Tastemaxxing
The last human mystery?
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On Taste
I watched a clip of Alex Karp on TBPN a couple of weeks ago. The Palantir CEO, a man whose company sells software to militaries and intelligence agencies, wanted to talk about taste.
Taste, from Alex’s world of big data and AI Integration, isn’t about aesthetics. As he puts it, it’s the judgment to know which problems are worth solving. In the tech elites, an increasingly ‘AI abundance’ worldview is taking shape. With all that capital without taste involved, you get ‘tokenmaxxing’ – the word increasingly being used for compulsive productivity-free AI use (basically wastefully burning money through AI usage). Taste without capital can’t scale.
Karp isn’t saying anything new; he’s just the latest voice in a discourse that’s been building all year. Ever since Anu Atluru declared that taste is “eating Silicon Valley” in 2024, the tech world has been circling the word like it’s the last thing in the room worth owning. Even fashion is having its own version of the fight: Demna’s Gucci is where the taste discourse plays out constantly; critics can’t agree whether the creative director has real taste or just optimises for virality engineered to look like taste.
What’s going on here?
The Land Grab
Once you believe AI will bring about ‘execution abundance’ – the ability to create code, images, copy, brand guidelines – you start hunting for whatever stays scarce. Taste is what’s been nominated. It’s become the universal ‘human part’, the bit that we’re hanging on to survive automation.
Taste is being filled differently with its own meaning: aesthetic taste, cultural fluency taste, problem-selection taste, judgment taste. The word is winning because it’s vague enough to mean whatever each camp (tech, design, fashion, etc.) needs it to mean.
What’s important is to note the through-line underneath the discourse. We’re all trying to dissect what ‘taste’ is. Mapping the mechanics of taste, extracting taste for the frameworks. The act of this, presumably, just helps it to be fed to machines.
That’s why it’s worth being sceptical of the interest in taste; it’s a land grab on unclaimed territory where being human is an advantage.
Feel Everything
Taste shouldn’t be a mechanism. It’s made up of everything non-optimising. As Amy Francombe puts it, “taste is when a brand resists market dynamics”. The ‘metric-readers’, the ones who are fluent in engagement and click-through rates, can tell you when loafers with white socks are coming back. They might not be able to tell you whether something is any good. The moment taste gets turned into a scoring function, it stops being taste and becomes a metric.
Funnily enough, Fakemink, the 21-year-old UK rapper helming the underground scene and his rise to stardom, functions as a nice way of looking at taste right now. Sitting down in a recent interview with Zane Lowe, the rapper drops some profound-for-his-age musings on life:
“Life isn’t just about feeling good. It’s about feeling everything. Feeling shame, feeling guilt, feeling happiness, feeling pride. Life is about feeling all of these.”
Moving through the world with everything switched on, that’s taste. You can’t tokenmaxx your way to that, you need to live your way there.
Maybe that’s the strategist’s real lesson hiding in all of this. Perhaps being good at strategy isn’t about understanding everything. I think it’s closer to what Fakemink describes, feeling and living at full sensitivity and letting the judgement form in the body before it forms in a deck or client meeting.
A Question to Sit With
While this topic is surely bigger than me, I do feel that trying to understand everything takes something away from what it means to be human. If I completely understood every single mechanism of love, every trigger, every chemical, would it still feel like love?
I don’t know. Hopefully, no one’s rushing to build that model.
Maybe some things work better left alone.
Maybe taste is one of them.
Your Curiosity Means a Lot
Active Materials exists to build a community of curious individuals, people open to new ways of seeing, making, and understanding the world. Learn more about us here. In the archive, you can find other ideas to explore.
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