“I hate talking about this word because it just means so many things,” social strategist Carmen explains of the feed being fake, but “let’s say taste is kind of like the sum of all of your cultural, right? Then there’s a discernment piece and you’re trying to figure out ‘What do I actually like?’ now all your cultural inputs have been paid for by a record label, so maybe your your ability to discern what is good and what is bad has just been totally poisoned.”
“But that’s always been the case,” Ben Dietz says. “Those things have always been been determined by somebody else.”
“You’re both right, obviously,” Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick adds, “but I think the other thing too that makes someone like an Eli, or whoever the person of the moment is, different is that very teenage thing that a lot of us still have and I think people naturally have in general and social media exacerbates: the desire to be the first person to discover something, that Christopher Columbus sense of ‘I found this person and my feed gave it to me as a gift and I am the first.’ Whether or not that is true doesn’t matter, but it’s what the clipping economy preys upon, that idea that you will find that novelty and feel special.”
“My fear — and I’ll just call it right now — I bet you that all of the same behemoths that tried to claim taste and tried to like um you know optimize taste,” Carmen explains, “the next word that they’re going to go hard on and make a campaign for is discernment. I feel like it’s just like already happening. August of this year, they’re going to be like, ‘No, no, no. We were just joking about taste! What we actually mean is discernment, the ability to tell between two things what is good and what is not.’”
“It’s funny,” Ben says, “I see it from a slightly different thing. As a matter of fact, I was at a talk last week where a pretty famous creative director said, ‘We’re not worried about juniors being replaced by AI because juniors at our shop are encouraged to use AI so that they are exposed to a million things so that that’s how they develop taste because taste is just the accumulation of stuff.’ He didn’t say it quite that way, but that was the thrust of it. And I was just like that is totally wrong. Absolutely wrong. Weirdly, he walked it back and made taste into actual discernment of all of that stuff. It was shocking to watch the sales job this was this guy was doing.”
“My point simply being, Carmen, that discernment has been activated,” Ben adds. “We just need Greg Brockman to tweet that he’s got je ne sais quoi and then that’ll be over too.”
“I’m telling you, Greg Brockman’s gonna Tweet about discernment,” Carmen says. “I give it six weeks.”
Listen to this conversation in full above, where we explore the Enhanced games and parental influence on music. You can also listen on YouTube and Spotify too.
Find more from HIP REPLACEMENT on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. Be sure to follow Ben Dietz over on SIC and Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick over on The Trend Report™ too.
