Taste Is Not a Personality
What we are actually doing when we perform our cultural preferences in public, and why it has so little to do with taste itself.
Taste used to be something you developed quietly, over years, mostly in private — the accumulated residue of everything you had read, watched, and listened to, refined by argument with people whose judgment you respected. Now it is something you perform, in public, continuously, as a form of identity maintenance. The two activities look similar from a distance and have almost nothing in common up close.
The performance version of taste rewards legibility over discernment. A preference only counts, in the economy of public display, if it can be recognized and categorized quickly by an audience scrolling past it in a fraction of a second. This favors extremes — the obscure b-side, the maximalist hot take, the film so canonically respectable that liking it says nothing at all — over the messier, more honest position of genuinely not being sure yet.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying things publicly, and plenty of real critical thought happens in public now, in essays and threads and reviews written by people with no institutional affiliation at all. The problem is not visibility. The problem is when visibility becomes the point, and the actual object — the book, the record, the film — becomes a prop in a performance about the person holding it rather than a thing being genuinely reckoned with.
You can usually tell the difference by watching what happens when someone changes their mind. Real taste updates: you rewatch a film you dismissed at twenty and find it holds up in ways you could not have seen then, or you return to a record you loved and hear its limitations for the first time. Performed taste rarely updates in public, because reversing a position costs more social capital than holding a wrong one quietly ever will.
The corrective is not to stop talking about what we love. It is to remember that taste was never supposed to be a fixed identity to defend. It is a practice, ongoing and a little embarrassing in retrospect, and the people worth listening to are usually the ones still willing to admit they were wrong about something last year.