The Pyramid Scheme of Taste

A while ago, I was set to get dinner with my boyfriend and his parents in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where he grew up. He scrolled through Google Maps and landed on Hainan Chicken House for our get-together. When we arrived, the two of us sat at a table and waited for his parents to show up when a trendy and somewhat diverse quartet of twenty-somethings entered the establishment. As they were seated at the table behind us, one of them immediately asked another, “so what does The New York Times recommend here?” Agitated, I eavesdropped for the next hour, growing increasingly frustrated as they asked the waiter for her recommendations for every section of the menu, discussed the history of Erewhon, recounted recent travels and their desires to go to Osaka, and took pictures of every dish while describing each as “interesting.”

Why this was such an upsetting tableau to witness I couldn’t articulate at the time. But I now realize what was so eerie to me: this group didn’t actually seem to enjoy their night out. How much they enjoyed their food, or each other’s company, didn’t seem to matter. The purpose of the night was clear: the satisfaction of visiting an establishment praised by tastemakers, and being able to talk about it later.

To me, this group was a perfect example of a mode of consumption and experience that has completely taken over our culture. It’s a mode fueled by algorithms and social media that dictates how so many of us decide where to go, what to do, and where to eat. We learn to prioritize how our lives might look when broadcast to others, placing higher importance on other people’s post-hoc reactions over our own in-the-moment enjoyment. This mode of consumption conditions us to efficiently collect experiences as badges of honor that will inspire envy, and alienates us from the meandering route of exploration that might offer us self-discovery. I call it the pyramid scheme of taste.

The pyramid scheme of taste follows the structure of your typical MLM. One person or institution declares something—a book, an Italian 90s movie, a type of coffee, the Hainan Chicken House—to have value. They then align the Chicken House with a certain desired aesthetic, a sense of prestige or in-group knowledge. The first degree of buy-ins might come from friends, TikTok followers or Times readers who will then go on to seek out this acclaimed Chicken House. These consumers are not motivated by the desire to fulfill a personal want or need, or by a drive toward personal aesthetic or knowledge or exploration, but by the knowledge that once they’ve collected this experience they can take a new seat in the pyramid and espouse the merits of the said experience to whoever their own micro-audience happens to be.

By being part of this structure, someone might believe they’re honing their own sense of taste, or that others will increasingly perceive them as being “in the know.” But this person is merely an arbiter of second-hand taste, a pawn in the pyramid scheme of supposedly knowing what’s hot. The result is homogenous appetites and value systems. Worse, it yields a culture disincentivized from seeking truly novel experiences, which leaves people unused to discerning what they like independent of others. After all, if satisfaction from an experience comes from billboarding it to someone else, then that enjoyment becomes vicarious, vicarious even to yourself.

“Okay, Hannah, god forbid we give and receive recommendations.” To which I say, you misunderstand. Sharing something you truly love to someone who revels in that revelation is sheer pleasure, and being shown a hidden gem you’d never otherwise come across is a true gift. It is not the transmission of recommendation that I object to, but the structure of its dissemination. The joy in sharing tastes comes from the joy of connection and mutual discovery. This is the opposite of the pyramid, which works to blend the joy of discovery with consumerist and elitist tastemaking.

In his recently published book Filterworld, writer Kyle Chayka makes the related argument that social media algorithms have created a flattened culture of passive consumption. In order to profit off of our attention, tech companies have engineered recommendation engines that incessantly and immediately serve up content it thinks will hold our gaze. As these algorithms relentlessly offer up new media for our consideration, Chayka writes that users become accustomed to “leaning back,” and “coast along with content running in the background, not worrying too much about what it is or what plays next.” Numb and dumb in our passive consumption, “we are fed culture like foie-gras ducks, with more regard for volume than quality.”

The idea that hordes of us are idly letting content stream endlessly through our eyeballs is horrifying, I agree. But where Chayka’s argument starts to lose me is when he starts to lament the loss of “good” taste. Since the aim of tech and media companies is to hold attention for as long as possible, algorithmic taste is essentially a game of numbers that presents us with media that panders to the lowest common denominator, he writes. The result is that it’s easier than ever to succumb to a dominant mainstream culture of dilute and subpar taste.

Chayka is hardly the first to observe or rail against mass acculturation. For decades, as new technologies from radio to the internet have democratized the consumption of culture and media, academics and thinkers have feared a decline toward monoculture. Late philosopher and critic Dwight Macdonald wrote in the 1960 book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America that “[mass culture] mixes and scrambles everything together, producing what might be called homogenized culture” that “distributes the globules of cream evenly throughout the milk instead of allowing them to float separately on top.” In other words: mainstream popular culture destroys our ability to discern which media is “valuable.”

Here, I’m sad to say, Chayka and Macdonald actually echo the mantra of the pyramid. Using “low-brow” or “mainstream” culture as a strawman, they say that homogenized culture is bad because it leads to bad taste, underscoring the idea that taste is something you can win at, that it’s something you can lord over others who aspire to consume as you do. And this is exactly what social media and internet platforms are best at: showing you everything you haven’t watched, read, eaten, bought yet, and shaming you for it. Social media has enabled whole micro-economies to run on clout: think hypebeasts or crypto or Birkin bags. Algorithmic recommendation engines aren’t destroying the concept of “good taste,” they’re propping it up, reinforcing existing hierarchies and value systems of taste all while hiding behind the farce that these recommendations are just “for you.” When your “tailored” algorithmic recommendation engine specifically led you to discover Sabrina Carpenter this summer, you may have loved her bops. This is not to say that she’s bad or good, but that she was fed to you.

But what I (and I’m sure plenty of others) am experiencing is that the whirlpool of recommendations powered by social media is exhausting—and if your tastes don’t fully don’t line up with the algorithms’ (which it rarely will), it renders certain terms meaningless. Everything is a “must-try” until nothing is. Your own taste becomes a piece of driftwood in the storm.

Tastes are meant to be formed in active voice. When you encounter a surprising song, clothing item, or restaurant, the reactions you feel are an opportunity to have a conversation with yourself about what resonates with you, how you prefer to move in the world, or who you think you are. Tastes are not meant to default to whatever content is being auto-steered—Chayka and I are aligned on that point. Tastes are meant to be formed through experimentation, experiences that test your comfort zone and elicit reactions that inform you of what you truly like.

In his paper “Pragmatics of Taste,” sociologist Antoine Hennion writes that taste “acts, engages, transforms and is felt,” and that it “is formed as it is expressed and is expressed as it is formed.” You can “like” music, but once you’ve developed your tastes, “liking music” becomes a new verb unto itself. Forming tastes requires the individual to use their lived experience and form a unique system of liking that reveals their difference. Taste is evidence of the world shaping us and vice versa.

In wanting guaranteed conversation starters, we become afraid of spending time not worth speaking about. After having a pyramid-endorsed experience you can say, “hey I did this thing,” and people will predictably react appropriately impressed or jealous or motivated to go try that thing themselves. But when you experience something that is great but doesn’t quite align with the pyramid—something with no cultural cache or veneer of coolness—all you can say is, “I tried this thing you don’t know about and it was meaningful to me, believe me.” And hopefully they do.

In the name of self-discovery, novelty and experimentation, and the fight against monotony, I hope we can still hear ourselves through the static. Honing my own taste has been an exercise in feeling out what I value—unique singing voices, textures, guitar solos, worlds that adhere to their own internal logic, novelty, brave and unexpected swings—and why. With that self-knowledge I can trust that even when I don’t enjoy an experience, those feelings will be new data-points I can use to challenge my understanding of the world and the people in it.

I don’t know if that group of friends at Hainan Chicken House enjoyed their food—they ate rather quickly and then they were out—but I hope they did. The Chicken House is a genuinely good eat. Their burrata paratha reminded me that fusion can be more than just bulgogi in a taco. It surprised me.