What are you into? What floats your boat? What music, films, clothes, art, books – anything, really – do you actually like? Do you find these questions more difficult to answer than you would have done 10 years ago? How about 20? You do? You’re not alone.
It has become impossible to ignore: personal taste has been seriously debased – if not completely destroyed – by technological advancement. We know the internet has radically altered the way we form our opinions and beliefs. Now we’re waking up to another sobering truth: it has wrecked our capacity to form our own preferences.
It used to go something like this. We experienced the outside world – including arts, culture and fashion – via a combination of community, geography, mass and specialist media, and serendipitous accidents. Exposed to a range of styles, genres and ideas, we would decide what appealed to us, and then attempt (with varying degrees of success) to consume and engage with those things.
This is no longer the case. We increasingly encounter most aspects of the world through a single aperture: streaming and social media platforms. Or, more specifically, the algorithmic feeds of streaming and social media platforms, plus algorithmically optimised search engines and e-commerce sites, from Amazon to Vinted. In many cases, these are programmed to show each individual specific content based on data gathered from their own activities and those of other users – content that will ideally keep them on the platform for as long as possible. On Spotify, that can mean serving customers songs with superficial similarities to the tracks they didn’t skip last time; on Instagram, it might result in multiple appearances from an influencer whose videos have previously held our attention for a couple of minutes. We now experience reality via a limitless stream of content tailored around previous preferences.
It’s a bewildering paradox: these platforms made personalisation a major part of their business model, then synthesised, commodified and automated individual taste into oblivion. We no longer choose what we want to consume; we take what we’re given. And we are being given it in such overwhelming quantities that we no longer have the mental capacity to properly digest and assess what we have encountered.
It’s not merely the medium; it’s the message, too. In his 2024 book Filterworld, Kyle Chayka explains that because content that is “accessible” and “ambient” is most conducive to uninterrupted scrolling, “the least ambiguous, least disruptive and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most” by algorithms.
This is not a new phenomenon, but years of living like this have started to take their toll. I began noticing that it was affecting me at some point last year. Scrolling through reams of overtly…
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