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actions and selecting the pieces of content that will most suit our patterns of behavior. They are supposed to interpret and then show us what we want to see.

no one entity had forced all the various influencers and platforms to conform to the trend;

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The Mechanical Turk is like The Wizard of Oz’s man behind the curtain—an all-knowing, uncanny entity that is ultimately revealed as something much more mundane and comprehensible. The machine and the trick reinforce each other. With its doubled deceptions, the Turk is able, as Walter Benjamin wrote reflecting on the device in a 1940 essay, to “win

It offered evaluation, but no holistic understanding nor grounding in emotion. Style Check simply compared your choices to the net average of data in its archives.

But the camera also judged your clothes with a function called “Style Check,” using a combination of algorithmic analysis and human workers (recall Amazon’s faux-automated Mechanical Turk) to tell you if the garments matched or if the combination was fashionable.

word we often use for the people who sort and select the culture that we consume. Booksellers are tastemakers, but so are librarians who recommend titles for their patrons, professional buyers for lifestyle boutiques, radio-station DJs, movie booking agents who advocate on behalf of films to theaters nationwide, and concert programmers who book ban

Taste is a fundamental part of the self; developing or indulging it means constructing a firmer sense of self. It…

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“That the tearoom should be built to suit some individual taste is an enforcement of the…

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Montesquieu crucially argued that surprise, which can be alienating or challenging, like a particularly ugly wabi-sabi Japanese tea vessel, is a fundamental element of taste. “Something can surprise us because it…

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