your taste it tasteless
Digging into the loss of creative culture in these times of ingestion, and a chat with one of the most prolific writers I know about the trends they're into.
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📚 Two media items of note!!
A project I worked on is out: meet Culture Slop, a new publication that investigates the overlaps and tensions between tech, art, and culture. There are a lot of familiar faces in it! And a story from moi too: peruse the issue online here, with physical copies available very soon!!
Ben Dietz and I did a special HIP REPLACEMENT episode for harry as a part of a project called Tranche. The episode is all about navigating life stages and features familiar faces too. Check it out here via Metalabel!
Speaking of: 🦿 HIP REPLACEMENT 🦿 this week features Holly Beddingfield, who joins Ben Dietz and I to talk Ariana Grande dramas, the Timothee Chalamet Kalshi ad, and World Cup good vibes. Listen now on Substack, YouTube, and or Spotify!!
Shooting of 1-year-old by Mississippi police
All because of a supposed “theft.” See also: the LAPD murdering a dog, which many of you likely saw the very sad aftermath video of on TikTok (or at least I did).
Paint peeling in Trump’s Reflecting Pool
160 with flu at air force base after end to vaccines
Maggots put Trump response under scrutiny
Italy’s deputy PM cancels US trip
This week in Trump fails, which isn’t to mention the whole UFC thing. Meanwhile, mind the growing Democrat socialist wins. Speaking of…
‘Astonishing’ win for Andy Burnham
What is Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism”?
This is exciting! Cheers to good leaders like Andy Burnham making waves!! And, as Holly Beddingfield mentioned on this week’s HIP REPLACEMENT, Manchester is having a great moment now — and this is proof of it. Grab your lettuce, Keir!
EU lawmakers approve tougher migrant policy
Swiss voters reject 10M population cap
Looking for more signs of Europe’s Americafication? Here you go!
Delhi’s temperature showed 43.5C
India’s Heatwave Is a Warning for the Future
Hotter in Paris than Bangkok
“How intense will El Niño be?”
First day of summer and it’s already rough. I’m praying for anyone reading from Delhi, as the first story noted temperatures of…56.9C / 134ºF!!!!!!!!!!
Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society
“Joseph was working with Peter Thiel”
Lots of buzz around Peter Thiel’cabal, which plays into the tradition of right wing brain networks designed to influence. Do we believe Josh Brolin’s reaction? (See also: the UK’s NHS trying to bring down Palantir — and making some advances.)
Meta CTO: Morale is almost ‘worst it’s been’
“your Meta chaos roundup”
“Corporations be like”
Thought you had a bad week? Meta employees are going through it because the AI heat is on. Meanwhile, companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Uber are pulling back on AI because it’s too expensive and an expense that isn’t paying off.
White House-Anthropic fight over Fable
The other big AI drama was between Anthropic and Trump’s world, on whether their high powered “scary” AI should be available. Yawn.
I
I remember things feeling new. Standing in line for a Korean taco, waiting to order dinner from a truck. Plucking out references woven throughout a track composed of commercials and radio clips and television shows and movies and other songs. Eating cookies inspired by composting and panna cotta made with “cereal milk.” Flipping backwards in a book because the narrator made such a drastic pivot at the book’s center that you had to question your relationship with what you’ve read (not to mention constructions of gender). Crying in a movie theater as an aging cowboy embraced the shirt of a long lost lover. Longing like this is comes with age, as things feel less-new having lived more life, but it could also be the way the world is now. I can have anything I want, wherever and whenever I am. I, a royal reigning over a kingdom of two-day-shipped treasures. I, with my life smoothed, without pulp. I, optimized and perfect. I, convincing myself I am happy despite being boring.
More and more, this feels like a “these times” thing. In between culture recessions and global homogeny, a shift occurred thanks to widening accessibility: we moved from an era of creativity as culture’s engine to one of ingestion (“curation”), of being parked at the buffet to eat all that came before us before spitting what we’ve been chewing onto others. The creative mindset still exists in many forms and functions, yes, and ingestion as cultural mode has always existed, sure, but our moving from a more pro-active mindset to the more passive seems to be a big contributor to culture feeling off. It’s not you, it’s not me, but the whole framework reshaping itself: the “vibe shift” may not have been aesthetic or political (but certainly technological) as much as it has been a state change, from our shift from being nimble worn fingers into a constantly chewing mouth. Swiping feeds to watch and watch endless streams of things to potentially like, scrolling maps and lists to plan evenings before they start, scanning data about yourself to understand how you feel so you can feel it: input as output. Large language models, reboots and adaptations, the powerful son of the powerful son of some powerful son making all decisions: nothing original, everything a reference, déjà vu as constant fatigue state.
The creativity of the 2010s (and even the 2000s) yielded a revolution of apps and internet tools, representing a shift from blue collars to white. The creative class came to define this moment with nearly a third of Americans in the 2010s (40+ million) doing “creative” work, which urbanist Richard Florida defined as those “whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content.” The group included obvious workers (artists, musicians, entertainers) but also the less obvious (engineers, scientists, educators), who largely shared an interest in city living and fostering tolerant, diverse environments. These are the people who bridged the twentieth century’s focus on refining industrialization with this era of ideas, culture making as product. This mode went on to gentrify everything, a mindset so expansive that everything became ingestible instead of inspirational. Yet: it was an era of ideas, a light enlightenment. Say what you will about the ideas that came out of the 2000s and 2010s — iPhones! Facebook! Avocado toast! Dubstep! Minecraft! — but ideas were happening. So was culture. It’s still happening! But it’s unconcentrated, diluted by so many parts of other things. Most things are collage, collage, collage.
At this point in this century, the feeling is one of descending backwards down the hill you came from — or shifting down to a supine position — versus evolution forward. We moved from making to ingesting, most “big” culture concepts a reforming of what is already formed. Aesthetics became curations of blended aesthetics, nostalgia shifting away from irony to sincerity, every social feed being a feed of other feeds (and copies of features from other platforms): just a few signs of this. Make America Great Again for one backwards-looking camp, maintain a past from ten years ago for the other backwards-looking camp. A place like Meta — which at one point was leading culture — has taken their best and brightest minds and turned them into data labellers: “The average Meta employee has a ‘significantly higher’ intelligence than those contractors — so [Zuckerberg]’d rather ‘enlist’ top employees from across Meta to train its AI instead.” “The average new release is looking particularly average,” The New York Times’ Jessica M. Goldstein wondered, trying to understand our great desaturation. “Everybody is concerned with what everybody else thinks and it creates this sense of blandness and risk aversion that gets in the way of the kind of bigger artistic swings that people were taking.” This is how and why conversations about taste continue to dominate: “taste” has been consumed and reformed in the mouths of soulless culture chewers. They’re not making anything new but curating the already existent — which is how we’ve ended steeped in tasteslop, these non-refined palates with wider mouths that only know eating is good and eating they should. “It is beautiful blandness, an empty aestheticism, much of it generated by AI platforms such as Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT and replicated by the algorithm,” The Times’ Phoebe Luckhurst explained of Emily Segal’s concept. This is exactly why and how the launch of Taste Labs was so widely panned this week: so much of who is claiming to be the height of culture, the leaders of this time, are gray ghostly mouths, pallid lips hoping to gobble you up in return for nothing but the same, the same, the same. Cue the capitalism breeds innovation memes.
“The problem of disposability is hammering entertainment across the board,” Gabriel Szatan wrote for Resident Advisor weeks back. “The issue isn’t just that we’ve bargained off the future due to an overreliance on the past, or that late capitalism is throttling progress…The doomer take is that we’ve simply run out of new ideas, but I don’t buy that. Petabytes of data suggest that something fresh is out there. Whether we have the ability to reach it, an on-ramp to integrate it or the headroom to even care are the thornier questions.” That’s what’s so sticky about this: has oversaturation killed inspiration? Once every stone is turned over, do we allow our brains die? I wonder this as I enter another decade of new versions of the same shirts with the same pictures of Ibiza, the same workwear inspired by the same work wears, the same model of influence to influence the same models. It’s not “tech” but instead our own loss of the new, as if we’ve fallen out of love with the world around us. A shame, to be certain, one that World Cup attendees may offer us a way out of. But, when we all dip and dip and dip into the same recursive pools of “inspiration,” the results are less robust and less captivating because we are less robust and less capitvating. As so much of what’s around us feels intellectually weaker, a passable recreation instead of a thoughtful transformation, nothing feels new. Where are the new genres? Where are the new art forms? Where are the new disciplines, industries, futures, mindsets? I ask this again and again and again. No wonder the majority of Gen Z long for pre-tech times: if the past was a time of wondrous creation, the present one of rearranging your plate, which is crowded with pre-chewed things someone spat out and insisted you eat and enjoy. We so long to taste something new in this future of the past.
Hollywood’s Mass Exodus
Stories like this have been coming out for the past four years and they get sadder and sadder. This one is about cutting red tape and tax breaks, which feels like a too-little-too-late thing.
We Were Promised Sex Robots by 2026
Favorite read of the week. Sex robot dudes ran so AI girlfriend dudes could fly, etc.
Pokémon Go data trained AI military drones
All tech really does pivot-to-evil, doesn’t it?
How Kratom Found Allies in Trump’s Cabinet
Convenience store opioid kratom finally got a major deep dive, leaping from TikTok horror stories to a legitimate exploration of why it hasn’t been regulated.
The Doom Trolling Needs to Stop
Inside Google’s AI training for teachers
These stories show you two sides of the same coin: the trend of AI “doom trolling” to scare you into it’s power paired with AI companies starting to create factions of fighters against AI doomerism.
Colleges Are Crossing the $100K Mark
Syracuse faces enrollment dip, first in years
More signs of something we talked about a few weeks ago, that colleges are in peril. A bit ashamed that my alma mater is one of the $100K places 🫣 Thankfully I had scholarships!!
Armie Hammer Wants a Second Chance
“a magical negro”
Armie Hammer is staging a comeback. Cue the Anne Helen Petersen piece!
An Oral History of Casa de Estrogen
A feel-good queer story about an LA apartment complex that was home to many iconic local artists like Catherine Opie, Jenny Shimizu, Eileen Myles, and Wu Tsang.
“turns himself into a statue”
“Fans have been unbelievable”
“Boston City Worker Blown Away”
“Japanese Guy’s tweet”
“Culture Shock”
A few of the feel-good stories from the World Cup, building on what we discussed on Tuesday.
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Mary H.K. Choi and I worked together a lil over a decade ago in LA, where we were producers on a Millennial culture-news show called TakePart Live. She was the show’s writer who hired me to be a miniature writer-producer type, adding me into a group of super talented hybrid producer/writer types in what we now know were the last years of such opportunities in television. We spent days into months working together as the show was nightly, working on camera and off, contributing to a vibrant and fun (and very overworked) atmosphere in CBS Television City next door to The Price Is Right. We were living-at-work to work-at-living, where I’d bring in so much La Croix before the time of La Croix to keep the good vibes going, which Mary wrote about, pushing La Croix to become the La Croix we all know and love. It was a moment.
I’ve been very lucky to have gotten to work with Mary firsthand, to see how she really is that girl, a cool person who recognizes cool things with the ability to bring such ideas to market. It’s a quality I admire in people! Her output is completely incredible too, as the decade between our working together has seen her publish three young adult novels along with the very recently released novel, Pool House, all as she continues to contribute to publications while working in and out of new media spaces. She’s a reminder to keep going, to get more writing out there, even if I scowl at my own three novels wondering if it was all worth it. But it is! Such is the lesson, to keep on keeping on: soo la voo, etc.
To catch up and chat, Mary and I checked in via the trends she’s into and what she’s been following as she brings her new (and very LA) book to the world. Get ready to dig into her love of magazines, why she too is over tasteslop, how Substack has added another dimension to book culture, and what she makes of LA and NYC lusting after each other.
Tell me about a trend you’re following that you’re really into.
Independent magazines and literary journals. Zines. I love Cake Zine. I love that the founders Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush recently did a one-off Steak issue. I find the irreverence thrilling and hilarious. I love Shaad Magazine which is what the music journalist Shaad D’Souza calls his Instagram grid where he posts various thoughts and musings and lists. It feels like one of the few iterations of a classic “front-of-book” section that actually work in this moment. It’s incredibly exciting and runs completely against the tide of this pivot-to-video, clipping world. It’s all terribly cool on like a molecular level.Generally I love the trend of smart, ambitious writers and editors leaving legacy media to become editors-in-chief of highly specialized enterprises that are somehow both nimble and rigorous. Like, Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow at The Drift, Whitney Mallett’s The Whitney Review.
Magazines are my first great love. I launched a culture quarterly when I was 27 called Missbehave and I think I’ll always be populating a dream masthead or thinking about covers and assignments in some part of my brain. I enjoy the details of producing something physical from time-to-time as well—the logic problems, photos, stupid jokes on spines and in gutter credits, the deadlines of printing in Estonia because they have the embossing technique you want, or printing in Canada but having to wait between larger orders because an indie magazine will always have a shorter run.
Magazines also capture time in a bizarre way. It’s a longer, far more comprehensive beat than scrolling but nevertheless also intended to be obsolete and nostalgic. It’s also such a good cheat for an autistic person to sidle up to an artist they admire with a collaborative intention. It’s like setting up a parallel play-date where you’re expected to generally dominate the conversation with your interests and be spectacularly nosy. Heaven.
What’s a trend you hope never dies?
People going deep and long on special interests. I love the endurance art of what my friend Yasi Salek over at Bandsplain (and the newsletter Fast & Loose) recently accomplished in her coverage of Madonna. For Madonna month, she did, like, 22 hours with each podcast episode clocking somewhere between three-plus hours and four. It’s all done in service of extreme sincerity and genuine love and it feels like a time machine or algorithm killer because it is driven by her own interests. She’s loves effusively and it’s rarely dictated by the larger monoculture and I can practically hear her snickering at her own jokes in the docs phase of production and it’s thrilling. She’s who told me about Shaad Magazine and both feel like brilliant acts of subversion that remain assiduously silly.I love how peopled certain enterprises are, if that makes sense. Where the engine can always be traced down to either an individual or a cluster of people. This can run the gamut from the immediacy of the way Pete Ohs makes a movie or how Kogonada and a tiny crew went to Hong Kong for three weeks to shoot a film without really telling anyone. To Dua Lipa’s Service 95 podcast’s editorial calendar. She literally just recently interviewed Roxane Gay on Bad Feminist, a book that came out over a decade ago. There’s something Touch Grass about this as an instinct without it being Touch Grass, I don’t know what to call it.
What’s a trend you are so over?
Tasteslop, chicslop, the algorithm mimicking cool but in this very LLM way that completely exsanguinates an artifact. It’s almost like semantic satiation, where you repeat a word until it loses meaning but for things that now carry the repulsive stink of uncanny valley for having been pattern matched by the algo.Are there any literary trends you feel are defining now?
I love the chaos of book optics right now. It’s all such a wild hash of moments like, Miu Miu’s book club run by Alexa Chung, Dior making Dracula bags, how chic bookish spaces are like Climax, Library 180 (magazines count; as does listening), the book as the central totem to the meet-cute in The Drama, the book that LaKeith Stanfield uses to bait the hook as a demon in I Love Boosters. Or that Dakota Johnson is reading a book called A Life Afloat in the Calvin ad but mostly using it as a fig leaf to cover her otherwise nude genitals. I also really like that The Damage by Harper Ellison, the The Drama book is fake. And that I’m pretty sure A Life Afloat is also fake even though there is a book by the same title that is real but by a different author.The signal to noise ratio feels fucked in a way that the addict in me is enthralled by. Is anyone actually reading? Or are books just emoji? Some shorthand pictogram to connote intelligence. There’s definitely a performative aspect to it. As well as a curatorial aspect. Books are cool now in directions that definitely has fuck-all to do with actual reading. The way people are fetishizing out-of-print books or only buying NYRB Classics editions or Fitzcarraldo editions. It’s giving monocle magazine and monstera plant. It’s giving that whole beginning section in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection.
It’s definitely moving away from soft-girl aesthetics which felt more dominant when I was publishing YA. But I also don’t know how much of this is dictated by how it’s been five years since I last published or that I am moving from YA to literary fiction. Literary fiction. I’m still really unclear what that means but it feels snobby in a coastal elite way. Or a Chanel ballet flats that I inherited from my mother way. Raffia bags but make them designer. Literary fiction sounds like the type of person who eats one single tub of yogurt for lunch but it’s performatively full fat. I feel some animus towards it but maybe because I’m intimidated. She sounds terrifying.
While I’ve been promoting Pool House I’ve also run up against this total ambiguity of what legacy media coverage can and can’t do. It’s been interesting as a person with over two decades of media experience to be on this side. Do meta ads still work? What does work even imply? Is that the NYT list or is it bookscan? How is an audiobook stream weighted on bookscan? Is the NYT list going the way of the Billboard Charts given what TikTok can do? How powerful is goodreads? Anne Patchett recently said that nothing beats a human saying, read this book, to another human with full-throated enthusiasm and while I’m paraphrasing I think that’s true.
I do agree with Casey Lewis that Lena Dunham’s Famesick press run with strategist Dolly Meckler, especially the way it played out on substack was incredible, especially since we’ll never know the particulars of how that juggernaut ultimately caught fire. Was it Shop Rat x Health Gossip x that note from Casey x the Substack interview with both Lena and Dolly that made Famesick a number one bestseller? Was it Emily Sundberg in DC as Lena’s interlocutor? Or was it all of that plus her excerpt in The New Yorker and all her traditional TV hits? Or was it everything raised to the power of Famesick ultimately being an incisive, compassionate, engrossing book?
At any given moment you might have Matt Dinniman occupying five spots on the New York Times bestseller list with his Dungeon Crawler series. And EGOT-winner Viola Davis hitting the list with a collab with James Patterson. Together this all means something, I just don’t know what. I’m also curious about what the algorithm—as its own monoculture engine can and can’t do in this moment—because we’re hitting muzzle velocity and peak despondency in a post Geese x clipping world so something’s gotta give.
What do you make of the symmetry forming between LA and NYC?
First of all, I think it’s hilarious that LA gave us Maru and we gave them Blank Street. It’s like if they gave us cashmere socks, we gave them HPV. I think LA and New York has always had legion in common but I think it mostly still invokes that meme: New York is fun hell and LA boring heaven. But I think LA is getting heller. I guess so is New York though. Hell in this case meaning Private Equity. I love both desperately. It’s horribly abusive.
Follow Mary on Instagram and Substack and check out her new book here.
“Fine Ass Girl”
“drama in my gym”
“Fire Island discourse”
“when your dad”
“Snoopy ass”
“are treated better”
“She loves Pride”
“lib mog each other”
“Sister Mary Robert as gay”
“Is there a lesbian accent?”
Third week of lol and interesting Pride posts. GET MORE GAY NOW !!
“Ay, no”
“laughing at this all day”
“Divina Evangelizes”
“Raised Catholic”
Some very good dog posts this week!! The latter two are from the best propaganda account of the year: CatholicDogNYC, which is exactly what you think it is.
“Look no further”
“sensory deprivation tank”
“My dog won’t listen”
“Will you shut up”
“Helly R should have”
Due to Backrooms, supposedly Hollywood is eager to make more movies based on Reddit things — which is stupid and a big tell they’re disconnected. In any event, the fan castings of movies-from-Reddit are great. Relatedly: I cannot wait for my goat Ari Aster’s new movie.
“personal beef with Dua Lipa”
The best story you’ll hear about Dua Lipa this week, courtesy of Good Noticings.
“Slam Frank”
It appears the slam poetry Anne Frank musical that was being mumbled about a year ago wasn’t a Hamilton-themed joke but in fact an actual real thing.
“digging in your ass”
“digging in your ass”
“digging in your ass”
The grandparents doing the acting challenge absolutely won the trend.
“this is abysmal”
Tierra Whack, if you’re reading this: I love you, but let’s talk about books because you gotta be trolling with this.
“I’M DEAD”
These AI songs made from new song titles are probably a joke but they are so dumb. They’re all Taylor slop! Save for “Petal,” which sounds crazy. Here’s the channel they come from.
“Insane psychological warfare”
Perhaps the only way to respond to an unsolicited dick pic.
And, finally, how I feel each week writing this.
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The idea of moving from creation to ingestion is such an interesting lens. It made me think about how often we mistake consumption for participation now. We save, curate, repost and reference, but creating something genuinely new feels increasingly rare.
I truly agree on your thought about "tasting it tasteless". Nowadays ppl just fall into consuming cultural stuffs while not generating them. That's ironic and lose of a sense and meaning of being humans.
More and more information is gonna added to our brains, less and less we become imaginative.