How to Discover Your Own Taste
About this episode
Klein opens with a personal puzzle — why the internet isn't fun anymore — and Kyle Chayka, author of 'Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,' offers an answer: the shift from human curation to algorithmic recommendation has flattened culture and made individuality harder. They define taste as inward attunement — knowing what moves you — rather than matching others' judgments, and discuss how hard it is to separate genuine feeling from internalized consensus. Chayka argues engagement metrics replaced critics with 'polls' like Rotten Tomatoes, rewarding ruthlessly optimized, 'ambient' content and punishing difficulty; his 'generic coffee shop' — identical minimalist cafés in Tokyo, Berlin and Mexico City — shows how platforms homogenize aesthetics globally. Klein pushes back, noting algorithms also enable niche discovery and political fracturing; Chayka concedes both forces operate at once. They close by mourning the lost 'pull internet' of blogs and curators and urging deliberate, human-to-human cultural exploration.