Robin Good

In an era of information abundance, the ability to filter effectively has become a premium skill. Good taste is cultural literacy: knowing the right references, understanding history, and recognising what matters beneath the surface noise.

AI augmentation is a future requirement, but remain mindful of what’s outsourced. Going forward, we need more demanding journeys than we do mindless shortcuts. Shortcuts rarely yield fun, stories or lessons. If it's easy, it likely isn’t worthwhile.

I am noticing how maxed out people’s mental bandwidth is these days- for every online creator the struggle is very real (subscription fatigue & co.)

Many of us still want to read, comment and engage, but there’s simply too much of everything all the time. And so we mentally “save” it all for “later” that never arrives.

But at the same time, the need... See more

To understand the role of a curator today, think of a sieve in a gold rush: the AI provides the massive pile of silt and sand (the data), but the curator's "taste" is the mesh that allows the worthless dirt to fall through while catching the rare, valuable nuggets of gold. Without the sieve, you just have a pile of dirt; with it, you have a... See more

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

There is something deeply offensive in knowing not only that hundreds of thousands of my words have vanished, but that some LLM is probably crawling through the tattered fragments to churn out mockeries of the very real sources, research, and energy that once backed those words. They’ll be vomited back on the shores of my browser, squirming and... See more