Why tech bros are now obsessed with taste
- 2 hours ago
- 1 min read
NEW YORKER — The uptick in concern about taste is both surprising and discomfiting, because the word comes with particular generational baggage. A decade or two ago, millennial hipsters made a claim to good taste by exercising their preference for, say, craft India pale ales over Budweiser, Arcade Fire over Nickelback, or American Apparel over Abercrombie & Fitch.
Hipster identity was built on what one chose to consume, and a fetishization of the lo-fi, the handcrafted, and the artisanal—qualities that were eventually co-opted and absorbed by corporate behemoths such as Meta, via Instagram, and Amazon, via Whole Foods.
Now A.I. companies are attempting to hitch themselves to a similar aura of artisanality, even as their core products promise to automate all that is human into obsolescence.
Last year, Anthropic hosted a pop-up café in Manhattan (what could be more hipster?) and gave away baseball caps embroidered with the word “thinking.”
OpenAI’s recent Super Bowl commercial, titled “You Can Just Build Things,” is shot, with faux-analog cinematographic flair, from a human point of view, with hands gripping the handlebars of a bike, writing in a notebook, and playing chess—never mind that the thing being advertised is a hypothetically omniscient robot. You, too, can be tasteful, the ad seems to say, if only you choose the right chatbot to run your life.
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