Men's Lifestyle May 20, 2026 0 Comments

Is Our Sense of Taste Deteriorating—And What That Means for Your Health and Diet!

Every morning, as I make my way to my favorite Japandi coffee spot in Brooklyn, I can’t help but notice the parade of lookalikes—the quintessential film bros clad in selvedge denim and sporting meticulously groomed mustaches, clutching first editions of Dune like badges of honor. They’re everywhere around here, united under the banner of Blackbird Spyplane, the cult style newsletter that’s defined a certain flavor of taste in this borough famed for its hipness. But here’s the kicker: Is that really taste, or just a uniform we’re all too eager to wear? In a world where algorithms spoon-feed us what to like and where “good taste” seems less about personal grit and more about impeccable mimicry, I find myself asking—did we lose something essential along the way? Is taste now a commodity we buy off a curated page, or is it still something raw, wild, and deeply personal? Let’s unravel why the perfect cup of coffee might serve as a better metaphor for true taste—steaming, affordable, and unapologetically unpretentious. Ready to challenge your own perceptions? Let’s dive in. LEARN MORE

13 min read

Every morning, on my pilgrimage to a Japandi coffee shop in my neighborhood in Brooklyn,I encounter taste, so much taste, often in the form of copies of the same guy. He wears selvedge denim, thumb rings, and a well-groomed mustache. He is a film bro, with a preference, inevitably, for anything directed by Akira Kurosawa. He likely lives in an intentionally cluttered Greenpoint loft. The clutter includes first-edition copies of Dune. Sightings of people like him are rare in most other American cities, except maybe in the trendiest dive bars of a few other metropolitan areas. Even in Brooklyn, if you travel a mile south or a mile north, he would disappear. For quite a few, this man’s aesthetic is the epitome of taste.

Him and every other Blackbird Spyplane reader, that is.

Fans of the cult-favorite style newsletter—and here in Brooklyn there are many—dress it to perfection. My borough is famously one of the hippest places on earth, so I am ostensibly surrounded by taste. But is this it, this phenomenon I observe every day with my morning coffee? Treating a fashion blog as a manual?

What even is taste?

Taste can be easiest—or perhaps only?—described indirectly. In 1964, Susan Sontag wrote in Notes on “Camp” that “taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response.” She argued that taste is active and unruly, not something one can just subscribe to, not something that can arise from consensus. The pursuit of taste shouldn’t be straightforward. “Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea,” she adds.

Centuries ago, people were already puzzling over the ways in which taste is ineffable. Montesquieu wrote, “Natural taste is not the same as theoretical knowledge. It consists in the rapid and subtle application of the very rules which we do not know.”

Taste requires intention. One must make choices to demonstrate it, and being simply drawn to something without reason is frivolous. At the same time, following trends is not cultivating taste, much as quoting Shakespeare isn’t authoring literature. Taste becomes a trope the moment it becomes tangible. Sontag, again: “To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself.”

Is taste a commodity? Today, we often describe it as such. It’s something—a hardened idea—that you either have or don’t. We think this way because we’re lazy. We owe that to the Algorithm. We recently acquired abundant access to the things from which one builds a sense of taste—music, film, fashion, information—and this abundance cultivated decision paralysis. We invented the Algorithm to help us sort through it all. First it helped us, then it overtook us. There was a time, roughly the period covered by Kyle Chayka’s viral 2024 book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, in which the worry was that the algorithmic mainstream was sanding down nuance of every kind, creating a big, fat, boring, Millennial Gray–colored middle. People without taste have always relied on convention to create the appearance of taste, and algorithmic factions are the most accessible and familiar source of convention in history: Spotify’s big shuffle button makes it easy for us to start listening to music without thinking about what we’re listening to; TikTok feeds us visuals distinct enough to be engaging without pushing our boundaries.

But it’s not just the Algorithm. Because today, we don’t just have Spotify and Pinterest. We have Blackbird Spyplane.

We are constantly planting “Love Is Love” yard signs to be like our tasteful neighbors. This isn’t taste. It’s the illusion of taste.

There’s nothing wrong with Blackbird Spyplane. Blackbird Spyplane is cool. Johan Weiner and Erin Wylie, the journalist and design scout who run the newsletter, are true tastemakers. Being against the Algorithm is kind of its whole point. But ever since the Algorithm became our primary source of information, being visibly anti-algorithmic has become a trend. The way people engage with Blackbird Spyplane is not materially distinct from the way they follow algorithmic trends. It is not taste. And that is the key to a feeling everyone has now, that something is off, that people care more than ever about what they look like, what music they listen to, what movies they acclaim, but no one seems to ever be, you know, original.

So the rise of Blackbird Spyplane is, arguably, pernicious. Just as the legion of Kangol-wearing JFK Jr. knockoffs, aping the style of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, is . . . stale. Just like how the hyperfixation on re-creating influencer-approved outfits will always fall flat.

Taste is, to put it simply, personal preference. But having preferences that are truly personal is work. It requires introspection and a strong sense of self. Taste was once something we developed, each on our own. It was as hard to pin down as the sense we exercise with our tongues: individual, subjective, surprising. But something terrible has happened. Taste no longer comes from within. It’s something we get from a cool fashion blog or a middling TV show costume-designed to within an inch of its life. Taste is now something we co-opt.

How did we get here?

I. The Gerrymandering of Taste

There is one thing that even in this new world remains as true as it has ever been: There is a certain kind of man who would never be caught dead in a Kangol hat. In fact, there are several of them. Our Greenpoint film bro, for one. Any member of the manosphere, for another.

In line with our fragmented cultural moment, items of clothing (among other artifacts of culture) are adopting polarizing identities online: Gucci horsebit loafers are passé among disciples of quiet luxury but the epitome of status in the banking world, where they’ve been nicknamed the “deal sled.” Bleached eyebrows can be the product of a meltdown just as much as a ticket to Berghain.

The intensity of these fashion contentions is fueled by their difference from each other, much like our political positions. It is undeniably a technological phenomenon. Even a slight preference for something sucks you into its algorithmic bubble, where you’re greeted by content that preaches the superiority of this preference that, you now realize, you share with many other people. That is, the Algorithm is no longer enabling a universal convergence of taste, which is what we once feared. It’s gerrymandering style.

It’s entirely reasonable to blame the multibillion-dollar user-experience industry, whence the Algorithm, for dulling our appetites, but it’s not entirely to blame. The Algorithm makes it trivial to find something for which you have an affinity, but the truth is that we need the help because we’ve forgotten where to look. We don’t know where to look because we know less about our own preferences. We know less about our preferences because we no longer have to articulate why we like something. We long ago off-loaded that to other people in the form of social media.

Collage featuring a DJ with a group of dancers and another figure.

Getty Images / Photo Illustration by Leigh Cohen

We live in algorithmic factions with distinct rules of meaning: Bleached eyebrows can be chic—or a cry for help. We got here by prioritizing perception over reality. Once, opinions about ballet had to do with a learned, cultivated obsession with dance. Today, they’re more about finding the right take on Misty Copeland.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard breaks this down in his 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulation. The more our lives are informed by a filtered depiction of reality, the more value is attributed to the representation of reality rather than reality itself. We read to be seen reading. We go on lengthy runs to share our Strava data. We go on vacation only to post pictures telling others we went on vacation. In the panopticon of social media, the value of running, reading, and going on vacation is dictated by how these activities are perceived, not the acts themselves. And of course it’s an elegant trap: To be recognized on social media as someone with taste, one must first be legible to others; but once that starts to anchor your decisions, you perform taste more than you develop it. You want your taste to be acknowledged more than you actually want to have it.

Here is the deep, deep problem of this reality: The size of these factions strikes the careful balance of being small enough to feel niche but big enough to be recognizable. They’re governed by a stylistic consensus that’s noticeably different from the mainstream, such as it still exists, and reinforces an aura of exclusivity through obscure, if-you-know-you-know content. Having taste, along this formulation, is seen as compliance with the consensus of your faction. Acclaim, or even just acceptance, from the people who acknowledge you. In our endlessly gerrymandered world, we are constantly planting “Love Is Love” yard signs to show just how much we are like our tasteful neighbors. But this isn’t actually taste. It’s the illusion of taste.

II. The Death of the Connoisseur

The writer and social commentator Fran Lebowitz, who in her inimitable way embodies the notion of individual style, likes to talk about how there was a time when critics of the ballet were (in her words) rabid. Fights would break out at intermission over the arch of a foot or the slight bend of a finger. Audiences had sharper tastes because they knew and cared more about the craft itself. What being a fan of ballet said about them had little bearing. (On the contrary, it’s not uncommon today to see the people claiming to be jazz enthusiasts struggle to name a Duke Ellington song.) In many of her iconic rants, Lebowitz heavily indexes on how AIDS took not only a generation’s greatest artists but also robbed us of an audience that cultivated artists. What her laments point out is that good taste requires good art, and good art requires a degree of connoisseurship.

The writer Dani Offline, in her viral Substack essay “everyone wants to be a DJ, no one wants to dance,” writes a 2026 version of this argument. Connoisseurship today is dying because “enjoying art with other people for the simple, loving pleasure of it all has become devalued.” We enjoy art with others because the Algorithm connects us with them; our own pleasure in it is immaterial if others approve.

In place of the cultivation of a personal sensibility is the pursuit of being a tastemaker. “We read books to become better writers, or so we can seem well-read,” Dani writes. “We listen to music to sharpen our influences and find our target audience.” The Algorithm consecrates a new layer of meaning onto Baudrillard’s representational world: It surveys how the Internet engages with something and creates a vocabulary of reward signals that we mix and match. We engage only with culture that the Algorithm deems will signal something about us to others. We learn who Jean-Luc Godard is to bring him up at parties; we watch In the Mood for Love to associate ourselves with Quentin Tarantino, who is a fan of the film’s director, Wong Kar-wai.

And so in walks the performative man, who wears wired earphones to show he listens to Clairo; who listens to Clairo to show he’s soft; who wants to be soft because it means he doesn’t embody the tropes of toxic masculinity. Whether he actually likes Clairo doesn’t matter, because reality has been replaced by the algorithmic simulation of reality. He scores points for his choices. No one can become a connoisseur on that basis. It’s no surprise Baudrillard’s essay was a primary inspiration behind The Matrix.

You will have moments of bad taste. But taste is by definition subjective, so unpopular tastes should exist, too.

Sol Thompson, a writer and cohost of the fashion podcast Pair of Kings, attributes this dwindling spirit of experimentation to our lack of introspection. “People expect the clothes to shift their relationship with what they do or how they are,” he said. There’s less room for so-called error because too many of us believe that what we wear is comprehensively representative of who we are, so we (to play things safe) turn to convenient, cookie-cutter aesthetics to exhibit taste. Enter “how to dress like a cool girl” tutorials.

The irony is that in this world where everyone wants to be a DJ, we’ve forgotten what DJs are for. Thompson, a DJ himself, believes that a DJ is a facilitator and ought not be the center of attention. “Ideally,” he says, “everyone is too busy enjoying themselves to notice the DJ.” In Lebowitz’s era, tastemakers kept artists in check. They demanded a certain quality of art through precise and constructive criticism. An audience with taste actually shaped art, in a feedback loop that advanced culture. Today it can feel like tastemakers have been reduced to offering breaks from the Algorithm. That can be thoughtful and valuable, but all too often they simply become costumes whose preferences we try on.

III. Against Good Taste

The ease and omnipresence of these technologiescan feel insurmountable. Who could bring themselves to get off Spotify? But they aren’t only swallowing us. Especially in the age of AI, when creation is just as cheap as curation, technology is killing the entire online experience. The Dead Internet Theory supposes that AI slop has taken over all previously genuine human activity on the Internet. Discussion forums have been flooded with bot accounts, all photos and videos are generated by AI, etc. It’s the natural and metaphorical end state for the version of taste we have now: literal robots endlessly aping things that already exist with minute variations. But we’re not there yet, and in fact, if the dead parts of the Internet are our flattened, gerrymandered style subcultures, perhaps that’s good.

As much as we’re told that the Web has become this poisonous, self-referential cesspool, such that finding inspiration offline is the new gold standard—or at least that’s what the consensus is here in Brooklyn—I think that’s too easy. For all the harm technology has done to our ability to develop taste, it’s still true that the Internet has given us unparalleled access to just about anything. We can now sift through the entire discographies of obscure international bands, watch independent short films, and read archived magazines whenever we want. I believe it still holds promise.

Here is what we must get rid of: Having taste today is synonymous with having “good taste.” That is what we mean when we say that someone “has taste”; we mean that they have good taste. That is a lie.

There was a time when taste was cultivated through trial and error. We used to have to take risks and suffer through its repercussions. By basking in the discomfort of ill-fitting silhouettes and excessive layering, we learned what worked best for us. We weren’t constantly trying to define and communicate what our tastes were because there wasn’t a “right” answer to what makes good taste. We got to good taste, such as it was, through a series of horrendous choices that exhibited bad taste.

The evil of the Dead Internet Theory, if it is right, is that it leaves us nowhere to turn for inspiration. But it supposes that the Algorithm is all that there is. There are broad swaths of the Internet that haven’t been colonized; the Algorithm is only the neatly paved brick road on the Internet’s uneven, treacherous terrain. It has its limits. No one’s stopping you from venturing off the beaten path to destinations that aren’t optimized for visibility: personal websites, anonymous bulletin boards, resource libraries.

“Internet walks”—the act of aimlessly surfing through online rabbit holes, not unlike how we experienced Wikipedia when it was new and wondrous, clicking from page to page until you wound up with knowledge you never would have suspected even existed—exposes us to the less legible textures of the Web. There are tools designed to facilitate this. The platform Are.na is like a nonalgorithmic Pinterest board where you can follow different people and traverse the parts of the Internet they bookmark. “The goal is not self-improvement,” says a note at the bottom of its home page. “The goal is engaging more deeply with the World.” It is precisely through navigating the vast, digital ridges that we’re forced to consider what resonated and why. That provokes introspection, through which the walls that once gerrymandered our tastes slowly crumble.

This notion, of course, is older than the Internet. In 1958, Guy Debord—a contemporary of Sontag, the author of The Society of Spectacle, and a member of the French postwar avant-garde group Situationist International—introduced the concept of the dérive. Defined as an unstructured, improvised wandering through an urban landscape, dérive pushes participants to let go of the relationships they have with their social environment. Pick a color and follow it; close your eyes and identify the loudest persistent sound you’re hearing, then walk to go find it; at every intersection, roll the dice to see which way to turn. In other words, walk for walking’s sake. A predecessor of Baudrillard, Debord saw the practice as the antidote to society’s “decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.”

Debord’s position operated in direct opposition to a culture of being “intentional.” Today’s algorithmic culture is the epitome of intentional. Nothing is an accident. Terms like curated and mindful are sprinkled across everything. What those terms obscure is a lack of introspection. Debord believed that by refamiliarizing ourselves with the things of the world rather than the relationships we have to them, we could find new, deeper meaning and come to know ourselves better. Perhaps by refamiliarizing ourselves with the physical (wearing a shirt) rather than the intellectual (what the shirt says about you), we can find a way out of what we would today call the Algorithm. Objects of trends, when considered in isolation, are simply things. They stop representing our membership in an algorithmic faction or signaling social status. They become free to mean anything for anyone.

The risk is that you will occasionally step on thorns. You will have moments of bad taste. But taste is by definition subjective, so unpopular tastes should exist, too. Where there is preference for Rick Owens, there’s also demand for Allbirds and skinny jeans. Our fixation on embodying the consensus of whatever algorithmic faction we fall under has asphyxiated every ounce of whimsy. Aren’t occasional poor choices worth the trade-off?

I now occasionally start my mornings with an aimless walk around the neighborhood, fueled partially by a desire to happen upon some caffeine. I no longer judge shops by their Japandi aesthetic, and I’ve stopped using Google Maps to read reviews or navigate to nearby joints. I’ve gotten the sense that much of the most highly acclaimed spots, while perfectly Instagrammable, make horrible coffee. But that’s by my own definition of what makes coffee good, and my opinion is that the best cup of coffee is just something that’s piping hot and costs less than three dollars. I recognize that that’s out of step in Brooklyn, but who’s a better judge of what I like best than me? I think it’s fair to say that I’ve tried enough happenstance coffee at this point to have an actual opinion. Cheap, hot coffee is what I like, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I earned it.

The same goes with taste. Forget the expensive coffee. Ignore the barber’s perfectly curated Instagram. Give the wrong bands a chance. Watch Kurosawa, sure, but not because another famous director, QT or otherwise, said anything—watch Kurosawa because Rashomon will terrify you. I could say more, but I’ll stop there because I’m getting away from my point. The point of this essay is don’t take my word for it.