For our cultural predictions roundup back in January, the musician and technologist Trevor McFedries predicted that 2026 was going to be a really good year—professionally speaking—for people with good taste. The jury’s still out, but it’s definitely turning into a big year for talking about taste. And for the first time in history, the tech world seems to be leading the charge, from engineers penning essays about how “personal taste” is the new moat, to startups promising us more aesthetically discerning AI, to the Palantir chore coat and tech billionaires sitting front row at Fashion Week.

To make sense of why taste has become such a Silicon Valley buzzword—and what that tells us about the changing meaning and role of taste more broadly–we brought on Drew Austin, a writer and urban planner who runs the excellent Substack, Kneeling Bus, where he recently penned a piece called “Tastecore and the Enclosure of the Commons.” We discuss Drew’s research on the tech world’s changing relationship to fashion in the post-pandemic era, the growing epidemic of “tasteslop,” and how the current discourse frames taste as something less about personal distinction and more about gaining a competitive edge. Plus, we tap Pierre Bourdieu to try to parse the evolving function of taste in society over time—and what the tech industry’s taste obsession can tell us about the shifting landscape of class and class antagonism.

Follow Drew at Kneeling Bus on Substack.

Read Drew on taste:

“Tastecore and the enclosure of the commons”

“Worn out: Tech elites’ supposed indifference to fashion is a contempt for the commons” (Real Life)

“Here comes a regular: Taste is obsolete & gatekeeping is code for what the internet took from us”

“Bots in the beerlight: Sometimes embodiment is all you’ve really got”“Lo-fi beats for studying: How to push more through the human attention bottleneck”

Additional references:

“Taste is Eating Silicon Valley” by Anu Atluru (Working Theories)

“Personal Taste is the Moat” by Wang Cong

“Tasteslop: Notes on technological anxiety” by Emily Segal (Nemesis)

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