How to Discover Your Own Taste

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Being on the internet just doesn’t feel as fun anymore. As more of our digital life is driven by algorithms, it’s become a lot easier to find movies or TV shows or music that fits our preferences pretty well. But it feels harder to find things that are strange and surprising — the kinds of culture that help you, as an individual, develop your own sense of taste. This can be a fuzzy thing to talk about. But Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has written a whole book on it, the forthcoming “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.” We talk about how today’s internet encourages everything to look more the same and is even dulling our ability to know what we like. And we discuss what we can do to strengthen our sense of personal taste in order to live a richer, more beautiful life. Mentioned: “Quartets: Two: II. Warmth” by Peter Gregson Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno Book Recommendations: “In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki (essay) Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Carole Sabouraud.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. I've been thinking a lot lately about why the internet isn't fun anymore.
0:27.0	And one of the hypotheses I've come to believe is that we moved at some point from this period where the internet was about curation.
0:35.2	It was about finding these individuals who would welcome you into these worlds they had
0:39.6	created and found and put together for you to this internet of algorithms.
0:45.0	And one of the quiet things that happened when that happened
0:49.0	is that it became harder to feel like you were finding individual experiences on the internet, and it became harder to be an individual on the internet.
0:57.5	And because we live a lot of our lives on the internet, that means it also became harder to be an individual. And as this yearning for this digital life that I feel like I once had and no longer do has grown,
1:11.0	I've noticed myself in my own life seeking out people who are individuals and
1:16.0	people more than that who seem to have their own sense of
1:20.0	aesthetics, of style, of taste.
1:23.0	These weren't things that were that important to me a decade ago,
1:27.0	but they've become more important to me now.
1:30.0	I've come to see them almost as a kind of superpower,
1:32.0	both because just living a beautiful life or living
1:35.8	a life in which beauty has a central role feels more important to me as I get older, but also
1:40.9	because it feels increasing like a kind of superpower, like a kind of act of resistance
1:46.8	against what these algorithms and what this age online is doing to us.
1:51.8	It feels like being able to be attuned enough inside yourself
1:55.8	to know what you really like, not just what you're being fed, being attentive
2:01.4	enough to the world around you to see things that are really yours,
2:05.3	not just everybody else's, feels like an important way to live.
2:09.6	And so I've been wanting to talk about this on the show, but it's a bit of a fuzzy thing to talk about.
	...

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