Your Taste Isn’t Yours. The Algorithm Decided Everything.

You’ve felt it. That quiet unease when you walk into a friend’s apartment and it looks exactly like yours. The same rattan chair. The same Phaidon art book on the coffee table. The same Le Labo candle. The same “accidental” vinyl collection leaning against the wall — Fleetwood Mac, Amy Winehouse, maybe some Tame Impala for edge.

You both laugh and say “great minds.” But it wasn’t your minds. It was your feeds.

We didn’t democratize taste. We industrialized it — and called it self-expression.

There used to be gatekeepers. Editors at Esquire and Vogue who decided what was worth looking at. Curators at galleries who told you what was art and what was garbage. Yes, it was elitist. Yes, it excluded people. But it created shared standards — a common vocabulary of what “good” meant. You could love it or hate it, but you knew what you were arguing against.

Then social media killed the gatekeepers. And we celebrated. Finally, anyone could discover anything. No more middlemen telling you what to like. Taste would be free, democratic, authentic.

Except that’s not what happened at all.

What happened was we replaced a dozen human gatekeepers with a single invisible one: the recommendation algorithm. And this gatekeeper doesn’t care about beauty, originality, or craft. It cares about one thing — how long you’ll keep scrolling.

The algorithm doesn’t know what good taste is. It only knows what makes you stop.

Think about how you discover things now. You didn’t choose to like mid-century modern furniture. You saw it forty times in a row because it photographs well and generates saves. You didn’t develop a passion for natural wine — your feed served it to you because the aesthetic performs better than Bordeaux. You didn’t stumble onto Japanese minimalism through some personal journey of aesthetic awakening. You saw it in a YouTube vlog, then again in a TikTok, then again in a Pinterest board, until it felt like your own idea.

This is the trick the algorithm plays on you. It doesn’t force anything. It just narrows your world until everything you see feels inevitable. It manufactures the sensation of preference while quietly removing every alternative.

I noticed this firsthand at a dinner party last year. Six people, all from different cities, all in their early thirties. Every single one of them was wearing a variation of the same outfit: oversized neutral sweater, wide-leg trousers, chunky loafers. They all listened to the same podcasts. They all had the same opinion about the same restaurants. They all described their style as “eclectic” and “personal.”

They were unique in exactly the same way. And they had no idea.

Being different used to require effort. Now it just requires a different algorithm — and most people don’t even have that.

Here’s what makes this truly insidious: the algorithm doesn’t just reflect your taste. It shapes it, then feeds it back to you as confirmation. You like what you see because you’ve been conditioned to see what you like. It’s a closed loop with no exit, and you’re inside it calling it freedom.

The old system was broken. I’m not romanticizing it. Editors were overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and coastal. They decided what mattered and ignored everything else. But at least you knew who they were. You could point at Anna Wintour and say, “She’s deciding this.” You could rebel against a person, a magazine, an institution.

Who do you rebel against now? A recommendation engine optimized for engagement? A dataset you’ll never see? At least gatekeepers had faces. The algorithm is a ghost in your phone, and you’ve invited it to decorate your life.

The result is a culture where everyone has opinions but nobody has taste. We have infinite access to everything ever created, and somehow we all converge on the same five things. We have more freedom than any generation in history, and we use it to buy the same couch.

We gained access to everything and lost the ability to choose.

There’s a word for what’s happening: homogenization disguised as diversity. Your Spotify Wrapped looks unique until you compare it with three million other people’s Wrapped and realize you’re all listening to the same playlist in slightly different orders. Your Instagram aesthetic feels personal until you search the hashtag and find ten thousand identical accounts.

The platforms have weaponized the language of individuality to sell you conformity. They tell you your feed is “personalized.” They tell you their recommendations are “tailored to your taste.” What they mean is: we’ve figured out which version of the same thing you’ll click on.

So what do you do? You can’t uninstall the internet. You can’t pretend algorithms don’t exist. But you can start noticing the cage.

When you “discover” something, ask yourself: did I find this, or was it placed in front of me? When you feel a preference forming, trace it back. Was it a slow accumulation of exposure, or did it arrive fully formed after one viral post? When you describe your taste as “unique,” check whether ten thousand other people are saying the same thing about the same stuff.

Real taste has always required friction. It requires boredom, wandering, getting things wrong, liking something for stupid reasons and then figuring out why. The algorithm removes all of that. It gives you the answer before you’ve asked the question. It optimizes for satisfaction and eliminates the struggle that makes taste meaningful.

Taste isn’t what you like. It’s the willingness to like something nobody served you.

The next time you buy something, save something, or declare something beautiful, pause. Ask yourself the only question that matters: is this mine, or is this what the machine decided I’d accept?

If you can’t tell the difference, that’s your answer.