Personal taste is being destroyed by technology and algorithms. That is the sobering conclusion of a growing body of cultural criticism, and it is a sentiment that will resonate with anyone who has found themselves scrolling through an endless feed of recommendations, unable to articulate what they actually like. The internet once promised a world of limitless discovery; instead, it has delivered a paradox: platforms built their business models on personalisation, then synthesised, commodified and automated individual taste into oblivion. We no longer choose what we want to consume; we take what we are given, and we are given it in such overwhelming quantities that we no longer have the mental capacity to digest it.
The Great Taste Robbery
To understand what has been lost, it helps to define what taste is. On one level, it is simple: what you like and what you do not. But as the writer and essayist Susan Sontag argued in her seminal 1964 work Notes on Camp, taste is all-encompassing. “There’s taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion … Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste – a taste in ideas,” she wrote, describing camp as a sensibility that “relishes, rather than judges” and a “mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment.” Taste, Sontag concluded, “governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response.” It is the closest thing most of us get to self-expression. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in his 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, argued that taste is not pure but is shaped by social class and background, functioning as a symbolic system for social judgment. “No judgment of taste is innocent,” Bourdieu wrote. Yet even within those constraints, authentic taste involved commitment, consistency and an element of risk. It required knowing that the things you like will not appeal to everyone. “Taste, when it’s successful, is a tool to make you feel more like yourself,” says Ione Gamble, founder of the alternative fashion publication Polyester.
That capacity for self-formation has been systematically dismantled. We used to form preferences through a combination of community, geography, mass and specialist media, and serendipitous accidents. Now we encounter most of culture through a single aperture: the algorithmic feeds of streaming and social media platforms, plus algorithmically optimised search engines and e-commerce sites from Amazon to Vinted. These systems are programmed to show each individual specific content based on data gathered from their own activities and those of other users – content designed to keep them on the platform for as long as possible. On Spotify, that might mean serving songs with superficial similarities to tracks you did not skip. On Instagram, it might mean multiple appearances from an influencer whose videos held your attention for a couple of minutes. In his 2024 book Filterworld, Kyle Chayka explains that because “accessible” and “ambient” content is most conducive to uninterrupted scrolling, “the least ambiguous, least disruptive and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most” by algorithms. The result is a bewildering feedback loop: the more you consume what you are given, the less you develop the muscle to choose for yourself.
From Serendipity to Sameness
The problem goes beyond the medium to the message itself. Years of algorithmic curation have taken a toll. Consumer trends – from childlike wall art to splatter ceramics, mesh ballet flats to bandanas, Dubai chocolate to putting cottage cheese in everything – become inescapable overnight, buoyed by the algorithm and reaching tedious saturation before anyone has had time to decide what they think of them. A visit to Portobello Road market in west London, a pre-algorithmic crucible of personal style, reveals that even vintage shopping is no longer immune. Kerry, a stallholder of eight years, has noticed a significant uptick in younger generations “wanting to fit in – they want to look like they belong.” Stephanie, 37, visiting from California, sees her friends at home “wearing the exact same outfit.” Helena, a 25-year-old stylist, is bored with the endless parade of microtrends. “They come around all the time and it’s always something that’s been done before. I hate when I see something that’s my vibe being turned into a microtrend – I’m, like, have I been influenced or is this actually me?”
Ione Gamble has spent her career thinking about such questions. “We’re always being told what to like and what not to like rather than being able to seek it out for ourselves,” she says. “It’s making us all feel powerless – we don’t have the power to train our own taste because there’s not the room in the day any more.” In her essay collection The Polyester Book of (Bad) Taste, the novelist Nicola Dinan writes about feeling like “a driverless car” when it comes to cultural consumption. It is an apt analogy for an era in which algorithms have taken the wheel.
Manufactured Enthusiasm and Mimicry
Two pop-cultural moments this year have crystallised the problem. First, the ascension of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy to 2026’s number one fashion icon. After the biopic series Love Story aired in February, her neutral, pared-back turn-of-the-millennium style was everywhere. Marks & Spencer promoted its “90s edit” by dressing a Bessette Kennedy lookalike, and Vogue provided a checklist of items to buy. Her friend Carole Radziwill pointed to the irony: “She did what felt natural to her … The takeaway is not to mimic her style. The takeaway is to do and wear what feels most authentic to you.” But working out what feels authentic has become nearly impossible since we subcontracted those instincts to corporate manipulation.
Second, the band Geese. The New York outfit generated so much hype that some suspected they were a music industry “plant” – and it turned out they had used the marketing services of a firm called Chaotic Good Projects, whose founders half-jokingly claim to have studied TikTok algorithms at “collegiate level.” The firm runs a huge number of social media accounts that post content soundtracked by its clients’ songs, a tactic it calls “trend simulation.” Meanwhile, the writer Lane Brown has explained the art of “clipping” – stealth advertising campaigns that involve paying members of the public to flood social media with content about a specific musician or TV show, tricking the algorithm into detecting widespread enthusiasm. One industry estimate suggests that “90% of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise.” The reason Geese’s case generated so much interest, one suspects, is that for many people, becoming a fan of the band had proven they could still feel genuine zeal for sophisticated new music – only to discover that zeal may have been manufactured.
Tech companies themselves are now trying to align with ideas of good taste in what Chayka calls “taste-washing” – an attempt to make an AI-dominated future more palatable. Palantir released a blue chore jacket; Anthropic produced caps embroidered with the word “thinking”; OpenAI’s merchandise includes football shirts and hipster-coded graphic hoodies. Jeff Bezos and his wife paid a reported $10m to serve as honorary chairs at this year’s Met Gala; Mark Zuckerberg sat in the front row at Prada’s Milan show. “To me, Silicon Valley’s use of taste is just PR or a marketing effort that gives them a veneer of humanity to hide automation behind,” Chayka says. The tech world is simultaneously destroying taste and trying to appropriate its cachet. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, posted on X that “taste is a new core skill,” echoing his former colleague Krithika Shankarraman, who said taste would become “a distinguishing factor in the age of AI” because AI would generate so much “drivel.” The concept of taste as a “moat” – a unique structural advantage – has taken root across the industry.
Meanwhile, AI-generated content is flooding our feeds. It is estimated that about 71% of the images shared online are now AI-generated, as are more than a third of podcasts; last year Spotify removed 75m AI tracks. The term “AI slop” has entered the lexicon – the Cambridge Dictionary recently added a definition for “slop” as “content on the internet that is of very low quality, especially when it is created by artificial intelligence,” and Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year. Phenomena such as Fruit Love Island, an AI-generated microdrama featuring anthropomorphic fruit, are “tailored for eyeballs, not even enjoyment,” says Gamble. In The End of Taste, the final chapter of her book, she writes that “we’re entering a new era in which good and bad taste is no longer a barometer worth thinking about.” Carmen Vicente, a social media strategist who writes the newsletter Scroll Sick, believes the motivation behind taste-washing is “fear – fear of losing power.”
Off-Ramps and Analogue Hopes
Yet there are signs of a backlash. According to the Financial Times, time spent on social media peaked in 2022, and a recent Ofcom survey showed a 12% drop in people posting on platforms in the past year. Algorithmic fatigue is one reason. “The active user base of Facebook has begun declining and I think platforms like Instagram and Spotify are now seen as less influential, creative or original than a few years back,” says Chayka. He predicts a splintering of the internet into smaller independent platforms. “Decentralisation is definitely here in the form of newsletter culture and Patreon-style crowdfunding models.”
Several algorithm-free alternatives are gaining traction. Tyler Bainbridge founded Perfectly Imperfect in 2020, frustrated with algorithms defining everyone’s tastes, and in 2024 launched PI.FYI, an algorithm-free social media site that shares recommendations in chronological order. With 200,000 users, it is niche, but the film recommendation site Letterboxd, which offers a similar community-driven approach, now has about 26 million members. Short-form interview formats such as Dream Baby Press’s Love/Hate Lists and Perfectly Imperfect itself ask celebrities to name their favourite things – the more random, the better – tapping into a thirst for genuine, un-optimised preferences. Newsletters have proliferated, though Erin Wylie, co-founder of the cult style newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, notes that “almost all of these people are profiting off of what they’re recommending.” (Her own publication does not accept gifts or affiliate links for products, except books and one-off eBay or Etsy finds.)
The biggest, most productive constraint we can give ourselves is to get off the internet entirely. The idea of returning to the real world is clearly appealing: “Is 2026 the year of analogue?” asked a Dazed headline in January, referring to the trend for sketchbooks, vinyl and film cameras. Gamble has noticed Gen Z “picking up physical media again. I have started rebuying magazines that I had when I was a teenager so I can dig into references that aren’t just on Pinterest.” At Portobello Road, the older clientele look most distinctive by a huge margin. Pip, a milliner who hates social media and has been coming to the market for 20 years, wears a white coat embroidered with images of Inuit people, a mauve scarf and a flat knitted hat. She mixes eras and wears things that make her “happy”. “I went through a phase where I was really into 1950s clothing, then I went 40s, 30s, 20s, then Victorian stuff.” Her instincts evolved via deep familiarity with fashion history.
Helena, the stylist, finds offline fashion inspiration in her dad – “a Tabi, cargos, T-shirt and big sunglasses wearer. It’s totally him – he isn’t online.” For those still struggling to distinguish algorithmic influence from genuine preference, Gamble offers a test: “Always question yourself. Why do I like that? Do I just like it because I’ve been shown it 100 times – or do I genuinely love it?”
