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Did The Feed Ruin Taste? · Never Post

• 0:11
  Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
• 0:14
  podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
• 0:16
  Rugnetta, and we have a refined show for you this week. In this
• 0:22
  episode, Georgia chats with journalist, critic, and New
• 0:25
  Yorker staff writer Kyle Chaeka about the formulation of taste
• 0:30
  and how the Internet helps and hinders that process. Do you
• 0:34
  really like what you like? How do you know in the first place?
• 0:39
  Does it matter? Will the band Geese be mentioned? But first,
• 0:44
  we're gonna take a quick break, and you'll listen to some ads,
• 0:46
  unless you're on the member feed. And when we return,
• 0:49
  Georgia, Kyle, and a taste of the Internet.
• 1:02
  Georgia Hampton: For the last month and some change, my social
• 1:06
  feeds have been having what seems to be a mass crash out
• 1:10
  about personal taste. The message I keep seeing plastered
• 1:21
  across headlines and declared cynically through tweets was
• 1:24
  that personal taste, developing it, having it, is dead. It is no
• 1:30
  longer possible to trust the things we like or trust our
• 1:34
  ability to choose things to like because, as it turns out, we
• 1:39
  don't really get to choose what to enjoy anymore. Everything we
• 1:44
  see online is nothing more than a big PR stunt trick. And the
• 1:50
  epicenter of the discourse, the thing that launched a million
• 1:54
  articles and posts about the end of personal taste, is the
• 1:58
  Brooklyn based rock band, Geese.
• 2:00
  Geese: God of the sun, I'm ticking you down on the inside.
• 2:09
  Georgia Hampton: Geese has been making music since 2021, but
• 2:12
  they really blew up last year, like majorly. An appearance on
• 2:18
  SNL, a write up in The New Yorker, even a glowing review
• 2:22
  from The Guardian declaring them the saviors of rock and roll all
• 2:27
  in the span of a couple of months. And according to an
• 2:31
  article from Wired that came out in April of this year, the band
• 2:36
  skyrocketed to fame not because of a natural uptick in
• 2:40
  listenership, but because Geese is the client of Chaotic Good
• 2:43
  Projects, a marketing firm that helps bands go viral.
• 2:48
  Representatives from CGP are not shy about their methods. Co
• 2:53
  founder Adam Tarcia proudly told Wired how the rockstar sausage
• 2:57
  gets made, Namely, through coordinated online campaigns
• 3:01
  using thousands of bot accounts that generate discourse all over
• 3:05
  TikTok and YouTube.
• 3:07
  The bots may start the conversation, but the goal is to
• 3:10
  get real people to start chiming in and keeping it going. More
• 3:15
  discourse, artificially created but maintained by real people,
• 3:20
  juices the algorithm, which then shows Geeze's music to more
• 3:24
  people and drives up the band's popularity. And clearly, it
• 3:29
  worked. CGP was, I should say, quick to add that their methods
• 3:34
  wouldn't work if Geese wasn't a good band, that no amount of
• 3:38
  Blitz marketing campaigns could actually make popular to the
• 3:42
  degree that they now are. And maybe that would have been
• 3:46
  easier to believe if Geese was an outlier in their use of this
• 3:50
  kind of marketing.
• 3:51
  But they aren't. The puppeteering of online interest
• 3:54
  isn't just the business of one New York based rock band. Chapel
• 3:59
  Rowan is a client of CGP, and so is Zara Larsen and Somber and
• 4:05
  Oak Glue and many others. Popularity has always had a
• 4:14
  fraught relationship to Taste. Popularity is determined by
• 4:17
  metrics, where the band sits on the Billboard 100, how many
• 4:21
  downloads an album has on Spotify, record sales, Grammy
• 4:25
  wins, the list goes on.
• 4:27
  And those things don't always reflect the actual opinion of
• 4:30
  real people who listen or don't listen to that music. I mean,
• 4:36
  look at the best new artist winner at the Grammys for, oh,
• 4:39
  the last two decades. Popularity is equatable to ubiquity. And
• 4:45
  the persistent presence of something is very easy to force
• 4:49
  with the right amount of money and the right kind of
• 4:51
  connections. This has been true since the days of Payola.
• 4:55
  But the way that geese became popular through the tools of the
• 5:00
  Internet felt different and worse to fans. And a lot of the
• 5:05
  conversation I see about why it feels worse comes from the fear
• 5:10
  that everything is an ad and that you can't trust any posts
• 5:14
  because they all must be financially incentivized. And
• 5:18
  therefore, if you like any of those things, you've just been
• 5:21
  tricked. But I don't really agree with that, at least not
• 5:28
  entirely. If the CGP marketing campaign worked on you and you
• 5:33
  genuinely like the band Geese because you saw them online, I
• 5:37
  really don't think that's a bad thing.
• 5:39
  Geese: God of the sun, I'm taking you down on the inside.
• 5:49
  Georgia Hampton: But there's another interesting problem here
• 5:51
  worth exploring because I think that the way that our personal
• 5:57
  taste is presented back to us online winds up making us lose
• 6:02
  interest in the things we actually like and leaves very
• 6:06
  little in its place. Taste is a hard thing to define properly
• 6:14
  because its very nature is so subjective. Susan Sontag, in her
• 6:19
  essay on camp, described it as a sensibility. Certainly not
• 6:24
  something so concrete as an idea. It's I mean, it's a vibe.
• 6:31
  Taste is made up of the stuff you like and what you buy, the
• 6:35
  clothes you wear, the movies you go watch, the concerts you pay
• 6:39
  to see. But all those things amount to more than just stuff.
• 6:44
  Kyle Chayka: A lot of times people think of good taste as
• 6:47
  this rule book, like what is cool or what is not cool. They
• 6:50
  think of it as a list of things they should like or should not
• 6:53
  like. But I think through my work, I've argued that taste is
• 6:59
  more than just a personal preference. It's kind of what
• 7:02
  things mean to you. Like, what kinds of culture you identify
• 7:07
  with, what things build your sense of self, what moves you.
• 7:12
  Georgia Hampton: That's Kyle Czaca.
• 7:13
  Kyle Chayka: I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker where I write
• 7:15
  a weekly column about the Internet called Infinite Scroll.
• 7:19
  And I've also written books including Filter Worlds, which
• 7:22
  was about algorithms and cultural homogenization.
• 7:25
  Georgia Hampton: Kyle's definition of taste is the most
• 7:27
  relatable version I've been able to find because it quickly does
• 7:31
  away with the idea of good and bad taste and focuses instead on
• 7:35
  your relationship to your own taste. Like I said, taste is so
• 7:40
  subjective, as it should be. I don't really subscribe to the
• 7:44
  idea that we must all bend the knee to a select group of taste
• 7:48
  makers pointing us to the right or more pointedly cool movies or
• 7:53
  music or clothes. At the end of the day, it's always up to you.
• 7:58
  The greatest value of taste, cultivating it, having it,
• 8:02
  changing it over time, lies in the relationship it helps you
• 8:06
  build with yourself.
• 8:08
  Kyle Chayka: Anyone can have taste. Like, the everyone does
• 8:12
  have taste. The baseline of taste is just what do you enjoy
• 8:16
  and what is meaningful to you in in culture or aesthetic
• 8:20
  experience. Good taste to me is good personal taste, which is
• 8:24
  knowing what you personally like and being secure in your own
• 8:28
  enjoyment of it and knowing why you like it and knowing what the
• 8:32
  thing is. Just having this like confident sense of what is
• 8:35
  meaningful to you.
• 8:36
  But that can be anything. I mean, like, Disney adults are
• 8:40
  very secure in their taste for Disney. It doesn't doesn't have
• 8:43
  to be, you know, Wong Kar wai films or whatever.
• 8:47
  Georgia Hampton: If you feel confident in the things you
• 8:49
  like, the popularity of any one of those things doesn't really
• 8:52
  matter. Like, I really loved Rosalia's new album Luxe. And in
• 8:59
  a couple weeks, I'm gonna go see her perform it at a huge stadium
• 9:03
  show with thousands of other people. Now would it have been
• 9:13
  more financially helpful to me if this album wasn't as popular
• 9:17
  and I could have seen her at a smaller venue for less money?
• 9:21
  Sure.
• 9:22
  But that doesn't affect how much I love the album. I know I love
• 9:26
  it because of the way it sounds, the themes of the songs,
• 9:29
  Rosalia's voice, and a million other reasons that have
• 9:32
  everything to do with me and what I like. Personal taste can
• 9:38
  always change and does always change. And as we all ride the
• 9:42
  wave of our personal taste as it grows and shifts, the feeds of
• 9:45
  social platforms can be a great way to discover new things to
• 9:49
  like. I learned that Rosalia was coming out with a new album
• 9:53
  because the song Berghain kept getting sampled across TikTok.
• 9:57
  But my feed isn't just accounting for my interest in
• 10:01
  Rosalia. It's gathering data about countless other posts
• 10:05
  about her, about the album, discourse about her that's
• 10:09
  getting popular on other parts of the Internet that make it to
• 10:12
  me whether I like it or not.
• 10:14
  Kyle Chayka: I mean, peep users online, all of us are so
• 10:17
  bracketed in by the formats of digital platforms, by the
• 10:21
  incentives behind what we post, by the ads and recommendations
• 10:27
  and brands that clutter up the spaces in which we create and
• 10:32
  consume culture. And so I think it becomes harder to feel like
• 10:36
  you have a grip on what you're seeing or what you're listening
• 10:40
  to or what you're watching.
• 10:42
  Georgia Hampton: As I swipe, I'm rushed through entire parts of
• 10:46
  the Internet that I've never looked for and don't care about.
• 10:50
  The stuff I want to see is also there, jockeying for position.
• 10:54
  But when all of it is being thrown at me at the same time,
• 10:58
  it's hard to control the balance. I desperately cling to
• 11:02
  videos that are doing lyric analysis of the tracks on Luxe,
• 11:06
  but they get shoved aside by videos with more views that are
• 11:10
  trying to decipher whether or not Rosalia was singing live at
• 11:13
  her London show. And the sheer volume of content makes it
• 11:18
  harder to actually get at the things that are to my taste.
• 11:22
  The taste I had originally developed online.
• 11:25
  Kyle Chayka: And that noise, like that distraction and chaos,
• 11:30
  I think, prevents you, the individual user, from really
• 11:34
  thinking about what you're seeing in front of you and
• 11:36
  thinking about what you're experiencing online, and thus it
• 11:40
  becomes harder to have your own sense of personal taste. Which
• 11:43
  is not to mention like the the overwhelming presence of
• 11:46
  algorithmic feeds that that crowd your taste with everyone
• 11:51
  else's taste. Like, algorithms take in the data of everyone on
• 11:56
  a platform and then use that to predict what kinds of content
• 11:59
  you'll like, and they often end up just promoting what is
• 12:02
  already popular.
• 12:04
  Georgia Hampton: Volume is the name of the game here. If the
• 12:07
  feed is like an infinite buffet of stuff you might like, the
• 12:11
  algorithm is the spoon heaping piles of food onto your plate.
• 12:15
  Surely, you might find something you'd enjoy eating. But when
• 12:19
  that mountain of macaroni salad and eggplant Parmesan and puppy
• 12:23
  chow gets higher and higher with no sign of stopping, it can be
• 12:27
  easy to lose that delicious morsel you actually enjoyed. In
• 12:32
  order to really get into Rosalia's new album, I had to
• 12:36
  step away from the feed and listen to the music on my own.
• 12:39
  My taste about Luxe couldn't really form completely through
• 12:43
  the channels of the feed because I was being surrounded by noise.
• 12:47
  10,000 voices shouting at me about a bunch of things I wasn't
• 12:52
  interested in. But it's sort of impossible to avoid a degree of
• 12:58
  this. Even if you fine tune your algorithm to show you things to
• 13:02
  your preference, a few things will always sneak through the
• 13:06
  cracks by the sheer amount of attention, artificial or
• 13:09
  otherwise, paid to it. Sometimes, my TikTok feed will
• 13:14
  feebly try to present me with NBA Finals Supercuts or the
• 13:18
  third video in a series of seven about the latest drama between
• 13:22
  two YouTubers I've never heard of.
• 13:24
  Geese: Oh my god.
• 13:26
  Georgia Hampton: I regularly refer to things like this as
• 13:28
  topics I've learned against my will. Data that came to me not
• 13:33
  by my own search for it, but just by the fact of existing on
• 13:37
  the Internet.
• 13:38
  Kyle Chayka: I mean, I I always think of this famous bit of
• 13:40
  marketing research that advertising works best after
• 13:44
  someone is exposed to the same thing. I think it was six or
• 13:48
  seven times. And that's on the sixth or seventh time of
• 13:51
  exposure, that's when the conversion happens. Like, that's
• 13:54
  when the customer actually buys the thing or clicks through,
• 13:58
  let's say. So I feel like that kind of exposure, not therapy,
• 14:02
  but like ex weaponized exposure, let's say, is behind a lot of
• 14:07
  that knowing things against your will online.
• 14:10
  Like the eighth time you see a Sabrina Carpenter video or
• 14:14
  something, it's just gonna stick in your brain more. The the
• 14:17
  twentieth time you hear espresso. To use a slightly
• 14:22
  outdated reference point, it's gonna stick in your head and
• 14:26
  that's and then you will know who Sabrina Carpenter is
• 14:28
  essentially against your will.
• 14:35
  Georgia Hampton: CGP's marketing strategy banks on this format of
• 14:38
  engagement. Fill your FYP with a clip of a song by one of their
• 14:42
  clients enough times, and it becomes impossible to ignore.
• 14:47
  But knowing about Sabrina Carpenter and liking her music
• 14:51
  are not the same thing.
• 14:53
  Kyle Chayka: You see so many things just flash by you on a
• 14:56
  screen, and you have enough time to register a few bare
• 15:00
  sensations like blonde hair, pop star, bubblegum music, you know,
• 15:06
  and that's that's all that sticks with you. And so instead
• 15:10
  of deep engagement, you have this repeated superficial
• 15:13
  engagement.
• 15:14
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. And it it does make me feel like I I mean,
• 15:17
  I'm not surprised to say this. I think the algorithmic feeds make
• 15:20
  it abundantly easy to just gather sort of fun facts and not
• 15:24
  actual deep elements of culture.
• 15:27
  Kyle Chayka: Fun fact culture is a good one. That's we're living
• 15:30
  we're
• 15:31
  Georgia Hampton: living in
• 15:31
  Kyle Chayka: a real fun fact age where it's like the what were
• 15:35
  those v h one pop up videos with just the little annotations on
• 15:39
  them?
• 15:39
  Georgia Hampton: It's like, did you know? Those are her real
• 15:41
  shoes.
• 15:42
  Kyle Chayka: Yeah. That's that is our level of cultural
• 15:44
  discourse at this point.
• 15:46
  Georgia Hampton: The culture of fun facts is great for
• 15:52
  platforms. To extend the food metaphors from before, it's like
• 15:59
  giving you infinitely refillable access to deliciously salty,
• 16:03
  buttery popcorn. Little bites for you to enjoy and come back
• 16:08
  for and enjoy and come back for again. Snackable content. But
• 16:13
  you will never fill up on popcorn.
• 16:16
  Having a repertoire of fun facts is not the same thing as taste.
• 16:23
  After the break, more thoughts on the content buffet. The
• 16:40
  Feed's endless buffet of stuff is a potable source of discovery
• 16:44
  if you use it as just that, the starting place. And so long as
• 16:49
  you have confidence in your own taste, that security that Kyle
• 16:52
  was talking about, then the popularity, the ubiquity of a
• 16:57
  song like espresso may not bother you. But I think the
• 17:01
  trouble here is that the feed overstays its welcome a lot of
• 17:05
  the time.
• 17:06
  The first few times I heard espresso, for example, I really
• 17:10
  liked it. That marketing ploy Kyle was talking about totally
• 17:13
  worked on me. By the fifth or sixth listen, I thought, oh,
• 17:17
  Okay, this is fun. But then I heard it, oh, 38,000 more times,
• 17:25
  and I got so sick of it that I never wanted to hear it again.
• 17:27
  Geese: God of the sun
• 17:29
  Georgia Hampton: And I bet a lot of people felt this way hearing
• 17:31
  fifteen second clips of Geese's music for the upteenth time.
• 17:35
  You're being confronted with the unavoidable presence of a band
• 17:39
  you at first maybe didn't care about
• 17:41
  Geese: What the hell?
• 17:42
  Georgia Hampton: And eventually hated Mommy. Because of sheer
• 17:45
  repetition and the dogged insistence by your feed that
• 17:48
  this is important. Even if you strongly disagree with that. And
• 17:54
  that will make you a fan of geese. If anything, it'll make
• 17:59
  you a staunch hater of geese or at least a hater of the chorus
• 18:04
  of Cameron Winter's solo track Love Takes Miles, which played
• 18:08
  on my FYP what felt like 10,000 times last year.
• 18:13
  But the problem of volume isn't just applicable to stuff we
• 18:17
  don't like and yet keep on seeing. Even things we do like,
• 18:21
  that we know we like, can get treated to the same process. And
• 18:26
  the result, unfortunately, is exactly the same.
• 18:30
  Kyle Chayka: I mean, my own Instagram Discover page is now
• 18:33
  like mid century modern decorations in Mexico City and
• 18:38
  abandoned European villas that are for sale for like $50. So
• 18:43
  it's just like even even those things which I do really like
• 18:48
  and like to look at by overexposing them to me,
• 18:52
  throwing them back in my face over and over again, it makes me
• 18:56
  dislike them actually. Like, it makes me go from identifying
• 19:00
  with my taste and being interested in these things to
• 19:02
  being like, oh my god. Like, why is this the thousandth Milanese
• 19:07
  villa that I've seen today?
• 19:10
  Georgia Hampton: That overexposure works against
• 19:13
  things we actually like and ends up making us sick not just of
• 19:18
  the content, but of our own personal taste. And then our
• 19:22
  taste, when presented back to us ad nauseam, starts to feel
• 19:27
  foreign. We become unmoored to the deeper connection we may
• 19:31
  feel toward the architectural style of Italian villas. Or in
• 19:36
  the case of my IG Discover page, content about astrology. There's
• 19:41
  this very unsettling anesthetic quality to the flattening of
• 19:46
  taste.
• 19:47
  Watching a topic I very genuinely love get shaved down
• 19:52
  into bite sized content. And then having that content fed to
• 19:56
  me over and over and over and over again makes me bored by it.
• 20:02
  And then it makes me forget why I liked it in the first place.
• 20:06
  And after all this, what happens to my desire to seek out more
• 20:11
  stuff?
• 20:12
  Kyle Chayka: It slows it down, I would say. I mean, if we get
• 20:16
  overexposed to something before we learn enough about it, I
• 20:20
  think it's alienating. Like, I would love to know more about
• 20:26
  abandoned European castles or whatever. Like, I would I would
• 20:30
  love to learn about things, but this is not learning or
• 20:34
  deepening my knowledge. It's just throwing the images in my
• 20:38
  face all the time.
• 20:39
  So I think it kind of turns us off of things that we might
• 20:42
  otherwise be interested in.
• 20:44
  Georgia Hampton: The work of looking carefully at things is a
• 20:47
  necessary part of taste, maybe even the essence of taste. The
• 20:52
  platforms are a great distributor of potential objects
• 20:56
  of personal taste, but they cannot and will not dive deeper
• 21:02
  on your behalf.
• 21:03
  Kyle Chayka: The algorithm is tasteless. And I think we have
• 21:07
  to embrace that idea that the taste belongs with the human and
• 21:12
  with the individual. You know, you can see something anywhere.
• 21:20
  You can watch your feeds. You can subscribe to whatever
• 21:25
  magazine you want.
• 21:26
  You can run your Instagram however you want. But
• 21:29
  ultimately, the responsibility of making meaning out of your
• 21:33
  experiences and building your sense of self is just within
• 21:37
  you. Like, you have to go back to the internal thought process
• 21:44
  of what does this thing mean to me? What does this film mean?
• 21:48
  What does this influencer account mean?
• 21:50
  What does this shirt mean? And that's work. Like, we have to
• 21:54
  take on more work, whereas the technology constantly promises
• 21:58
  to take work away from us.
• 22:05
  Georgia Hampton: Taste is an essentially embodied experience,
• 22:09
  and it cannot flourish completely if it is flattened
• 22:12
  into the same ten second clip from the same song. And to me,
• 22:19
  this is the bigger crisis of taste plaguing us online, well
• 22:22
  beyond the influence of CGP or any of its kin. A lot of the
• 22:26
  posts I saw in the wake of those articles about Geese being a
• 22:29
  PSYOP were coming from people proclaiming that they always
• 22:33
  knew that this band wasn't the real deal. But what it really
• 22:36
  felt like they were saying was that they had been so
• 22:39
  overexposed to geese that they had learned about geese against
• 22:43
  their will for too long and craved a kind of vindictive
• 22:48
  satisfaction in seeing that band dragged through the mud for
• 22:52
  overstaying their welcome on the feeds of people who didn't like
• 22:55
  them. The ferocity of this discourse felt just as
• 23:02
  superficial as the content that created it.
• 23:04
  Content I really don't care about and would love to never
• 23:08
  see again. More volume, more junk, more stuff keeping me
• 23:13
  distracted and numb away from the things I actually wanna see.
• 23:18
  I hate to bring up the no press is bad press adage of yore, but
• 23:23
  I mean, if the shoe fits. And I think if we're ever going to
• 23:28
  figure out a way to maintain a real embodied relationship to
• 23:33
  our own personal taste online, I think we need to know when to
• 23:37
  engage and when to disengage. The buffet is going to keep
• 23:41
  refilling our plates.
• 23:43
  We get to choose, and I think we have to choose when to dine
• 23:48
  there.
• 23:49
  Kyle Chayka: Because the temptation is there to engage
• 23:51
  with everything, to to weigh in on every new discourse and every
• 23:55
  new meme and every new phenomenon that happens.
• 23:57
  Georgia Hampton: It's like you don't have a choice. You have to
• 23:59
  you have to weigh in on this article about geese.
• 24:02
  Kyle Chayka: It's a trap. It's a it's a terrible trap. But to to
• 24:08
  have that taste to be like, this just isn't my thing. I'm not
• 24:11
  even gonna engage with it at all. That's a a powerful act
• 24:15
  now, I think.
• 24:21
  It's like you're a scavenger in the dangerous woods. Like, go go
• 24:25
  out there, find find your favorite band on Spotify or
• 24:29
  whatever, and immediately go to their band's camp and buy their
• 24:32
  album. Or go, you know, subscribe to your favorite
• 24:36
  writer's Patreon or something like that or, like, piece that's
• 24:41
  been missing, I think, is that second step.
• 25:01
  Georgia Hampton: A massive thank you to Kyle Shaika for talking
• 25:04
  to me about taste and the algorithm and how those two
• 25:07
  things interact with each other. I'll leave ways you can read
• 25:10
  more of his work in the show notes.
• 25:34
  Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We
• 25:37
  are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday,
• 25:41
  June 11. Did you know that fewer than a thousand of you are
• 25:46
  members? We run this show on a shoestring budget, so just
• 25:51
  imagine what we could do with a few more bucks in the bank. A
• 25:55
  few more of your bucks, perhaps.
• 25:57
  I know you also live on a shoestring budget. Every buck
• 26:01
  helps. Become a member at neverpost.st, and for $4 a
• 26:04
  month, you'll get access to an ad free feed, sideshows like
• 26:07
  Slow Post, and the satisfaction of listening to the show do
• 26:10
  something cool or adventurous, and being able to say, hey. I
• 26:14
  did that. I helped.
• 26:16
  Neverpo.st, $4 a month. Become a member today. Never Post's
• 26:21
  producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the
• 26:24
  mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer
• 26:28
  is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer.
• 26:32
  And the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. I needed
• 26:36
  something beyond or not myself that could get me there. I tried
• 26:42
  to imagine the distance or how, to breach what I couldn't, save
• 26:46
  for a machine that worked upon something I couldn't see. May
• 26:51
  call it mystical. Excerpt of Radio by C.
• 26:56
  M. Burrows. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure
• 27:00
  and it's distributed by Radiotopia. Hi.