Robin Good

Taste is discernment expressed: informed judgment plus the courage to show it. It only exists once you make a choice. ‘Discernment’ as in having a judgment based on a strong set of references, understanding the differences between things, and being able to articulate why you like or dislike something. ‘Expressed’ as in you have to make choices;You... See more

But what I began to notice, through all of it, was that something felt increasingly off. Not just in my own experience, but in the culture surrounding it. What once felt full of possibility had started to feel constricted. The language of freedom was still there, but beneath it was a kind of pressure that didn’t feel creative at all.

There’s a... See more

That an individual can him- or herself shape the way people understand the world is not itself radically new; however, concomitant with the rise in data has been what Clay Shirky has called a “cognitive surplus” (Shirky, 2010), whereby the connection and aggregation of humanity via the network also makes it possible to aggregate humankind’s time... See more

According to Bourdieu (1979): ‘social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.’

In other words, social classes define their preferences,... See more

The critical distinction is that today's gatekeepers derive authority not from institutional power but from demonstrated discernment. Cultural capital now flows to those who can navigate overwhelming abundance with skill and intention.

I think of taste like a radar. As you move through the world, your radar scans and picks up on what aligns.

The finding is elegant and disturbing: when AI systems are trained on data generated by previous AI systems—a scenario increasingly common as synthetic content floods the internet—the models progressively lose their ability to represent rare and subtle patterns. The statistical tails of the distribution vanish. The models converge toward median,... See more

Give users of all platforms the right to customize or opt out of algorithms—choosing chronological or geographical or genre-based filtering or even human curation.