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

I think taste almost can move in two directions. There is that internal sense of what am I feeling when I experience a work of art? What is happening in my own brain, in my soul when I listen to this music?

And then there’s this external idea of it, which is being super self-conscious about what other people are consuming, how they’re consuming it,

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

We treat everything as a poll and not as criticism. And that felt very efficient to me for a while. And now it feels very weird.

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

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.

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 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