🆕 Never Post! Did The Feed Ruin Taste?

Georgia talks to New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka about the state of personal taste on our algorithmic feeds. When popularity reigns supreme and it feels like everything is an ad online, how do we trust our own personal taste? 

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Did The Feed Ruin Taste?

• Wired - Geese’s popularity is a psyop
• Vulture - The entire feed is fake 

Find Kyle:

• His column Infinite Scroll in The New Yorker
• Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
• Bluesky

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and we have a refined show for you this week. In this episode, Georgia chats with journalist, critic, and New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chaeka about the formulation of taste and how the Internet helps and hinders that process. Do you really like what you like? How do you know in the first place?

Does it matter? Will the band Geese be mentioned? But first, we're gonna take a quick break, and you'll listen to some ads, unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, Georgia, Kyle, and a taste of the Internet.

For the last month and some change, my social feeds have been having what seems to be a mass crash out about personal taste. The message I keep seeing plastered across headlines and declared cynically through tweets was that personal taste, developing it, having it, is dead. It is no longer possible to trust the things we like or trust our ability to choose things to like because, as it turns out, we don't really get to choose what to enjoy anymore. Everything we see online is nothing more than a big PR stunt trick. And the epicenter of the discourse, the thing that launched a million articles and posts about the end of personal taste, is the Brooklyn based rock band, Geese.

God of the sun, I'm ticking you down on the inside.

Geese has been making music since 2021, but they really blew up last year, like majorly. An appearance on SNL, a write up in The New Yorker, even a glowing review from The Guardian declaring them the saviors of rock and roll all in the span of a couple of months. And according to an article from Wired that came out in April of this year, the band skyrocketed to fame not because of a natural uptick in listenership, but because Geese is the client of Chaotic Good Projects, a marketing firm that helps bands go viral. Representatives from CGP are not shy about their methods. Co founder Adam Tarcia proudly told Wired how the rockstar sausage gets made, Namely, through coordinated online campaigns using thousands of bot accounts that generate discourse all over TikTok and YouTube.

The bots may start the conversation, but the goal is to get real people to start chiming in and keeping it going. More discourse, artificially created but maintained by real people, juices the algorithm, which then shows Geeze's music to more people and drives up the band's popularity. And clearly, it worked. CGP was, I should say, quick to add that their methods wouldn't work if Geese wasn't a good band, that no amount of Blitz marketing campaigns could actually make popular to the degree that they now are. And maybe that would have been easier to believe if Geese was an outlier in their use of this kind of marketing.

But they aren't. The puppeteering of online interest isn't just the business of one New York based rock band. Chapel Rowan is a client of CGP, and so is Zara Larsen and Somber and Oak Glue and many others. Popularity has always had a fraught relationship to Taste. Popularity is determined by metrics, where the band sits on the Billboard 100, how many downloads an album has on Spotify, record sales, Grammy wins, the list goes on.

And those things don't always reflect the actual opinion of real people who listen or don't listen to that music. I mean, look at the best new artist winner at the Grammys for, oh, the last two decades. Popularity is equatable to ubiquity. And the persistent presence of something is very easy to force with the right amount of money and the right kind of connections. This has been true since the days of Payola.

But the way that geese became popular through the tools of the Internet felt different and worse to fans. And a lot of the conversation I see about why it feels worse comes from the fear that everything is an ad and that you can't trust any posts because they all must be financially incentivized. And therefore, if you like any of those things, you've just been tricked. But I don't really agree with that, at least not entirely. If the CGP marketing campaign worked on you and you genuinely like the band Geese because you saw them online, I really don't think that's a bad thing.

God of the sun, I'm taking you down on the inside.

But there's another interesting problem here worth exploring because I think that the way that our personal taste is presented back to us online winds up making us lose interest in the things we actually like and leaves very little in its place. Taste is a hard thing to define properly because its very nature is so subjective. Susan Sontag, in her essay on camp, described it as a sensibility. Certainly not something so concrete as an idea. It's I mean, it's a vibe.

Taste is made up of the stuff you like and what you buy, the clothes you wear, the movies you go watch, the concerts you pay to see. But all those things amount to more than just stuff.

A lot of times people think of good taste as this rule book, like what is cool or what is not cool. They think of it as a list of things they should like or should not like. But I think through my work, I've argued that taste is more than just a personal preference. It's kind of what things mean to you. Like, what kinds of culture you identify with, what things build your sense of self, what moves you.

That's Kyle Czaca.

I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker where I write a weekly column about the Internet called Infinite Scroll. And I've also written books including Filter Worlds, which was about algorithms and cultural homogenization.

Kyle's definition of taste is the most relatable version I've been able to find because it quickly does away with the idea of good and bad taste and focuses instead on your relationship to your own taste. Like I said, taste is so subjective, as it should be. I don't really subscribe to the idea that we must all bend the knee to a select group of taste makers pointing us to the right or more pointedly cool movies or music or clothes. At the end of the day, it's always up to you. The greatest value of taste, cultivating it, having it, changing it over time, lies in the relationship it helps you build with yourself.

Anyone can have taste. Like, the everyone does have taste. The baseline of taste is just what do you enjoy and what is meaningful to you in in culture or aesthetic experience. Good taste to me is good personal taste, which is knowing what you personally like and being secure in your own enjoyment of it and knowing why you like it and knowing what the thing is. Just having this like confident sense of what is meaningful to you.

But that can be anything. I mean, like, Disney adults are very secure in their taste for Disney. It doesn't doesn't have to be, you know, Wong Kar wai films or whatever.

If you feel confident in the things you like, the popularity of any one of those things doesn't really matter. Like, I really loved Rosalia's new album Luxe. And in a couple weeks, I'm gonna go see her perform it at a huge stadium show with thousands of other people. Now would it have been more financially helpful to me if this album wasn't as popular and I could have seen her at a smaller venue for less money? Sure.

But that doesn't affect how much I love the album. I know I love it because of the way it sounds, the themes of the songs, Rosalia's voice, and a million other reasons that have everything to do with me and what I like. Personal taste can always change and does always change. And as we all ride the wave of our personal taste as it grows and shifts, the feeds of social platforms can be a great way to discover new things to like. I learned that Rosalia was coming out with a new album because the song Berghain kept getting sampled across TikTok.

But my feed isn't just accounting for my interest in Rosalia. It's gathering data about countless other posts about her, about the album, discourse about her that's getting popular on other parts of the Internet that make it to me whether I like it or not.

I mean, peep users online, all of us are so bracketed in by the formats of digital platforms, by the incentives behind what we post, by the ads and recommendations and brands that clutter up the spaces in which we create and consume culture. And so I think it becomes harder to feel like you have a grip on what you're seeing or what you're listening to or what you're watching.

As I swipe, I'm rushed through entire parts of the Internet that I've never looked for and don't care about. The stuff I want to see is also there, jockeying for position. But when all of it is being thrown at me at the same time, it's hard to control the balance. I desperately cling to videos that are doing lyric analysis of the tracks on Luxe, but they get shoved aside by videos with more views that are trying to decipher whether or not Rosalia was singing live at her London show. And the sheer volume of content makes it harder to actually get at the things that are to my taste.

The taste I had originally developed online.

And that noise, like that distraction and chaos, I think, prevents you, the individual user, from really thinking about what you're seeing in front of you and thinking about what you're experiencing online, and thus it becomes harder to have your own sense of personal taste. Which is not to mention like the the overwhelming presence of algorithmic feeds that that crowd your taste with everyone else's taste. Like, algorithms take in the data of everyone on a platform and then use that to predict what kinds of content you'll like, and they often end up just promoting what is already popular.

Volume is the name of the game here. If the feed is like an infinite buffet of stuff you might like, the algorithm is the spoon heaping piles of food onto your plate. Surely, you might find something you'd enjoy eating. But when that mountain of macaroni salad and eggplant Parmesan and puppy chow gets higher and higher with no sign of stopping, it can be easy to lose that delicious morsel you actually enjoyed. In order to really get into Rosalia's new album, I had to step away from the feed and listen to the music on my own.

My taste about Luxe couldn't really form completely through the channels of the feed because I was being surrounded by noise. 10,000 voices shouting at me about a bunch of things I wasn't interested in. But it's sort of impossible to avoid a degree of this. Even if you fine tune your algorithm to show you things to your preference, a few things will always sneak through the cracks by the sheer amount of attention, artificial or otherwise, paid to it. Sometimes, my TikTok feed will feebly try to present me with NBA Finals Supercuts or the third video in a series of seven about the latest drama between two YouTubers I've never heard of.

Oh my god.

I regularly refer to things like this as topics I've learned against my will. Data that came to me not by my own search for it, but just by the fact of existing on the Internet.

I mean, I I always think of this famous bit of marketing research that advertising works best after someone is exposed to the same thing. I think it was six or seven times. And that's on the sixth or seventh time of exposure, that's when the conversion happens. Like, that's when the customer actually buys the thing or clicks through, let's say. So I feel like that kind of exposure, not therapy, but like ex weaponized exposure, let's say, is behind a lot of that knowing things against your will online.

Like the eighth time you see a Sabrina Carpenter video or something, it's just gonna stick in your brain more. The the twentieth time you hear espresso. To use a slightly outdated reference point, it's gonna stick in your head and that's and then you will know who Sabrina Carpenter is essentially against your will.

CGP's marketing strategy banks on this format of engagement. Fill your FYP with a clip of a song by one of their clients enough times, and it becomes impossible to ignore. But knowing about Sabrina Carpenter and liking her music are not the same thing.

You see so many things just flash by you on a screen, and you have enough time to register a few bare sensations like blonde hair, pop star, bubblegum music, you know, and that's that's all that sticks with you. And so instead of deep engagement, you have this repeated superficial engagement.

Yeah. And it it does make me feel like I I mean, I'm not surprised to say this. I think the algorithmic feeds make it abundantly easy to just gather sort of fun facts and not actual deep elements of culture.

Fun fact culture is a good one. That's we're living we're

living in

a real fun fact age where it's like the what were those v h one pop up videos with just the little annotations on them?

It's like, did you know? Those are her real shoes.

Yeah. That's that is our level of cultural discourse at this point.

The culture of fun facts is great for platforms. To extend the food metaphors from before, it's like giving you infinitely refillable access to deliciously salty, buttery popcorn. Little bites for you to enjoy and come back for and enjoy and come back for again. Snackable content. But you will never fill up on popcorn.

Having a repertoire of fun facts is not the same thing as taste. After the break, more thoughts on the content buffet. The Feed's endless buffet of stuff is a potable source of discovery if you use it as just that, the starting place. And so long as you have confidence in your own taste, that security that Kyle was talking about, then the popularity, the ubiquity of a song like espresso may not bother you. But I think the trouble here is that the feed overstays its welcome a lot of the time.

The first few times I heard espresso, for example, I really liked it. That marketing ploy Kyle was talking about totally worked on me. By the fifth or sixth listen, I thought, oh, Okay, this is fun. But then I heard it, oh, 38,000 more times, and I got so sick of it that I never wanted to hear it again.

God of the sun

And I bet a lot of people felt this way hearing fifteen second clips of Geese's music for the upteenth time. You're being confronted with the unavoidable presence of a band you at first maybe didn't care about

What the hell?

And eventually hated Mommy. Because of sheer repetition and the dogged insistence by your feed that this is important. Even if you strongly disagree with that. And that will make you a fan of geese. If anything, it'll make you a staunch hater of geese or at least a hater of the chorus of Cameron Winter's solo track Love Takes Miles, which played on my FYP what felt like 10,000 times last year.

But the problem of volume isn't just applicable to stuff we don't like and yet keep on seeing. Even things we do like, that we know we like, can get treated to the same process. And the result, unfortunately, is exactly the same.

I mean, my own Instagram Discover page is now like mid century modern decorations in Mexico City and abandoned European villas that are for sale for like $50. So it's just like even even those things which I do really like and like to look at by overexposing them to me, throwing them back in my face over and over again, it makes me dislike them actually. Like, it makes me go from identifying with my taste and being interested in these things to being like, oh my god. Like, why is this the thousandth Milanese villa that I've seen today?

That overexposure works against things we actually like and ends up making us sick not just of the content, but of our own personal taste. And then our taste, when presented back to us ad nauseam, starts to feel foreign. We become unmoored to the deeper connection we may feel toward the architectural style of Italian villas. Or in the case of my IG Discover page, content about astrology. There's this very unsettling anesthetic quality to the flattening of taste.

Watching a topic I very genuinely love get shaved down into bite sized content. And then having that content fed to me over and over and over and over again makes me bored by it. And then it makes me forget why I liked it in the first place. And after all this, what happens to my desire to seek out more stuff?

It slows it down, I would say. I mean, if we get overexposed to something before we learn enough about it, I think it's alienating. Like, I would love to know more about abandoned European castles or whatever. Like, I would I would love to learn about things, but this is not learning or deepening my knowledge. It's just throwing the images in my face all the time.

So I think it kind of turns us off of things that we might otherwise be interested in.

The work of looking carefully at things is a necessary part of taste, maybe even the essence of taste. The platforms are a great distributor of potential objects of personal taste, but they cannot and will not dive deeper on your behalf.

The algorithm is tasteless. And I think we have to embrace that idea that the taste belongs with the human and with the individual. You know, you can see something anywhere. You can watch your feeds. You can subscribe to whatever magazine you want.

You can run your Instagram however you want. But ultimately, the responsibility of making meaning out of your experiences and building your sense of self is just within you. Like, you have to go back to the internal thought process of what does this thing mean to me? What does this film mean? What does this influencer account mean?

What does this shirt mean? And that's work. Like, we have to take on more work, whereas the technology constantly promises to take work away from us.

Taste is an essentially embodied experience, and it cannot flourish completely if it is flattened into the same ten second clip from the same song. And to me, this is the bigger crisis of taste plaguing us online, well beyond the influence of CGP or any of its kin. A lot of the posts I saw in the wake of those articles about Geese being a PSYOP were coming from people proclaiming that they always knew that this band wasn't the real deal. But what it really felt like they were saying was that they had been so overexposed to geese that they had learned about geese against their will for too long and craved a kind of vindictive satisfaction in seeing that band dragged through the mud for overstaying their welcome on the feeds of people who didn't like them. The ferocity of this discourse felt just as superficial as the content that created it.

Content I really don't care about and would love to never see again. More volume, more junk, more stuff keeping me distracted and numb away from the things I actually wanna see. I hate to bring up the no press is bad press adage of yore, but I mean, if the shoe fits. And I think if we're ever going to figure out a way to maintain a real embodied relationship to our own personal taste online, I think we need to know when to engage and when to disengage. The buffet is going to keep refilling our plates.

We get to choose, and I think we have to choose when to dine there.

Because the temptation is there to engage with everything, to to weigh in on every new discourse and every new meme and every new phenomenon that happens.

It's like you don't have a choice. You have to you have to weigh in on this article about geese.

It's a trap. It's a it's a terrible trap. But to to have that taste to be like, this just isn't my thing. I'm not even gonna engage with it at all. That's a a powerful act now, I think.

It's like you're a scavenger in the dangerous woods. Like, go go out there, find find your favorite band on Spotify or whatever, and immediately go to their band's camp and buy their album. Or go, you know, subscribe to your favorite writer's Patreon or something like that or, like, piece that's been missing, I think, is that second step.

A massive thank you to Kyle Shaika for talking to me about taste and the algorithm and how those two things interact with each other. I'll leave ways you can read more of his work in the show notes.

That is the show we have for you this week. We are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, June 11. Did you know that fewer than a thousand of you are members? We run this show on a shoestring budget, so just imagine what we could do with a few more bucks in the bank. A few more of your bucks, perhaps.

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Neverpo.st, $4 a month. Become a member today. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer.

And the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. I needed something beyond or not myself that could get me there. I tried to imagine the distance or how, to breach what I couldn't, save for a machine that worked upon something I couldn't see. May call it mystical. Excerpt of Radio by C.

M. Burrows. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and it's distributed by Radiotopia. Hi.