taste

Extrapolating from the premise of Aspirational Humanity, I’m proposing that charisma, not taste, may be the most covetable skill in the age of AI. Perhaps your aesthetic sensibility is irrelevant, as long as you can hold a great conversation. AI can style your outfit, but it’s not going to be a helpful wingwoman at the bar. As our external facades... See more

Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.

I see three distinct drivers of taste: Inputs, Filters, and Discernment.

• INPUTS are the experiences, knowledge and data you seek. Your brain is a system that absorbs whatever is around it, and then mashes it together alongside a lot of emotionally-driven randomness that results in all sorts of ideas, mistakes of the eye, and a lens on the world

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Maybe if you spin it in the right kind of way with the right kind of confidence and a baseline level of taste anything can be cool?

So, there’s the trick. The path to taste is really as simple as writing a little plus and minus in the margin more often. If we apply this to digital space, we can turn them from an overwhelming and chaotic bombardment into a steady stream of things we find beautiful, that in turn, can define our tastes. For me, Are.na is a space for this kind of... See more