Taste As Interface Behaviour | Weeknotes #443

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Taste As Interface Behaviour

The Guardian had a great piece over the weekend by pop culture writer Rachel Aroesti called Have I been influenced, or is this actually me? How personal taste fell out of fashion. It’s about taste. Good taste and bad, and the author’s suspicion that due to the state of social media, we might not have any taste at all any more. What we might think of as our personal preference, is in fact just psychic residue left over from having been shown the same thing 100 times a day by a machine. It’s really good! go read it it.

Six years ago in Animal Crossing Is The Place For Taste I was thinking the ‘demonstration’ of taste online. In that game, taste is demonstrated by arranging virtual objects in a toy box world. You perform taste by making a place. Later I argued in Good Taste Online that each platform had its own physics and affordances, and therefore its own way of making taste visible: Twitter has retweets and likes and replies. Pinterest has boards. Tumblr has juxtaposition. Minecraft configurable virtual environments.

But after reading Aroesti’s piece, I would put it more strongly.

Taste is an interface behaviour

Millennials and older might like to romanticise pre-internet media discovery and wax lyrical about the noble struggle of crate-digging, mixtape making, and hanging around in bookshops… I know I do! But none of these nostalgia bait memories are pure encounters with culture. Just like the code-spaces we encounter today, bookshops, libraries, the radio all had interfaces too.

Aroesti writes:

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.

This is exactly right, though I think “aperture” is too passive. A window is something you look through, the feed is something that watches you doing the looking. It’s an apparatus that observes you observing, then changes its own behaviour based on that observation, which in turn shapes the future view you see though the window.

But, the record shop as taste interface was kinda optimised in the same way too. Genre bins ar ea kind of taxonomy. Staff picks are the recommendation engine. The counter both a record and comic book shop is a social checkpoint, and for better or worse, a site of community moderation. If hardcore punk or UK Jungle was getting popularity with customers, the shop would respond by stocking more of that genre. There is how a big difference between a record shop and the feed.

Latency. A lot of what I think of as taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement. I belive things need to ‘settle in‘ to culture. The immediacy of the feed collapses the delay. The feed responds to you, instantly, and the world it builds next is shaped by the gesture you just made. The shop has a feedback loop measured in months and pointed at a market. The feed is measured in milliseconds and pointed at a person.

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.

I understand the feeling here, but I don’t think that we no longer choose on social media. Your Attention is Sovereign. We are always actively making choices on social media; by pausing, not skipping, replaying, hovering, letting the next episode begin. I understand these can be influenced by dark patterns and UX tricks etc, but you are still responsible for your actions. Social media is less a battle for attention than what I’ve elsewhere called a Conflict of Disinterest: the ongoing, internal work of choosing what to overlook. The choices are still yours. They have just been turned into a continuous stream of tiny, pre-formatted gestures.

Online taste though an interface becomes behaviour, that behaviour becomes data, and that data becomes prediction. Then you fall into The Loop. Code Space is Bayesian prediction all the way down. Inside the feed you are being presented with a ‘culture-world’ shaped by all your previous gestures of choice. The self is still in there somewhere, but it’s increasingly buried under its own captured behaviour.

This is also why I am not sure taste has been destroyed. Flattened, yes. Operationalised? gamed? automated? captured? Yes. But not destroyed. Taste has been translated into interface behaviour.

Emily Segal’s recent viral piece on “tasteslop” is also useful here.

To riff on this: if taste classifies (and classifies the classifier), tasteslop is what happens when the classifying function is automated, overly explicit, or reduced to spitting out rote taste tokens.

Segal is right that tasteslop happens when the classifying function is automated, but I would put the emphasis on individual behaviour. The machine does not really know taste, it knows the gestures that have clustered around taste.

See Marek Poliks’ ’No One Listens to Music Anymore’

I think the internet and social media recommendation algorithms made taste programmable, in the same way it made culture playable. The token is not the taste. Taste is the relation between the object and the person, and the social world in which the judgement is made.

There’s a whole sidequest into the concept of ‘Answerability’ here, but I’m going to leave it to one side as that’s what a chunk of the next episode of Permanently Moved is going to be about.

Anyways, the platform sees media as a collection of ranked ordinal points, vectors in a database, but the person has a relation to the work. This is why so much tasteslop feels dead even when it is made of tasteful parts. It has the references, but not the relationship. If you have a relationship to the media in question, it is answerable, then all good. But to do that you need to explain why:

Segal’s own summary gets very close to this. She writes:

“Taste is not really a property of various objects. It is a socially validated relation between objects, people, histories, scenes, and timing.”

Yes. Exactly. But if taste is a relation, then interfaces matter because the kind of interface shapes the relation. A mixtape and a Spotify playlist can contain the same songs, but they do not ask the same behaviour from either the maker or the listener. John Peel or Mary Anne Hobbs were also interfaces in a way. A mixtape or radio show is a sequence of songs with pacing, and tonal change etc — All the things that make the film High Fidelity romantic. An algorithmic playlist does all of that too, but the platform also makes the gesture searchable, measurable, and reproducible at scale.

Taste is not just what passes through you. It is what culture becomes after passing through you, via a particular interface. This is why Animal Crossing still feels like such a good early example. It gives you a little island and a lot of objects and says: okay then, make a world.

I personally have never thought that having bad taste was the bad thing. John Waters didn’t tell you to have faith in your good taste; he said have faith in your own bad taste. But faith in bad taste is not the absence of discernment, it is a higher form of it.

Which is why I’ll keep hammering on the idea of discernment.

To knowingly like the unfashionable thing, you first have to know it’s unfashionable and why, and step outside that on purpose. That is his whole game. Liking something other people think is bad taste, and being able to say exactly why you like it anyway, is good taste. The judgement is still there, just pointed against the grain. The worse condition is having no taste at all, when your preferences arrive entirely from outside without the practice of discernment. The feed is very good at supplying preferences and very bad at leaving you the latency to act upon them.

Segal lists “Discernment” as the first part of definition of good taste, asking: “Can you tell one thing from another, and can you make a specific, articulated judgment about why one thing is better than another?” I agree with this, but again I would go even harder than Segal does.

If taste is a relation between objects, people, histories, scenes and timing, then discernment is the one part of that relation the feed cannot perform on your behalf. It can supply the cultural objects, but it can’t do the telling-apart for you, no matter how hard it tries. Discernment is not the whole of taste, but in the 2020s it may be the most important part: choosing one thing over another that the feed serves up. Which in many ways we are doing all the time, acticly choosing.

This is the same act I’ve described in the Conflict of Disinterest, but from the other direction. Disinterest is the refusal; deciding what not to spend attention on. Discernment is what that refusal makes possible. Once you have a tighter field of view though the window, you can actually tell one thing from another. I don’t think you can hav the second without the first.

Discernment is the ability to ask and then articulate why you like something, or why you hate something, or whether you have spent enough time with it. Good taste online is the practice of noticing what interface brought the thing and what gesture it is inviting you to perform. The headline “Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?” is actually a very run of the mill millennial crisis of authenticity (which I also think is a silly niche and generational concern). It’s actually I think a crisis of lack of discernment. Being influenced is not the problem online, not being discerning about what is influencing you is the problem. It’s the same with advertising, as the same flattened interfaces that serve you culture, also serve you adverts.

Near the end of Aroesti’s piece, publisher Ione Gamble offers this advice, and it’s very similar to my own.

When it comes to tuning into your own taste, Gamble’s advice is essentially the same. “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?”

But I don’t think you can out-question a system whose whole physics is around the production of rapid questions. You can only take responsibility for where you put your own attention. If taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement, then discernment needs latency. You have to somehow and somewhere put the delay back; to let a thing sit long enough that your relation to it can form before the interface asks what you think about it again.

And once that delay returns, the discernment can move up a level. The wider battle ground in the Conflict of Disinterest not whether this or that video in the feed is to your taste, but whether the entire act of engaging with the form is. Is short-form vertical video to your taste as a way of encountering culture? Is short-form microblogging? Boomer box television? Radio? Podcasts? Do I like the interface and the medium that keeps placing objects in this relation to me?

If your Attention is Sovereign, then taste is what you do with that sovereignty; and discernment is how you keep it from being spent for you. Otherwise you end up with no taste at all. Only a feed-shaped pattern of exposure and reaction.

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Photo 365

Terminal Access

This post on late 90’s UK Emo/Hardocre punk scene is super interesting! The Political War That Tore British Emo Apart — Scuff.

At the end of 1990, Anderson and his schoolmates worked up the courage to form their own band. They took the name Understand, and by the next year, had also welcomed Coleman. They spent their early years trading time as openers between hardcore bands and the more mainstream rock of Revolver, Stereolab and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. For Understand, this separation never existed; Anderson had digested everything from Iron Maiden to Mudhoney to Napalm Death.  Their sound reflected this, honed around the grooving riffs of American post-hardcore groups Quicksand and Fugazi and the melodicism of first-wave British emos Sink and Bad Dress Sense, but also grunge breakouts Nirvana and Soundgarden and the alternative metal rhythms of Helmet and TAD. 

I didn’t get involved in the UK DIY punk scene until 1999 when I was 14, so Understand or Fabric were bands I only ever saw written about in the past tense in Fracture Mag.

Reading

I finished Duncan Barford’s novel The Going Down. It’s one of the best contemporary fiction books I’ve read in ages. As I said last week “Magical dreaming” is very much the operative description. Never read anything like this written by someone in ‘the west’

I moved on to some non-fiction and spent this months audible credit on Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang of ‘Annual Letter’ fame. Really interesting so far. I wish I lived in a highly competent engineering state. lol

horsegiirL – Nature Is Healing (LP)

If you have been wondering where an album of totally bonkers; euro-rave pop bangers and hyper pop pastiche, performed by an anthropomorphic horse DJ has been all your life then look no further!

This album is fantastic both in concept and its execution. Some potential songs of the summer on here!

Remember Kids:

define the term as a skill that requires a few actions: listening for the full meaning of a message, responding to emotions, and noticing nonverbal communications

Active Listening Techniques by Nixaly Leonardo