The New Cool Is Not Needing To Be Seen.
The idea of being a poser, of being driven to do things because it’ll look good and for the satisfaction of knowing someone thinks it looks good, not for the satisfaction of actually doing the thing. Could it be this is more prevalent today, because more eyes are on us all the time with the internet? Because we watch so much TV, we start thinking
... See moreWe live in an era where personal style is increasingly indistinguishable from brand strategy. The aesthetic codes that once belonged to subcultures, regions, or craftspeople have been flattened into algorithms—optimized for compatibility, trend velocity, and frictionless aspiration. When everything looks good, originality becomes the only risk... See more
Good Taste is Making You Boring
While it’s probably one of the corniest things I’ll ever write in this column, I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not... See more
Elizabeth Goodspeed on the Importance of Taste – And How to Acquire It
K-HOLE and Box1824 captured the new landscape in their breakthrough 2014 report “Youth Mode.” They described an era of “mass indie” where the search for meaning is premised on differentiation and uniqueness, and proposed a solution in “Normcore.” Humorously, nearly everyone mistook Normcore for being about bland fashion choices rather than the... See more
subpixel space • After Authenticity
The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture
A recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations.
By Kyle Chayka
October 30, 2024
Illustration by Ariel Davis
Save this story
In the 2010s, affiliate marketing became a dominant strain of online business models. The... See more
A recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations.
By Kyle Chayka
October 30, 2024
Illustration by Ariel Davis
Save this story
In the 2010s, affiliate marketing became a dominant strain of online business models. The... See more