there's also like probably has been discussed at length elsewhere but just kind of a a looser relationship between like subcultural aesthetics and actual like subcultural belonging like you know you can it's more normal now for somebody to like dress like a goth one day but not actually be a goth or we don't have the same like barriers for entry socially that used to come along with subcultures like that.

1:01:39And so everything's just kind of like floating around. I don't know. Is this what like the theorists predicted would happen with like signifiers, Andrea? Like cultural signifiers that they would become detached from their reference and then just kind of only refer to themselves? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, we seem to have gotten pretty far along with that. And what I wonder then is like, how much farther can it go? Or does it have to ultimately reverse? And what you were saying about the internet and like AI, like needs more input. And if it runs out of input, and if everything gets too detached and fragmented and fluid, then there's no foundation for something else to be like, built on top of.

1:02:24and it just kind of all circulates endlessly in an entropic state. Yeah. Which actually makes me think that like the last place where taste will exist is in like, as you talk about your article, like public space or local, like locally where people see their peers. I think Dime Square was weirdly a good example of that, where it was like these people who all congregated in this like few square block area and then kind of had their own, develop their own like aesthetics and not to like put it on a pedestal or anything but like where it is like small groups in person responding and reacting to one another and expressing themselves in relationship to what already exists and i can almost see that like that will be maybe we'll see fashion become more like location dependent or something yeah interesting that's probably why like the meat like dime square the origin of it and in 2021 i remember wondering like Like, will this last or will anyone be talking about Dime Square in five years?

1:03:28And I think the reason that it did kind of, it was like manifested into a real thing that people still talk about was probably because it had a physical footprint. And many other things like that that were just on the Internet that were happening at the same time have probably been less well remembered. and now it has become like a clearing house for anybody who's been in new york for like a few days and just like goes in there and i think what it's kind of like that area is now yeah i'm honest with like the bus the bus pulls in from ohio drops everybody off yes i think it's also important to remember that like taste is kind of being currently tied to scarcity as well like taste is not again with like a bourdeaux type reading it's never like innate or pure like it's always it's used for social navigation and social exclusion you know even if that's like a cool hip subculture or whatever and i think part of why taste feels so weird right now is because it's actually quite abundant because of the internet yeah yeah at least with which the pastes to which we are exposed to it and the breadth of it and therefore access to it especially like the like teamification of everything yeah and i think that's just totally like existentially like jammed the notion and function of taste because you can kind of just like yeah it's like thrown taste itself into kind of existential crisis which isn't to say it doesn't still have a kind of utility and i think like maybe in a way silicon valley is like redirecting that utility because they see that like taste from the human curation sense is the thing that is going to become scarce yeah yeah and i mean it'll be very interesting to see how it's hard to distinguish wish real and fake in some of that like the simulation the ability to simulate it is easier than ever so you it almost like the role of taste will be the person who's actually able to to tell the real thing from the almost real version of it that is available if you just want to take all these cultural signifiers that you've found online and jumble them together like only the people that have the good eye or the good ear can really know what's going on when they see that and everyone else might just be kind of easily convinced by it yeah exactly it's a it's ultimately like a form of it's ultimately a power exercise it's a form of exercising power because taste is like i don't need this i like it you know right and like that's part of why the origins of taste are in like elites which is very interesting because i feel like it's totally inverted itself but you know the things that were seen as like less tasteful or whatever, like were deemed such because that was like something the poors needed.

1:06:13It's like why rich people don't talk about money. It's like not tasteful. But it's because it's also because like the poors have to talk about money. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's probably why taste will continue to be a thing always because it's ultimately just about domination or class antagonism. Right. which is why i'm like i think i think what's happening here is silicon valley is realizing they need taste to like close the loop of like power assertion yeah i don't know it's one form of domination left yeah yeah exactly yeah i like to think that taste isn't only that but for the purposes of the discussion yes because it can also be about like i think of like because we talked about this recently in another podcast like the black hipsters of the 1940s they asserted their elite taste as a form of rebellion against an oppressive society or a form of like well i mean i guess it's like it can also be that the oppressed exercises taste in that like as yeah as a form of like counter counter yeah as a form of class warfare in a more positive sense totally totally yeah and i think i think we've seen it shift significantly heavier towards that and that's the thing and that's why we're now with the elites having no taste which is like hilarious to think about if you like read something like distinction and like its emergence from the bourgeoisie yeah all comes full circle all right so as ai becomes increasingly embedded in our lives and as the silicon valley usurping of taste continues how do we expect our notions of good taste and its functions the functions it serves to evolve like do we think we'll see continued backlash in the form of culture that like valorizes nostalgia and luddite aesthetics like artisanality or are things going to get more complicated than that yeah now i'm now i'm thinking about your the class warfare angle that we just brought up but i i think what i do think um a near-term prediction that I've been tossing around a lot is just the idea that like it was alluded to a minute ago by Emily but that like embodiment and things with physical presence will become more valuable and more I think we've already moved in that direction in the last few years as well or the post-pandemic shift in culture but I think it like AI you know threatens once again to dematerialize all these things and i think the almost like the term proof of work like there's it's so easy to simulate information information is so cheap that the thing that is valuable and scarce is presence and whatever it'll take a variety of forms but i think that um people will look to that more and more as proof that something is real or not synthetic not that it's bad for something to be synthetic but um people like the fear of being duped by cheap copies of things or or things that are not representing themselves accurately will cause a craving for the physical world which we've you know in some ways kind of abandoned uh and i think it'll just become a source of value and and taste maybe like reconnected to that to that world more and more i've been chewing over like that as a concept i feel like we're gonna have like i foresee like qed like as a concept becoming its own aesthetic you know like qed core like showing your work yeah you know you know lump it in with like friction maxing or whatever it's something we were like talking about earlier in the year when we were like doing our coachella episode about how like i think there's an appetite for imperfection now because perfection and like sleekness and all that can be like so easily wrought like some of the more popular performances at Coachella or the popular artists there like from geese to like Justin Bieber like noodling on his laptop you know it's is like imperfect and it's like showing it's inherently showing its work right so yeah yeah the thing that is confusing to me is like it makes sense that like there would be kind of a reaction to AI in the form of like Luddite core I mean kind of like already are seeing that then the AI companies are also like kind of co-opting that already themselves and so I'm kind of like that can't be the final form of like I'm just like embracing Luddite like circling around nostalgia forever being like low-tech anti-tech it can't be like the final form of culture yeah in response to this like it has to go somewhere after that especially when like those aesthetics are easily co-optable so i just like right i mean i'm at a loss i don't know what's gonna happen but i think and i also think it would be like bad i think it would be bad if it like only went in that direction too and like boring for culture yeah there's always very like limited cultural mileage on anything that like defines itself by what it isn't you know and so like i agree with you emily i think that can only go so far by being like anti-something like you got to be pro something so like what's the what's going to be the pro here you know yeah I'm really curious what happens when um like I think social media too is starting to there's just the whole nature of it and the audience is changing because AI is it's kind of almost becoming like a background layer to so much of of what it used to be the foreground of and um a lot of stuff you know like it's almost like computers are the audience for a lot of stuff that is is put out there and so if this whole like level of the internet kind of just sinks out of view but still exists than like what occupies the foreground and what are we paying attention to when we're not when we don't have to pay attention to all this stuff that we used to have to yeah ai can do it and like it's just bots making culture for bots and we're just here that would be kind of cool all right well drew austin it's been a pleasure having you on um where can people follow you and find your work?

1:12:26I'm on kneelingbus.substack.com. That's the main place I'm active on the internet these days. I'm also kneelingbus on Twitter, but I don't really post much there anymore as of the last few months. So, Substack, kneelingbus. Thanks for having me on. Right on. Thanks.

1:12:50This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominik. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.