TR.BIZ: 2.19.2026

From AI "taste" to dramas at Vogue, this is your late-mid-week check-in 💫

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re looking at the taste panic around AI, the new video tech that could “kill Hollywood,” an avant piano superstar who has become fashion’s new it girl, and a game where gnomes kill.

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📲 Tech Talk: “taste is a new core skill”

In launching the Taste Report™ last year, I was seeking to identify and connect with people I thought were navigating this world with a specific point of view and ease that was special, in the effort of amplifying and investigating “how they do it” in a world where all culture is being colonized by the mass of tech. A year later, the series has effectively ended as not only writing but taste has become sullied by tech madness. “taste is a new core skill,” OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman Tweeted on Monday, likely inspired by tech bro Paul Graham, setting off a chain reaction of takes and memes, most of which kicks up the Kinfolk/Notion/Nothing via RickRubin/Muji/Apple stereotypical value prop of “tech taste.” In conjuring “taste” as the barometer to push one AI (or whatever the fuck tech) over the other suggests OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and whoever have lost a tech war and are more interested in a battle of looksmaxxing, just like the rest of us: when everyone “hates the machines",” you have to sell “style” to suggest better values and better approaches, responsibility as expressed by a culture of minimalist design and aesthetic caps that go beyond the nuts-and-bolts being sold. This is a scam, an attempt to normalize and humanize very awful stuff, “taste” as the excuse OpenAI will use to elevate Jonny Ive over our heads as they “attempt” to define the next quarter-century in the way Apple did the first. By doing what? Creating another phone we don’t need while enabling the far right to ethnocleanse all as Sam Altman gets a broccoli bangs makeover in the style of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos: this is another attempt by billionaires to “buy into” culture in the ways Lauren Sanchez is doing by swiping up Law Roach and the Met Gala, in the same ways Elon Musk has bought a comedy machine like Twitter and hosting SNL: it’s not new but another example of the-maker-of-the-television demanding to be-the-thing-watched on the television. Sure, sure, Claude AI hats and, yes, yes, Anthropic diss commercial — but that doesn’t make any of this any better: the temptations of something being fly doesn’t make it morally, ethically, or philosophically “good” when it’s also exploiting the vulnerable and advancing fascism. None of this will never be cool — point blank — as this is a four dimensional taste test that many are failing. This isn’t a battle “over taste” but of ideology that no academic hired to teach morals can absolve, no matter how they fight to look like the good guy. “Good taste” will never excuse tech’s failed sale of a better future for all.

👀 Trend Watchers: Class of 2020’s woes

What’s something a class within Gen Z are real butt hurt about? Not getting a graduation. This idea is an old truism that is becoming a huge meme gesture that is being used as a punchline to various absurd situations, which sees a Gen Z person bringing up that they “didn’t get a graduatio"n” at the wildest moments. It’s funny and suggests yet again that we haven’t fully unpacked the “traumas” of the early 2020s — and we definitely never will, at least not as a collective. This trend is crashing into a another where people explain how certain types would react to a glass being half-filled/half-empty, which almost always includes “We didn’t get to graduate.” Perhaps this is another example of how Gen Z is no longer infallible when it comes to being roasted online? I think so.

👁️‍🗨️ Listen In: Are there generational dramas at Vogue?

In the Vogue editor joint interview with Chloe Malle and Anna Wintour for The New York Times, a battle played out: which generation’s leadership style is better? When asked about getting a bigger budget, Chloe explained she’d give everyone a raise and invest in the new media aspects of the magazine — and Anna? She demured, explaining how healthy their budgets and resources are. Is this not a huge statement on how different generations see leading teams now, as far as priorities and values? “Chloe, as part of the newer generation, is very much used to an upfront kind of, ‘We’re just going to be real.’ energy,” Leann Abad of Living Room NYC explained on the latest HIP REPLACEMENT. “Anna, as part of the ‘old guard’…kept things purposefully vague so that, you know, maybe on the back end we don’t have to like actually be held accountable.” This is true, but it also highlighted something else: Vogue has maybe lost its value. “What this also really speaks to is a generational difference in the way that that job — or the job at Vogue, in Conde Nast — is desirable,” Ben Dietz added. “The reason why you’d want to give a 30% increase to an employee is so that they don’t go be the social director at fucking Graza olive oil — because that’s the same level of cultural prestige as Vogue at this points….Whereas Anna, who comes from a universe much closer to mine, where it’s just like…It’s Vogue. Of course you’re going to take less money, of course you’re going to work harder, of course you’re going to prostrate yourself to the altar of the brand.” All fascinating to consider and all up in the latest podcast, which you can listen to on Substack, YouTube, and Spotify now.

🤩 Hollyweird Insider: Seedancing all over the damn place