Tastecore and the Enclosure of the Commons

What changed in 2021?

In the summer of 2021, I wrote an essay for Real Life (RIP) about the tech industry’s fraught relationship with fashion, arguing that this attitude reflected a contempt for public goods and a desire to monetize any value created. As you may remember, summer 2021 was an intense time—the COVID vaccine had become available early that year and by springtime most people who wanted it had gotten it, so there was a rush back outside that in retrospect was pretty weird. I recall countless examples of people not knowing how to act, newly acquired pets blocking sidewalks, and terrible driving, but also a sense of childlike wonder and gratitude as one mundane element of pre-pandemic life after another was incrementally restored. We may never see anything like it again: If 2020 was the grand experiment in living all of life at home (which worked a bit too well), 2021 was an opportunity to observe a complete factory reset on public space and the norms that make it tick. The New Normal is a term you don’t hear anymore and that’s probably when it died, as it all became too awkward to face. Anyway, I found myself noticing fashion more around that time because it was apparent that people had spent the preceding quarantine year fantasizing about all the joys of life that were indefinitely off limits and developing new hobbies and interests at home, a combination that enhanced fashion’s post-pandemic relevance among new groups of people, including tech bros, who would soon be talking about “taste.”

Revisiting that Real Life essay five years later, it strikes me as an inflection point in the trend it attempts to describe. Back then, Allbird sneakers and Mark Zuckerberg’s Gap hoodies were still both amusing shorthand for tech fashion; today, the Allbirds company is circling the drain and Zuckerberg wears carefully curated post-streetwear attire. By 2021, tech was getting into fashion, but in its own alienating way, recognizing yet another commons to enclose. “Fashion is a mode of display that enriches public space and a culture’s shared meanings, but as it enters the culture, it ceases to strictly belong to anyone,” I wrote in the essay. “It creates positive externalities—benefits for which people don’t have to explicitly pay, but can enjoy just by being present in shared space.” The tech bro reinterprets this as pure consumption, the benefits of which are meant to accrue primarily to oneself. If the 2010s were about neglecting your personal appearance because you had bigger things to focus on and ZIRP money to grab with both fists, the 2020s seem to signify the decadent era that followed. By the fall of 2021, Facebook would rename itself Meta and cringely tag Balenciaga in a tweet about the dress code in the metaverse. The NYC-vs-SF cultural dichotomy and the stereotype of poorly dressed tech workers persists, but it is complicated by a growing subset of “taste bros” who don’t necessarily have good taste, but at least believe that they’re supposed to have it—a dangerous combination.

Today, there is a huge amount of discourse about taste that seems to largely unfold in the shadow of AI, which will either make taste much more or much less important. I’ve tried to write a longer piece about taste but I’m still not sure I want to feed the fire, plus it has become increasingly clear that people using the word to mean wildly different things, to the degree that any additional commentary risks talking past whatever it’s responding to. But let’s assume that taste means “aesthetic discerment,” or liking things that are good, and then we can ask the question that always puzzles me: If you know you don’t have good taste, why would you want it? If the goal is personal satisfaction, you might as well just enjoy whatever you enjoy. But if the goal is to gain some sort of status or advance in the world, then it would make more sense to work on the skills that will propel you (or your business) forward, and it’s probably no accident that this version of taste is almost entirely a matter of consumption—acquiring a set of signifiers, throwing money at a problem you don’t really want to solve yourself. Friend of Kneeling Bus @brb_irl had the best assessment of this, tweeting “I’m trying to make ‘tastecore’ (derogatory) a thing. It’s when your taste is just trying to be tasteful, but really it’s molded by market forces.” Now that is something that’s available to all of us. iykyk.

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