Opinion | How to Discover Your Own Taste - The New York Times

I think having taste seems more important than ever, or cultivating your own taste, because you are surrounded by so many options and because it’s so easy to be passively fed whatever you’re looking for. Taste is always a way of carving out a distinction for yourself and figuring out who you are. And I think that’s more important when algorithmic f

there’s this vast generic agglomeration of stuff that we’re just cherry-picking from each place that we like and molding it into a great blob of generic culture.

Yeah, it tells you something about yourself. It gives you a deeper appreciation of the influences and understanding of where the music comes from. And I think that’s how artists work, too. They riff on people’s work who they find inspiring. They take parts of it and use it in new ways.

So I think when I think about the value of curation, it’s not just telling you what to consume. It’s giving you this holistic education and insight into how things work, into the context of objects or ideas. It involves vast amounts of labor and time and work to present objects or ideas or songs or whatever in the context that they deserve. And I f

Now I think we have newsletters, which is a relatively unmediated form of consuming someone’s stuff. And I feel like that’s right now, at least, where I follow the weirdest voices or get the complicated ideas to the point that sometimes they’re too complicated. I’m not reading your 8,000-word Substack on why you’re moving to Portugal or whatever.

And I do think there’s something there in — I miss curators. There are a couple newsletters that have a curatorial function now for me. But it’s hard to find a human being exposing you to their taste. And it’s something I really appreciate now when I find it. What I like about the internet is connecting with actual human beings.

The kind of culture that the algorithmic ecosystem ends up promoting is that widest possible average. It’s the stuff that avoids alienating people, keeps you engaged as much as possible, even if that engagement is very shallow. It’s fundamentally scalable, to use the horrible Silicon Valley word.

Whereas, I think, historically, the culture that we p

So there is this way in which it doesn’t feel to me that the algorithms have created more monoculture. It does push you in a direction. But there are more directions now than ever. I mean, I don’t know how I would find a bunch of the music I find now if I couldn’t start playing radio from any random thing that I get served up.

So I’m curious about t

when algorithms are feeding me things or doing something kind of like that, where they are looking at people a little bit more personalized, looking at people like me who seem to do things like what I do and then telling me if other people like me liked the thing.

But we’ve moved away from this attaching to a curator who has an individual taste and