Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta, and we have a refined show for you this week. In this
episode, Georgia chats with journalist, critic, and New
Yorker staff writer Kyle Chaeka about the formulation of taste
and how the Internet helps and hinders that process. Do you
really like what you like? How do you know in the first place?
Does it matter? Will the band Geese be mentioned? But first,
we're gonna take a quick break, and you'll listen to some ads,
unless you're on the member feed. And when we return,
Georgia, Kyle, and a taste of the Internet.
Georgia Hampton: For the last month and some change, my social
feeds have been having what seems to be a mass crash out
about personal taste. The message I keep seeing plastered
across headlines and declared cynically through tweets was
that personal taste, developing it, having it, is dead. It is no
longer possible to trust the things we like or trust our
ability to choose things to like because, as it turns out, we
don't really get to choose what to enjoy anymore. Everything we
see online is nothing more than a big PR stunt trick. And the
epicenter of the discourse, the thing that launched a million
articles and posts about the end of personal taste, is the
Brooklyn based rock band, Geese.
Geese: God of the sun, I'm ticking you down on the inside.
Georgia Hampton: Geese has been making music since 2021, but
they really blew up last year, like majorly. An appearance on
SNL, a write up in The New Yorker, even a glowing review
from The Guardian declaring them the saviors of rock and roll all
in the span of a couple of months. And according to an
article from Wired that came out in April of this year, the band
skyrocketed to fame not because of a natural uptick in
listenership, but because Geese is the client of Chaotic Good
Projects, a marketing firm that helps bands go viral.
Representatives from CGP are not shy about their methods. Co
founder Adam Tarcia proudly told Wired how the rockstar sausage
gets made, Namely, through coordinated online campaigns
using thousands of bot accounts that generate discourse all over
TikTok and YouTube.
The bots may start the conversation, but the goal is to
get real people to start chiming in and keeping it going. More
discourse, artificially created but maintained by real people,
juices the algorithm, which then shows Geeze's music to more
people and drives up the band's popularity. And clearly, it
worked. CGP was, I should say, quick to add that their methods
wouldn't work if Geese wasn't a good band, that no amount of
Blitz marketing campaigns could actually make popular to the
degree that they now are. And maybe that would have been
easier to believe if Geese was an outlier in their use of this
kind of marketing.
But they aren't. The puppeteering of online interest
isn't just the business of one New York based rock band. Chapel
Rowan is a client of CGP, and so is Zara Larsen and Somber and
Oak Glue and many others. Popularity has always had a
fraught relationship to Taste. Popularity is determined by
metrics, where the band sits on the Billboard 100, how many
downloads an album has on Spotify, record sales, Grammy
wins, the list goes on.
And those things don't always reflect the actual opinion of
real people who listen or don't listen to that music. I mean,
look at the best new artist winner at the Grammys for, oh,
the last two decades. Popularity is equatable to ubiquity. And
the persistent presence of something is very easy to force
with the right amount of money and the right kind of
connections. This has been true since the days of Payola.
But the way that geese became popular through the tools of the
Internet felt different and worse to fans. And a lot of the
conversation I see about why it feels worse comes from the fear
that everything is an ad and that you can't trust any posts
because they all must be financially incentivized. And
therefore, if you like any of those things, you've just been
tricked. But I don't really agree with that, at least not
entirely. If the CGP marketing campaign worked on you and you
genuinely like the band Geese because you saw them online, I
really don't think that's a bad thing.
Geese: God of the sun, I'm taking you down on the inside.
Georgia Hampton: But there's another interesting problem here
worth exploring because I think that the way that our personal
taste is presented back to us online winds up making us lose
interest in the things we actually like and leaves very
little in its place. Taste is a hard thing to define properly
because its very nature is so subjective. Susan Sontag, in her
essay on camp, described it as a sensibility. Certainly not
something so concrete as an idea. It's I mean, it's a vibe.
Taste is made up of the stuff you like and what you buy, the
clothes you wear, the movies you go watch, the concerts you pay
to see. But all those things amount to more than just stuff.
Kyle Chayka: A lot of times people think of good taste as
this rule book, like what is cool or what is not cool. They
think of it as a list of things they should like or should not
like. But I think through my work, I've argued that taste is
more than just a personal preference. It's kind of what
things mean to you. Like, what kinds of culture you identify
with, what things build your sense of self, what moves you.
Georgia Hampton: That's Kyle Czaca.
Kyle Chayka: I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker where I write
a weekly column about the Internet called Infinite Scroll.
And I've also written books including Filter Worlds, which
was about algorithms and cultural homogenization.
Georgia Hampton: Kyle's definition of taste is the most
relatable version I've been able to find because it quickly does
away with the idea of good and bad taste and focuses instead on
your relationship to your own taste. Like I said, taste is so
subjective, as it should be. I don't really subscribe to the
idea that we must all bend the knee to a select group of taste
makers pointing us to the right or more pointedly cool movies or
music or clothes. At the end of the day, it's always up to you.
The greatest value of taste, cultivating it, having it,
changing it over time, lies in the relationship it helps you
build with yourself.
Kyle Chayka: Anyone can have taste. Like, the everyone does
have taste. The baseline of taste is just what do you enjoy
and what is meaningful to you in in culture or aesthetic
experience. Good taste to me is good personal taste, which is
knowing what you personally like and being secure in your own
enjoyment of it and knowing why you like it and knowing what the
thing is. Just having this like confident sense of what is
meaningful to you.
But that can be anything. I mean, like, Disney adults are
very secure in their taste for Disney. It doesn't doesn't have
to be, you know, Wong Kar wai films or whatever.
Georgia Hampton: If you feel confident in the things you
like, the popularity of any one of those things doesn't really
matter. Like, I really loved Rosalia's new album Luxe. And in
a couple weeks, I'm gonna go see her perform it at a huge stadium
show with thousands of other people. Now would it have been
more financially helpful to me if this album wasn't as popular
and I could have seen her at a smaller venue for less money?
Sure.
But that doesn't affect how much I love the album. I know I love
it because of the way it sounds, the themes of the songs,
Rosalia's voice, and a million other reasons that have
everything to do with me and what I like. Personal taste can
always change and does always change. And as we all ride the
wave of our personal taste as it grows and shifts, the feeds of
social platforms can be a great way to discover new things to
like. I learned that Rosalia was coming out with a new album
because the song Berghain kept getting sampled across TikTok.
But my feed isn't just accounting for my interest in
Rosalia. It's gathering data about countless other posts
about her, about the album, discourse about her that's
getting popular on other parts of the Internet that make it to
me whether I like it or not.
Kyle Chayka: I mean, peep users online, all of us are so
bracketed in by the formats of digital platforms, by the
incentives behind what we post, by the ads and recommendations
and brands that clutter up the spaces in which we create and
consume culture. And so I think it becomes harder to feel like
you have a grip on what you're seeing or what you're listening
to or what you're watching.
Georgia Hampton: As I swipe, I'm rushed through entire parts of
the Internet that I've never looked for and don't care about.
The stuff I want to see is also there, jockeying for position.
But when all of it is being thrown at me at the same time,
it's hard to control the balance. I desperately cling to
videos that are doing lyric analysis of the tracks on Luxe,
but they get shoved aside by videos with more views that are
trying to decipher whether or not Rosalia was singing live at
her London show. And the sheer volume of content makes it
harder to actually get at the things that are to my taste.
The taste I had originally developed online.
Kyle Chayka: And that noise, like that distraction and chaos,
I think, prevents you, the individual user, from really
thinking about what you're seeing in front of you and
thinking about what you're experiencing online, and thus it
becomes harder to have your own sense of personal taste. Which
is not to mention like the the overwhelming presence of
algorithmic feeds that that crowd your taste with everyone
else's taste. Like, algorithms take in the data of everyone on
a platform and then use that to predict what kinds of content
you'll like, and they often end up just promoting what is
already popular.
Georgia Hampton: Volume is the name of the game here. If the
feed is like an infinite buffet of stuff you might like, the
algorithm is the spoon heaping piles of food onto your plate.
Surely, you might find something you'd enjoy eating. But when
that mountain of macaroni salad and eggplant Parmesan and puppy
chow gets higher and higher with no sign of stopping, it can be
easy to lose that delicious morsel you actually enjoyed. In
order to really get into Rosalia's new album, I had to
step away from the feed and listen to the music on my own.
My taste about Luxe couldn't really form completely through
the channels of the feed because I was being surrounded by noise.
10,000 voices shouting at me about a bunch of things I wasn't
interested in. But it's sort of impossible to avoid a degree of
this. Even if you fine tune your algorithm to show you things to
your preference, a few things will always sneak through the
cracks by the sheer amount of attention, artificial or
otherwise, paid to it. Sometimes, my TikTok feed will
feebly try to present me with NBA Finals Supercuts or the
third video in a series of seven about the latest drama between
two YouTubers I've never heard of.
Geese: Oh my god.
Georgia Hampton: I regularly refer to things like this as
topics I've learned against my will. Data that came to me not
by my own search for it, but just by the fact of existing on
the Internet.
Kyle Chayka: I mean, I I always think of this famous bit of
marketing research that advertising works best after
someone is exposed to the same thing. I think it was six or
seven times. And that's on the sixth or seventh time of
exposure, that's when the conversion happens. Like, that's
when the customer actually buys the thing or clicks through,
let's say. So I feel like that kind of exposure, not therapy,
but like ex weaponized exposure, let's say, is behind a lot of
that knowing things against your will online.
Like the eighth time you see a Sabrina Carpenter video or
something, it's just gonna stick in your brain more. The the
twentieth time you hear espresso. To use a slightly
outdated reference point, it's gonna stick in your head and
that's and then you will know who Sabrina Carpenter is
essentially against your will.
Georgia Hampton: CGP's marketing strategy banks on this format of
engagement. Fill your FYP with a clip of a song by one of their
clients enough times, and it becomes impossible to ignore.
But knowing about Sabrina Carpenter and liking her music
are not the same thing.
Kyle Chayka: You see so many things just flash by you on a
screen, and you have enough time to register a few bare
sensations like blonde hair, pop star, bubblegum music, you know,
and that's that's all that sticks with you. And so instead
of deep engagement, you have this repeated superficial
engagement.
Georgia Hampton: Yeah. And it it does make me feel like I I mean,
I'm not surprised to say this. I think the algorithmic feeds make
it abundantly easy to just gather sort of fun facts and not
actual deep elements of culture.
Kyle Chayka: Fun fact culture is a good one. That's we're living
we're
Georgia Hampton: living in
Kyle Chayka: a real fun fact age where it's like the what were
those v h one pop up videos with just the little annotations on
them?
Georgia Hampton: It's like, did you know? Those are her real
shoes.
Kyle Chayka: Yeah. That's that is our level of cultural
discourse at this point.
Georgia Hampton: The culture of fun facts is great for
platforms. To extend the food metaphors from before, it's like
giving you infinitely refillable access to deliciously salty,
buttery popcorn. Little bites for you to enjoy and come back
for and enjoy and come back for again. Snackable content. But
you will never fill up on popcorn.
Having a repertoire of fun facts is not the same thing as taste.
After the break, more thoughts on the content buffet. The
Feed's endless buffet of stuff is a potable source of discovery
if you use it as just that, the starting place. And so long as
you have confidence in your own taste, that security that Kyle
was talking about, then the popularity, the ubiquity of a
song like espresso may not bother you. But I think the
trouble here is that the feed overstays its welcome a lot of
the time.
The first few times I heard espresso, for example, I really
liked it. That marketing ploy Kyle was talking about totally
worked on me. By the fifth or sixth listen, I thought, oh,
Okay, this is fun. But then I heard it, oh, 38,000 more times,
and I got so sick of it that I never wanted to hear it again.
Geese: God of the sun
Georgia Hampton: And I bet a lot of people felt this way hearing
fifteen second clips of Geese's music for the upteenth time.
You're being confronted with the unavoidable presence of a band
you at first maybe didn't care about
Geese: What the hell?
Georgia Hampton: And eventually hated Mommy. Because of sheer
repetition and the dogged insistence by your feed that
this is important. Even if you strongly disagree with that. And
that will make you a fan of geese. If anything, it'll make
you a staunch hater of geese or at least a hater of the chorus
of Cameron Winter's solo track Love Takes Miles, which played
on my FYP what felt like 10,000 times last year.
But the problem of volume isn't just applicable to stuff we
don't like and yet keep on seeing. Even things we do like,
that we know we like, can get treated to the same process. And
the result, unfortunately, is exactly the same.
Kyle Chayka: I mean, my own Instagram Discover page is now
like mid century modern decorations in Mexico City and
abandoned European villas that are for sale for like $50. So
it's just like even even those things which I do really like
and like to look at by overexposing them to me,
throwing them back in my face over and over again, it makes me
dislike them actually. Like, it makes me go from identifying
with my taste and being interested in these things to
being like, oh my god. Like, why is this the thousandth Milanese
villa that I've seen today?
Georgia Hampton: That overexposure works against
things we actually like and ends up making us sick not just of
the content, but of our own personal taste. And then our
taste, when presented back to us ad nauseam, starts to feel
foreign. We become unmoored to the deeper connection we may
feel toward the architectural style of Italian villas. Or in
the case of my IG Discover page, content about astrology. There's
this very unsettling anesthetic quality to the flattening of
taste.
Watching a topic I very genuinely love get shaved down
into bite sized content. And then having that content fed to
me over and over and over and over again makes me bored by it.
And then it makes me forget why I liked it in the first place.
And after all this, what happens to my desire to seek out more
stuff?
Kyle Chayka: It slows it down, I would say. I mean, if we get
overexposed to something before we learn enough about it, I
think it's alienating. Like, I would love to know more about
abandoned European castles or whatever. Like, I would I would
love to learn about things, but this is not learning or
deepening my knowledge. It's just throwing the images in my
face all the time.
So I think it kind of turns us off of things that we might
otherwise be interested in.
Georgia Hampton: The work of looking carefully at things is a
necessary part of taste, maybe even the essence of taste. The
platforms are a great distributor of potential objects
of personal taste, but they cannot and will not dive deeper
on your behalf.
Kyle Chayka: The algorithm is tasteless. And I think we have
to embrace that idea that the taste belongs with the human and
with the individual. You know, you can see something anywhere.
You can watch your feeds. You can subscribe to whatever
magazine you want.
You can run your Instagram however you want. But
ultimately, the responsibility of making meaning out of your
experiences and building your sense of self is just within
you. Like, you have to go back to the internal thought process
of what does this thing mean to me? What does this film mean?
What does this influencer account mean?
What does this shirt mean? And that's work. Like, we have to
take on more work, whereas the technology constantly promises
to take work away from us.
Georgia Hampton: Taste is an essentially embodied experience,
and it cannot flourish completely if it is flattened
into the same ten second clip from the same song. And to me,
this is the bigger crisis of taste plaguing us online, well
beyond the influence of CGP or any of its kin. A lot of the
posts I saw in the wake of those articles about Geese being a
PSYOP were coming from people proclaiming that they always
knew that this band wasn't the real deal. But what it really
felt like they were saying was that they had been so
overexposed to geese that they had learned about geese against
their will for too long and craved a kind of vindictive
satisfaction in seeing that band dragged through the mud for
overstaying their welcome on the feeds of people who didn't like
them. The ferocity of this discourse felt just as
superficial as the content that created it.
Content I really don't care about and would love to never
see again. More volume, more junk, more stuff keeping me
distracted and numb away from the things I actually wanna see.
I hate to bring up the no press is bad press adage of yore, but
I mean, if the shoe fits. And I think if we're ever going to
figure out a way to maintain a real embodied relationship to
our own personal taste online, I think we need to know when to
engage and when to disengage. The buffet is going to keep
refilling our plates.
We get to choose, and I think we have to choose when to dine
there.
Kyle Chayka: Because the temptation is there to engage
with everything, to to weigh in on every new discourse and every
new meme and every new phenomenon that happens.
Georgia Hampton: It's like you don't have a choice. You have to
you have to weigh in on this article about geese.
Kyle Chayka: It's a trap. It's a it's a terrible trap. But to to
have that taste to be like, this just isn't my thing. I'm not
even gonna engage with it at all. That's a a powerful act
now, I think.
It's like you're a scavenger in the dangerous woods. Like, go go
out there, find find your favorite band on Spotify or
whatever, and immediately go to their band's camp and buy their
album. Or go, you know, subscribe to your favorite
writer's Patreon or something like that or, like, piece that's
been missing, I think, is that second step.
Georgia Hampton: A massive thank you to Kyle Shaika for talking
to me about taste and the algorithm and how those two
things interact with each other. I'll leave ways you can read
more of his work in the show notes.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We
are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday,
June 11. Did you know that fewer than a thousand of you are
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