On taste
Continuing on the banger-reads tip, this universally correct piece on taste hit for me over the weekend.
I’m currently writing a new offering that is nominally about current technological developments. Really, though, it’s about cultivating your own taste.
This is because no new technology should be able to affect your taste. Your taste shapes technology, not the other way around.
I think often about how I get excited about technology. I have been excited about technology recently. But I also know the difference between technological excitement and things that are not that.
Take pieces that urge you, in so many words, to embrace something or become yesterday’s news. These are a form of labor gaslighting, not technological resonance. They do not express the wonder of technology. They threaten you, and through those threats try to get you to do something that you don’t want or need to do.
Again, this is a matter of taste. “It’s coming and you need to learn it” is a far cry from, say, mobile, which everybody largely embraced & loved; or open source, which spawned a massive global community that remains strong as of press time. Both movements resulted in upheaval & job loss, but they were not forced upon anyone. We wanted them.
You cannot really get people to groan and bite it when it comes to anything. They will resist. This is a matter of taste. Taste is a question of finding your own center and staying there.
That does not make the technology itself bad. We respond to technology. We do what we’re going to do with it. You can use it a little or a lot. You can rely on it heavily or not at all.
What I’ve noticed lately is people referring to technology as a drug, as something addictive – and that being a good thing. I invite us to use our collective taste to inquire about what that means for us.