Why We Like Things
A first-person essay from Asterisk Magazine on what "taste" actually is, why Silicon Valley has made it the catch-all term for whatever survives AI automation, and how it is cultivated.
The essay opens in autobiography: the author learned taste from a partner with "impeccable taste," then from a design startup whose Issey Miyake–wearing, French-New-Wave-watching culture treated taste as the reason for the company's success. That experience becomes the hook for the essay's central observation — as generative AI shifts knowledge work from production to selection and curation, "taste has become the catch-all term for what's left." Paul Graham ("when anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make"), Greg Brockman ("taste is a new core skill"), and Rick Rubin (paid for "the confidence I have in my taste") all invoke taste without ever defining it.
The skeptical counterpoint comes from the literary scholar Leif Weatherby: LLMs already encode "judgments of taste" from literary criticism to Likert-scale quality ratings, so the idea that taste is "the last preserve of the human" reads as "anxiety on the part of industry leaders" about deskilling.
To explain taste, the essay turns to history and theory. In 19th-century Britain, automation anxiety produced a national project of taste — publicly funded design schools and the V&A, argued for by Ewart and Ruskin. The Bauhaus (Johannes Itten's Vorkurs, Josef Albers's pedagogy at Black Mountain College) treated aesthetic perception as a trainable, domain-independent skill shaped by study and peer critique. On theory, the essay weighs Bourdieu (taste as class strategy and cultural capital) and Girard (mimetic desire) against Hannah Arendt's reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment: taste as "enlarged mentality," an anticipated communication with others, persuasive rather than coercive.
The essay closes against the "tyranny of good taste" — taste is most meaningful when it conveys discernment, not conformity; Sontag's camp and Carl Wilson's "relish the plenitude of tastes" are offered as escapes. The thesis: our tastes are how we understand ourselves, and communicating them is how we understand each other.