Taste is not just prescient. It's also a lagging indicator. It shows up when engineering alone is not enough.
Conventional wisdom is that taste enables you to see into the future. Tastemakers are meant to see ahead.
Yet, they often don’t have the opportunity to influence tastes until a market reaches feature parity.1 So the rise in tastemakers can signal a cooling-off period in a maturing category.
AI is a perfect example. When ChatGPT launched, the product itself was the differentiator. Only four years later, it is difficult and often unimportant to know which model to use for what. Mostly all of them are much better than us at most things.
Certainly, the median consumer can’t tell the difference between frontier models for median use cases. Taste is what breaks the tie. Increasingly, AI companies will be competing for emotional resonance, trust and a chance to express an identity.
This is actually a well-documented pattern in consumer markets. It happened with cars in the 1920s (when GM beat Ford by offering style after Ford had won on function), with smartphones in the 2010s, and now with AI.
Feature parity is the precondition for taste to become commercially decisive. Taste shines once engineering stops being the moat.
What is taste?
Moral Psychology
x
Communications
x
Human Action
My formula is multiplicative, not additive. And my instinct is that if any variable is zero, then taste doesn’t exist.
No action? Makes you a critic, not a tastemaker.
No moral psychology? Makes you a robot.
No communication? If nobody knows, how can it be in good taste?
The pinnacle tastemaker in the 80s and 90s was the A&R rep. They signed the artists we loved and were made to love. They taught us what was worth hearing. And they had a big distribution arm that took over after they did the heavy-lifting to communicate the taste as far as they could.
Today, the influencer is the democratized A&R. The barrier to entry for taste-making has moved to zero, but now the tastemakers themselves are the artists, seeking attention for the chance to be accepted by older distribution in order to better communicate their tastes.
The Epicurean project is simple: live a life well-lived. But it’s not easy; reading or listening to any religion requires you to assemble puzzle pieces of virtue and vice into your persona.
Annoyingly, the puzzle sets are all out of order and there are a lot of puzzle sets, so it’s impossible for anyone to be seen as getting it perfectly right.
Also, you don’t learn a religion sequentially. Instead you absorb it in fragments and do your best to see meaning in the puzzle’s gaps.
Now bringing it back to taste, this is how it connects. Taste is the secular equivalent of assembling morals into your persona. If you don’t solely operate from a religious mental model, then it is taste that allows you to construct a more coherent identity.
By curating what we consume, endorse, and reject we’re involved in choosing the tastes of others and perhaps communicating our own.
So, our moral psychology is the reason taste exists at all. Aside from religion, taste becomes the language through which we signal our value to others.
And now …
Music: Colours - Remix by Kid AlpHa, J Kaz, Demmaa
An epoch of feature parity doesn’t have to last forever but you can feel it while it’s happening.
