by: Brandon Marcus

In his book Technopoly, Neil Postman writes that a core belief of scientific management was that “technical calculation” is superior to human judgment and subjectivity. 

He defined technopoly as:

the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.

That is: a technopoly is a culture that takes orders from and finds satisfaction in technology, one that has lost confidence in this human subjectivity and devalued “the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions.”  

For decades, organizations have made work more orderly and predictable by pushing the knowledge worker to more resemble the assembly line worker. To be “custodians of computation,” as Cal Newport puts it, where original thinking and discretionary judgment are devalued.

The measurable and the data-driven are prized above all, even deified. Quantification is a technique for mechanizing decisions; for assuring “accuracy” against the ambiguities of human judgment. 

TL;DR: We started sidelining human thinking long before AI. 

I interpret all the taste talk as part of the broader effort to mark the terrain of human distinction in a machine world of automation, commodification, and interchangeability.

As AI commoditizes expertise and colonizes execution, knowledge work drifts further from the human and flattens toward the statistical mean. Incentives pull toward “good enough” work. Non-distinct. Passable. And we talk of workslop and standing out in the seas of sameness.

AI — the apex of automation — compels us to find language to capture how subjectivities, lived experience, and earned expertise reassert their value. If expertise is reducible to next word prediction and pattern matching, then it falls within the aperture of automation. If judgment collapses into “following the numbers,” Claude can do that better and faster too. 

And there are plenty of domains where judgment remains a murkier matter of interpretation and perspective. Qualitative, not quantitative. Where there’s no single conception of what good looks like, or only one right strategy or choice. 

Nowhere is this more visible than in tech, where taste talk is most ubiquitous. A lot of it sounds like a different way to talk about brand in the context of software commodification. Absent durable advantages, they’ll differentiate on vibes, aesthetics, design, and user experience. Brand is back! And irreducibly qualitative. That’s why it was buried by the wave of growth marketers.

Many place attention and care at the heart of forming taste. Brie Wolfson writes:

“Though taste may appear effortless, you can’t have taste by mistake. It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention…Most people with taste can tell you, in explicit terms, how they came to it.”

While most of us focus on the dangers of outsourcing our thinking to AI, we also outsource to it our attention and care. The talk of taste recognizes a necessary counterpoise to automating away this attention and care. Before we place anything before a human audience, we entrust a person to carefully decide it’s good and ready. AI might give you “good enough,” but humans are the arbiters of the good.

After all, people with taste don’t need to ask AI if something looks good, they recognize and articulate what “good” looks like.

Wolfson offers a few more instructive sentences on the term:

“Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the world works, and also what they’re working with in their inner worlds. When we recognize true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul. This is why it is so alluring.”

Skill and soul.

Taste is a subset of judgment that’s inseparable from the person exercising it — a word for what’s at once skilled, and yet distinctly personal and human.

What makes slop so distasteful, if not its unearned skill and the whiff of soullessness?

After a century of making workers more machine-like, the ultimate machines have arrived. Taste reclaims a bit of the ‘human’ in ‘human excellence’ — and perhaps, rehabilitates the subjective judgment that technopoly taught us to distrust. ■

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Brandon Marcus is a ghostwriter and editorial content strategist for B2B service firms, startups and nonprofits. He’s based in Santa Monica, CA.