Our last letter was about AI and the creative process, about refusing to outsource your thinking even when the tools make it frictionless to do so. When I was writing that, I knew I had to write a separate piece unpacking the topic of social media and more specifically… taste. What it means to have it. What it actually takes to build it. And whether the conditions we’re consuming in are capable of producing it at all.
Let’s talk about that, about consumption and what we’ve stopped doing: digestion.
Taste is not the same thing as an aesthetic. It’s not the personal brand you are building with a colour palette, a mood board made on Pinterest or a label like “clean girl”.
Taste is sensibility. Built through thousands of small encounters with things that either moved you or didn’t.
I feel like I can always recognize a person with taste by how they move through ideas. Of course, what they own or wear matters but when they carry this ease of association to different references, I know that it can only have come from spending time accumulating what matters to them. In other words, having taste meant that you had done the work. It shows a discipline in finding what was true to you. And back when everyone did this, we had individuality.
Recently, I read Emily Oberg’s reflection on the years before she created Sporty and Rich. Back in 2014, she was spending hours buying magazines off of eBay and scouring the internet for old photos. “I think about all the effort and energy that goes into finding references and doing research,” she wrote, “and I think its a lost art form. I sometimes wonder do people really love doing this as much as I do? or do they just love the results?”
As someone who lived on Tumblr for most of her teen years, I missed the frisson you can only experience when you find an obscure or lonely reference. It’s like finding a new artist before they are mainstream. Now? Content doesn’t wait to be found anymore.
Volume is eroding taste. The algorithm is eroding taste.
The Consuming Mind
The human brain has a circuit for curiosity. Our minds were made to consume. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp spent decades mapping what he calls the SEEKING system: a dopamine-driven subcortical mechanism that drives exploration and curiosity. Our perpetual pursuit of the “next thing” is a part of our biological wiring.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the algorithm is created with knowledge of this. And guess what it provides us with? Infinite novelty, variable reward, continuous suggestion, more and more and more content for us to consume. It has replaced the experience of genuine discovery with unlimited stimulation disguised as curation.
You are probably now thinking: If the algorithm is learning what I like and showing me more of it… what exactly is the problem?
The problem is that the algorithm doesn’t have your best interest at heart. It’s not trying to show you something that can challenge you or expand your references to grow your point of view. It’s simply trying to sell to you. The “for you” page or “you might also like” exists because it knows you’ll engage and engagement converts to revenue. The algorithm isn’t learning your taste, it’s manufacturing your desire then satisfying you with more of the same so it can keep you on the platform.
The system is adapting to this and the problem is compounding. Creators and businesses are copying what the feed rewards because that’s what gets seen. Brands are running to AI to find out what converts, and AI generates from what already exists. Influencers share products and aspiring creators share the same products because they think it’s what will get them noticed.
So here is a question to sit with: Do you actually like what you see? Or did the system decide what you should find interesting?
And even if the answer is yes, even if you think what the algorithm feeds you is what interests you, is it actually meaningful? How much of what you consume is actually contributing to your taste? How much of it is adding to who you are
The Digestion Problem
I believe what we consume should do something. It should expand our worldview, help us make informed decisions and opinions or at the very least, add joy! But there is a caveat because whatever it adds, it still needs to be digested.
and… we are simply NOT digesting.
Think about how digestion works. When you eat, you body doesn’t just store food in your belly. It absorbs the nutrients and the rest… well, goes to waste. Our body is selective in this biological process. So when we are doing the same (but with our brain) stuffing knowledge and ideas without discerning, it’s not a surprise we are exhausted and overstimulated.
So what have we done to lessen the load? We outsource our storage externally. We “keep” information for later by taking screenshots and “save”ing posts to return to. It’s an illusion of control! They just end up in the landfill with the rest of the thousands of other things we also want to go back to look at. Congrats, now we have a second inbox.
A 2011 study in Science found that when people expect information to be digitally retrievable, they remember it less. And that study was done over a decade ago… so you can imagine what it’s like living in an AI-first world.
And the algorithm is not waiting for us. It’s always ready to serve the next thing. Can anything matter if everything matters?
Funny enough, the digestion problem was already a concern before the World Wide Web existed. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote about human knowledge accumulating faster than humans could meaningfully engage with it. He proposed a solution called Memex which was a desk-sized personal system for storing and retrieving. It was a thinking tool.
This pioneered what has now become the internet, search engines, smartphones and eventually AI. We’ve solved this problem technologically; we now have more tools than ever. But we are digesting less than ever. The technological solution somehow made the problem worse?
I mean there has to be a reason why 2026 is called The Year of Analog right?!
The Practice of Meaningful Digestion
The return to analog might seem romantic and nostalgic. It might even seem like a trend but it’s actually a response to exhaustion.
At least I would hope that buying physical books and disposable cameras and writing in notebooks isn’t an aesthetic statement or an act of performativity.
So, what do we do? What does it look like to consume with intention and digest properly?
There is a practice for this: The Commonplace Book. For centuries before all the digital tools, this was how people with rich inner lives organized their thinking. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations began as a private collection of notes and quotes , John Locke had a unique indexing system for his, and Virginia Woolf’s notebooks were her lifelong practice of accumulation. They read widely, found things that resonated with them and then they wrote it down and expanded their own thoughts on the topic.
The act of writing something down was digestion. Not copy and pasting or screenshotting it for later. The deliberate act of deciding what belonged in their notebook was a ritual for taste.
With Love Archive
When I started designing the Personal Archive, I built it as a contemporary commonplace book. An analogue home for a genuine point of view. From our earliest conversations, some of the reflection has been that despite it being an old practice, more people are commonplacing than they realize.
One of my dear friends Elisa ( & talented writer for our previous publication) shared:
“Even though I’ve “commonplaced” throughout my life, in one way or another, discovering the word for it made me more motivated and inspired to jot down ideas in one centralized place. Since then, I feel more connected to the topics that make me curious and spaces I wish to be in.”- Elisa Nguyen
So I hope that if you haven’t heard of the term before, it can offer you that same spark both Elisa and I found.
What we choose to write down helps us articulate what matters most to us. It becomes the record of our fixations which is the closest any of us get to understanding our own taste.
(Maybe in a future piece, I’ll share some of my fixations and rabbit holes to go down in, that feels fun.)
Further Reading & Exploration
Shoshana Zuboff- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Vannevar Bush- As We May Think
Malik Alimoekhamedov- Memex: A Romantic Theoretical tool for Thought
Dazed- Is 2026 the year of analogue?
Ayushi Thakkar- How to Start a Commonplace Book (and Why you Need One)
