Last September, I wrote an essay called The Era of Designers in which I argued that as AI democratizes creation, the real differentiator would no longer be the ability to build, but the ability to design. And that taste would become one of the most valuable things a person could have.

Fast forward a couple of months, and taste became the word. Feeds have become full of “taste”. Regardless of the topic I may be exploring or conversations I engage in, the word taste will always make its way there. Everyone suddenly has something to say about taste.

I included, but this may be the last thing I write on taste because I am starting to hate the word. I am starting to hate what it’s becoming and how it’s being used. I believe taste is on its way to becoming one of the most overused, most hollow, and most hated words in our cultural vocabulary, right alongside community and authenticity.

These were all words that once meant something deep (they still do, but only for some) and now mean almost nothing because everyone says them and almost no one “lives” them. From my observation, most of the things people are calling taste (Pinterest boards, curated feeds, or font choices) are actually preferences shaped by algorithms, choices that were never really chosen. The word is getting louder while the thing it describes is starting to lose its color.

And in all this talk about taste (taste as the new competitive advantage, taste as the thing AI can’t replicate, taste as the moat, taste as the edge, taste as this and that) I think we’ve completely lost sight of the only thing that actually matters: the person behind it.

We talk about taste as if it exists on its own, but I don’t think it floats in the air. It lives in a human being, and it is the expression of a self (of how that self sees, what that self values, and what that self has lived through and decided to care about).

When we talk about taste without talking about the person, we strip it of the only thing that gives it meaning.

Pierre Bourdieu spent decades studying taste, and what he found was that taste, as most people experience it, is social rather than personal. In “Distinction”, he showed that what we call our taste is largely shaped by class, education, and cultural environment. He called it habitus, which is defined as the system of internalized dispositions that makes our socially conditioned preferences feel natural and chosen.

For Bourdieu, taste was always a mechanism of social distinction, a way for groups to signal belonging and maintain boundaries. The upper classes used “refined” taste to differentiate themselves. Everyone used taste, consciously or not, to mark who was in and who was out. What felt like personal expression was, in large part, social reproduction.

I resonate deeply with this, as I cannot say I agree or disagree because who am I to do this with one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century??? But when I look at how things work, his framework makes too much sense to me to ignore it.

Taste has always been shaped by forces outside us, like the environment we grew up in, or the things we were exposed to. All of this was already doing the work of constructing our preferences before we ever thought we were choosing them.

What’s changed since Bourdieu’s argument is speed. The social conditioning he described happened slowly, over years, through upbringing and gradual cultural exposure. I look at it as being something generational, as you inherited taste the way you inherited an accent.

The internet industrialized that process, its impact being most evident through social media and AI. The algorithm only needs weeks to shape our habitus as it shows you what everyone else likes, and slowly you begin to like it too. AI accelerates this further, as it mirrors your existing patterns back to you faster than you can examine them. It generates options based on what’s already popular, and you select from a menu that was written by the system, not by you.

While the choosing may feel like taste, I would argue that it’s not, because the thinking never happened.

Today’s question is whether you have good taste. But if taste is the expression of a self, the real question is whether you’ve done the thinking that produces it and whether you’ve sat with your own preferences long enough to know which ones are actually yours.

I define thinking as the capacity to reflect, to subtract, and to sit with uncertainty until you arrive at something that is yours and not a reproduction of what was handed to you. And to me, that is the real moat. The real infrastructure is thinking. taste is just the output.

And thinking is the thing that’s under threat, because the tools we use every day are doing so much of the thinking for us that we’re losing the muscle for it.

At times, I am talking about the way these tools have domesticated us, and people call me crazy, but I do believe that this is the reality. These tools tell us what to post, when to post it, how to frame it, what will perform, and they are completely influencing how we think about what’s worth creating in the first place. They are outsourcing our thinking and while we think what we have is taste, what we actually remain with is compliance.

I believe most people today don’t have taste in the way they think they do because the conditions for developing it have been systematically eroded. The result is a taste that looks personal but is actually a reflection of the system. It’s one that was assembled from parts that were handed to you, that feels like being completely yours. The saddest thing about this is that most people can’t tell the difference, because the system has become so good at making its outputs feel like your inputs.

And I know this because I’ve lived it.

I haven’t grown much on social media, and the main reason is that I’ve never followed this algorithmic playbook. I’ve never chased trends, and I’ve never optimized my content for what the platform wants to reward. I’d be lying if I said I never tried, as I did, a handful of times, and I hated how it made me frame everything I was putting out there. Maybe that was the biggest mistake of my life in terms of reach and numbers, but it gave me something I value more:

the people who are around me are there because something I was making resonated with something in who they are, not because an algorithm served me to them. That’s a different relationship entirely.

I’ve been going through a similar thing with AI. I started using it in 2022 with an early access to Dall-E, then I started using ChatGPT on a daily basis more than I was using any other program, and later I started using more AI tools. What I’ve noticed is that in a way, it was reshaping the way I think. Whenever I gave a prompt I had to think for a few times about the way I am writing it in order to have a better output (not always the output I desired).

More than this, it always offered suggestions, all of its responses were structured, and it made certain kinds of thinking feel effortless and some others completely unnecessary. When I realized this, I knew that I had to choose between molding myself to the tool or molding the tool to myself. I decided to create with AI on my own terms, to make it serve my thinking rather than replace it. It is a harder process, but it’s more rewarding because I am not only preserving my thinking, but also enriching it.

I am still in the process of being fully free of these influences, as I find myself at times still being shaped by things I haven’t fully identified yet. I am still working to subtract, and to fully find which preferences are mine and which were placed there by something else. This is ongoing work, and I have a long way to go, but I believe the work is possible. For all of us.

What I mean when I talk about taste, the version I actually care about, is the things you would choose if no one were watching. The preferences you would hold if there were no algorithm, trend, or social signal to suggest or reward you. The thing that remains when all the layers of influence are removed.

That taste exists, and it does in everyone. But a work of removing rather than adding is required to uncover it.

This is the thing that only a few people in the taste discourse are talking about. Most are discussing what taste produces, but only a few are discussing who’s doing the tasting, which is the human being underneath.

We’ve been so focused on the output that we’ve forgotten the source.

The word taste might be on its way to becoming meaningless, and that may be a loss. Though, looking at the past, words get hollowed out all the time (community or authenticity are the best examples), and there is a familiar cycle forming:

something real gets named, the name gets popular, the popularity drains it of meaning, and eventually the word becomes something superficial used for attention or other purposes that may have nothing to do with its real meaning.

Taste is following that exact trajectory, and I think it will get worse before it gets better. More people will use the word, and fewer will mean it. It will become a credential, and even a section on someone’s website. And the thing it once pointed to will become harder and harder to find underneath all the noise.

But the thing itself can’t be made meaningless. The person behind the seeing, choosing, and caring is still there. Underneath the algorithms, social conditioning, and the years of absorbing other people’s preferences as our own, the human is still there.

The work of finding ourselves, of peeling back the layers until we reach the preferences that are actually ours, is still possible. It has always been, and it just requires one thing that everything around us is designed to prevent:

Thinking. For yourself.🌹

Last September, I wrote an essay called The Era of Designers in which I argued that as AI democratizes creation, the real differentiator would no longer be the ability to build, but the ability to design. And that taste would become one of the most valuable things a person could have.

Fast forward a couple of months, and taste became the word. Feeds have become full of “taste”. Regardless of the topic I may be exploring or conversations I engage in, the word taste will always make its way there. Everyone suddenly has something to say about taste.

I included, but this may be the last thing I write on taste because I am starting to hate the word. I am starting to hate what it’s becoming and how it’s being used. I believe taste is on its way to becoming one of the most overused, most hollow, and most hated words in our cultural vocabulary, right alongside community and authenticity.

These were all words that once meant something deep (they still do, but only for some) and now mean almost nothing because everyone says them and almost no one “lives” them. From my observation, most of the things people are calling taste (Pinterest boards, curated feeds, or font choices) are actually preferences shaped by algorithms, choices that were never really chosen. The word is getting louder while the thing it describes is starting to lose its color.

And in all this talk about taste (taste as the new competitive advantage, taste as the thing AI can’t replicate, taste as the moat, taste as the edge, taste as this and that) I think we’ve completely lost sight of the only thing that actually matters: the person behind it.

We talk about taste as if it exists on its own, but I don’t think it floats in the air. It lives in a human being, and it is the expression of a self (of how that self sees, what that self values, and what that self has lived through and decided to care about).

When we talk about taste without talking about the person, we strip it of the only thing that gives it meaning.

Pierre Bourdieu spent decades studying taste, and what he found was that taste, as most people experience it, is social rather than personal. In “Distinction”, he showed that what we call our taste is largely shaped by class, education, and cultural environment. He called it habitus, which is defined as the system of internalized dispositions that makes our socially conditioned preferences feel natural and chosen.

For Bourdieu, taste was always a mechanism of social distinction, a way for groups to signal belonging and maintain boundaries. The upper classes used “refined” taste to differentiate themselves. Everyone used taste, consciously or not, to mark who was in and who was out. What felt like personal expression was, in large part, social reproduction.

I resonate deeply with this, as I cannot say I agree or disagree because who am I to do this with one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century??? But when I look at how things work, his framework makes too much sense to me to ignore it.

Taste has always been shaped by forces outside us, like the environment we grew up in, or the things we were exposed to. All of this was already doing the work of constructing our preferences before we ever thought we were choosing them.

What’s changed since Bourdieu’s argument is speed. The social conditioning he described happened slowly, over years, through upbringing and gradual cultural exposure. I look at it as being something generational, as you inherited taste the way you inherited an accent.

The internet industrialized that process, its impact being most evident through social media and AI. The algorithm only needs weeks to shape our habitus as it shows you what everyone else likes, and slowly you begin to like it too. AI accelerates this further, as it mirrors your existing patterns back to you faster than you can examine them. It generates options based on what’s already popular, and you select from a menu that was written by the system, not by you.

While the choosing may feel like taste, I would argue that it’s not, because the thinking never happened.

Today’s question is whether you have good taste. But if taste is the expression of a self, the real question is whether you’ve done the thinking that produces it and whether you’ve sat with your own preferences long enough to know which ones are actually yours.

I define thinking as the capacity to reflect, to subtract, and to sit with uncertainty until you arrive at something that is yours and not a reproduction of what was handed to you. And to me, that is the real moat. The real infrastructure is thinking. taste is just the output.

And thinking is the thing that’s under threat, because the tools we use every day are doing so much of the thinking for us that we’re losing the muscle for it.

At times, I am talking about the way these tools have domesticated us, and people call me crazy, but I do believe that this is the reality. These tools tell us what to post, when to post it, how to frame it, what will perform, and they are completely influencing how we think about what’s worth creating in the first place. They are outsourcing our thinking and while we think what we have is taste, what we actually remain with is compliance.

I believe most people today don’t have taste in the way they think they do because the conditions for developing it have been systematically eroded. The result is a taste that looks personal but is actually a reflection of the system. It’s one that was assembled from parts that were handed to you, that feels like being completely yours. The saddest thing about this is that most people can’t tell the difference, because the system has become so good at making its outputs feel like your inputs.

And I know this because I’ve lived it.

I haven’t grown much on social media, and the main reason is that I’ve never followed this algorithmic playbook. I’ve never chased trends, and I’ve never optimized my content for what the platform wants to reward. I’d be lying if I said I never tried, as I did, a handful of times, and I hated how it made me frame everything I was putting out there. Maybe that was the biggest mistake of my life in terms of reach and numbers, but it gave me something I value more:

the people who are around me are there because something I was making resonated with something in who they are, not because an algorithm served me to them. That’s a different relationship entirely.

I’ve been going through a similar thing with AI. I started using it in 2022 with an early access to Dall-E, then I started using ChatGPT on a daily basis more than I was using any other program, and later I started using more AI tools. What I’ve noticed is that in a way, it was reshaping the way I think. Whenever I gave a prompt I had to think for a few times about the way I am writing it in order to have a better output (not always the output I desired).

More than this, it always offered suggestions, all of its responses were structured, and it made certain kinds of thinking feel effortless and some others completely unnecessary. When I realized this, I knew that I had to choose between molding myself to the tool or molding the tool to myself. I decided to create with AI on my own terms, to make it serve my thinking rather than replace it. It is a harder process, but it’s more rewarding because I am not only preserving my thinking, but also enriching it.

I am still in the process of being fully free of these influences, as I find myself at times still being shaped by things I haven’t fully identified yet. I am still working to subtract, and to fully find which preferences are mine and which were placed there by something else. This is ongoing work, and I have a long way to go, but I believe the work is possible. For all of us.

What I mean when I talk about taste, the version I actually care about, is the things you would choose if no one were watching. The preferences you would hold if there were no algorithm, trend, or social signal to suggest or reward you. The thing that remains when all the layers of influence are removed.

That taste exists, and it does in everyone. But a work of removing rather than adding is required to uncover it.

This is the thing that only a few people in the taste discourse are talking about. Most are discussing what taste produces, but only a few are discussing who’s doing the tasting, which is the human being underneath.

We’ve been so focused on the output that we’ve forgotten the source.

The word taste might be on its way to becoming meaningless, and that may be a loss. Though, looking at the past, words get hollowed out all the time (community or authenticity are the best examples), and there is a familiar cycle forming:

something real gets named, the name gets popular, the popularity drains it of meaning, and eventually the word becomes something superficial used for attention or other purposes that may have nothing to do with its real meaning.

Taste is following that exact trajectory, and I think it will get worse before it gets better. More people will use the word, and fewer will mean it. It will become a credential, and even a section on someone’s website. And the thing it once pointed to will become harder and harder to find underneath all the noise.

But the thing itself can’t be made meaningless. The person behind the seeing, choosing, and caring is still there. Underneath the algorithms, social conditioning, and the years of absorbing other people’s preferences as our own, the human is still there.

The work of finding ourselves, of peeling back the layers until we reach the preferences that are actually ours, is still possible. It has always been, and it just requires one thing that everything around us is designed to prevent:

Thinking. For yourself.🌹