after reading one of your pieces, I often feel both 'smarter' / more educated, and also sometimes dumbfounded (complimentary) by how you draw together so many different concepts into a cohesive whole.
Re: principled acquisition of taste and the condensing of media into escapism, the lone ad nauseam allowance I make for myself is pointing out that liking something and disliking something are the exact same thing. It's the same nebulous, reactive emotion, just packaged in a different shade of expression for the happenstance verdict. Meanwhile, the curiosity, neutrality, optimism et al that you mention here begets the honest thinking and reflection that we will ideally apply to the art we encounter, and which actually has communal relevance as opposed to simply liking and disliking something, which is categorically only relevant to the dis/liker.
And so when we talk about taste, aren't we actually talking about digestion? The ways in which we take the nutrients offered by the art and convert them into a shared cultural health that prioritizes growth over placation? With the further understanding that each viewer boasts a different flora and so can theoretically convert certain nutrients that others can't even truly digest? I think Mad Max: Fury Road is mid as all fuck, but I'd much rather read an essay that can pinpoint a tangible genius of the film instead of stand on my own dismissive business.
Kingly stuff here, Inigo; thank you for this. Will forever be fighting the urge to memeify the phrase "we're drowning in content."
I wanted to give this some concerted thought because I think you've struck utter gold here.
I'm thinking about how what you named "honest thinking" brought about by curiosity, neutrality and optimism could be considered a tabula rasa-ing of the self, and how it differs from the Eurocentric, patriarchal practise of supplanting emotion with logic and reason. The difference, I believe, is in not criminalising the emotions themselves and welcoming them, even when they aren't your own. You believe Mad Max: Fury Road is mid as fuck but you recognise others do not and are open to understanding what cinematic infrastructures are used to move.
Funnily enough, I just stumbled across a quote by Borges which compliments my essay and your idea: “I think that one should never use words like ‘the best’ or ‘the first,’ since those words carry no conviction and only lead to arguments. Beauty is not something rare. For example, I know nothing about Hungarian poetry, and yet I am sure that in Hungarian poetry I should find certainly a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Fray Luis de León, because beauty is common. People are creating beauty all the time.”
In order to recognise that beauty, you have to be open to it but our culture is one much quicker to dismiss. Which brings me to your point about "digestion" which is a great and necessary extension on the "taste" metaphor posited by thinkers long before us. Your analogies about nutrition explain the problem with pedestaling taste as I have and all the other "writers" before me have: I wrote that ours is a problem with care--so close to the point--when its really about the nutrients (or lack thereof) that lie past taste.
When confronted by three-star worthy food – a Michelin Guide Inspector is unconcerned about the healthiness of it, only the experience. Taste is foregrounded but ultimately shallow, it last on the memory but nutrition is transformative in ways that can alter the course of your life. You've made this so much clearer in my mind. Thank you!
I noticed this phenomenon quite a while ago now: when meeting a new person, if I had a strong adverse reaction to them, I learnt to take it as a sign that I could (sometimes) later really love them. Of course some people I just kept on disliking, but there were definitely people I started out disliking & ended up liking. It was like hate & love were closely tied-- whereas indifference remained indifference.
The saddest part to me is that her "clap back" was almost certainly written by AI. Now I'm like... maybe she isn't even a real person, but perhaps some tech bro's drag persona, an Ai Sasha Fierce. I assume it's just the same-old desire to win in the capitalist game, to chase after the social status of being a think piece influencer. Capitalism is rotting, and we were born just in time to drown in the sludge.
I'm finding the increased vigilance--even this early in AI's manufacture--pretty exhausting. I don't want to ingest bad artistry at the best of times but now, there's an added layer of reading something that might just be (lower-case) bad and speculating that it's AI. Or coming across social media users without perceivable avatars and accusing them of being AI. It's an eerie new normal emerging and I'm already over it.
Copies of keys made from subsequent copies of keys, eventually fail to unlock the door. AI endlessly regurgitating pilfered iterations of the known, not only risks doing the same for the connection between artists and their work but their work and audiences too.
First off, I'm flattered to read this assessment coming from you. I love your work and I'm bathing in the compliment. Second, I think I might have to print off and frame your reply. I can count on very few fingers the times I've been told I was perfectly succinct. lol
Excellent writing. I just read the whole thing to my wife and she was nodding along, asking questions, and wanted to know “who the fuck is this Stephanie Tyler” followed by “I don’t care, but this Inigo guy is an excellent writer”. She’s not on Substack, so this is her first experience of your work.
I’m post-menopausal, jaded and exhausted by all the second-guessing we have to do now. I watched a BBC Archives film from 1984 the other day (I was 14 back then) and the people talking were just as concerned about the way the world was going, but obviously in a different context. It’s an advanced technological threat state we’re in now. I’m not downplaying it. Just trying to make sense of it all.
Doesn't feel like a downplay at all, I think every generation is concerned about the way the world is going. I can't imagine what it was like being an adult during the Cold War, the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still in the rearview, the threat of nuclear war looming over everything. Whenever I watch a Marvel movie, I think about "gamma" rays that transformed the Hulk or "the radioactive spider" that made Spider-Man and I'm reminded that those things were what the kids called "copium", a denial of the harrowing reality of how radioactivity affects the body. In that respect, we can see comics as an optimism laundering in a way. But yeah, the technological threat is bizarre and dizzying. I'm happy to have you read and share me, regardless. Please thank your wife for the kind words.
Yes, I was just about an adult when the Cold War ended. I grew up absorbing the news because my parents watched it all the time, and the shadows of the Cold War were cold and dark. I was haunted by the prospect of nuclear annihilation.
I have been camping out on your page to read this particular piece for weeks and I finally got to read it! It was worth the wait. Really enjoyed reading this one.
This is perhaps the best thing I’ve ever read on Substack.
Your command of language, the way you weave together strands of thought and present a holistic and very persuasive argument is something LLMs will never be able to replicate.
I love how you bring things together that I had not connected but seem so obviously related once you point it out! Many of those in this piece but the one that stands out most to me is the part about how we don’t care where things come from - food or art. Such good analysis!
I appreciated the structure of this essay, the references and quotes included, your deftness with a sentence and word choice, and the depth and clarity presented here. The clarity isn’t declarative (a common issue with ‘content’) but in a matter of perspective.
So much of the taste-maker writing is declarative instead of questioning. Curiosity and openness is what drives creativity and human ingenuity, and the empathy of connecting to one another.
AI feels like a micro-version colonialism to me, or the same principles that drove it. Where theft and exploitation is the foundation (albeit on vastly different scales). These essays about taste just make me think the person writing/not writing them is screaming ‘please let me be relevant before we all get consumed’.
I am now subscribed and look forward to more of your writing and perspective. Thanks for this.
I loved the taste vs nutrition analogy and am really appreciative of the overall write-up.
The challenge for me is that I think there is some truth in the whole "somebody's gotta tell us what of this crap is worth a damn," but it's tough to discern what qualifies let alone who is qualified to say. To your and @Charlotte Simmons (I am clearly a noob in substackery so forgive the fact that I'm likely not linking to her properly) points, I think there is so much to be gained by identifying what art is the most likely to have the high-emotion visceral impact we consider good art, even if that is separate from what impacts you the most personally. The ability to do so when it doesn't impact you is the cognitive dissonance stuff of real critical mastery. That said, I still like french fries, action movies, silly tiktok videos and the thoughts that flit across the surface like a skipping stone. There must be some room for both without the french fries clogging our mental arteries forever.
I look for art to connect me to another person, let the little imp in my mind jump into the ear of another person. AI unmoors that experience from any kind of meaning as long as it doesn't somehow link back to someone. If the AI provides a prosthetic that boosts an otherwise brilliant mind onto the stage with others who have made it through the educated gates of verbosity then fuck ya, bring it on!
Thanks for the post and look forward to reading more.
after reading one of your pieces, I often feel both 'smarter' / more educated, and also sometimes dumbfounded (complimentary) by how you draw together so many different concepts into a cohesive whole.
This is all I could hope for my readers. Thank you so much for sticking with it until the end.
thank you for continuing to challenge us with your writing! I appreciate it, especially in these diminished attention times
reheated nacho-paste!!!!! 😭💥 Spot on. Per usual, could not agree more. The elegance! The style! You are fencing with words.
Appreciate you, Jenovia! I'm glad people are feeling emboldened to call out these trespasses.
Re: principled acquisition of taste and the condensing of media into escapism, the lone ad nauseam allowance I make for myself is pointing out that liking something and disliking something are the exact same thing. It's the same nebulous, reactive emotion, just packaged in a different shade of expression for the happenstance verdict. Meanwhile, the curiosity, neutrality, optimism et al that you mention here begets the honest thinking and reflection that we will ideally apply to the art we encounter, and which actually has communal relevance as opposed to simply liking and disliking something, which is categorically only relevant to the dis/liker.
And so when we talk about taste, aren't we actually talking about digestion? The ways in which we take the nutrients offered by the art and convert them into a shared cultural health that prioritizes growth over placation? With the further understanding that each viewer boasts a different flora and so can theoretically convert certain nutrients that others can't even truly digest? I think Mad Max: Fury Road is mid as all fuck, but I'd much rather read an essay that can pinpoint a tangible genius of the film instead of stand on my own dismissive business.
Kingly stuff here, Inigo; thank you for this. Will forever be fighting the urge to memeify the phrase "we're drowning in content."
I wanted to give this some concerted thought because I think you've struck utter gold here.
I'm thinking about how what you named "honest thinking" brought about by curiosity, neutrality and optimism could be considered a tabula rasa-ing of the self, and how it differs from the Eurocentric, patriarchal practise of supplanting emotion with logic and reason. The difference, I believe, is in not criminalising the emotions themselves and welcoming them, even when they aren't your own. You believe Mad Max: Fury Road is mid as fuck but you recognise others do not and are open to understanding what cinematic infrastructures are used to move.
Funnily enough, I just stumbled across a quote by Borges which compliments my essay and your idea: “I think that one should never use words like ‘the best’ or ‘the first,’ since those words carry no conviction and only lead to arguments. Beauty is not something rare. For example, I know nothing about Hungarian poetry, and yet I am sure that in Hungarian poetry I should find certainly a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Fray Luis de León, because beauty is common. People are creating beauty all the time.”
In order to recognise that beauty, you have to be open to it but our culture is one much quicker to dismiss. Which brings me to your point about "digestion" which is a great and necessary extension on the "taste" metaphor posited by thinkers long before us. Your analogies about nutrition explain the problem with pedestaling taste as I have and all the other "writers" before me have: I wrote that ours is a problem with care--so close to the point--when its really about the nutrients (or lack thereof) that lie past taste.
When confronted by three-star worthy food – a Michelin Guide Inspector is unconcerned about the healthiness of it, only the experience. Taste is foregrounded but ultimately shallow, it last on the memory but nutrition is transformative in ways that can alter the course of your life. You've made this so much clearer in my mind. Thank you!
I noticed this phenomenon quite a while ago now: when meeting a new person, if I had a strong adverse reaction to them, I learnt to take it as a sign that I could (sometimes) later really love them. Of course some people I just kept on disliking, but there were definitely people I started out disliking & ended up liking. It was like hate & love were closely tied-- whereas indifference remained indifference.
The saddest part to me is that her "clap back" was almost certainly written by AI. Now I'm like... maybe she isn't even a real person, but perhaps some tech bro's drag persona, an Ai Sasha Fierce. I assume it's just the same-old desire to win in the capitalist game, to chase after the social status of being a think piece influencer. Capitalism is rotting, and we were born just in time to drown in the sludge.
I'm finding the increased vigilance--even this early in AI's manufacture--pretty exhausting. I don't want to ingest bad artistry at the best of times but now, there's an added layer of reading something that might just be (lower-case) bad and speculating that it's AI. Or coming across social media users without perceivable avatars and accusing them of being AI. It's an eerie new normal emerging and I'm already over it.
“Assisted” is doing crazy work. It was written by AI, as are most of her responses to comments calling her out or praising her.
I try not to jump to conclusions but I'm not even sure there is a "Stepfanie Tyler"
If I taught in a classroom I would assign this.
The absolute highest honour!!
Inigo, this is a great post.
Copies of keys made from subsequent copies of keys, eventually fail to unlock the door. AI endlessly regurgitating pilfered iterations of the known, not only risks doing the same for the connection between artists and their work but their work and audiences too.
“Copies of keys made from subsequent copies of keys, eventually fail to unlock the door” urgh amazing!! perfectly succinct.
First off, I'm flattered to read this assessment coming from you. I love your work and I'm bathing in the compliment. Second, I think I might have to print off and frame your reply. I can count on very few fingers the times I've been told I was perfectly succinct. lol
Excellent writing. I just read the whole thing to my wife and she was nodding along, asking questions, and wanted to know “who the fuck is this Stephanie Tyler” followed by “I don’t care, but this Inigo guy is an excellent writer”. She’s not on Substack, so this is her first experience of your work.
I’m post-menopausal, jaded and exhausted by all the second-guessing we have to do now. I watched a BBC Archives film from 1984 the other day (I was 14 back then) and the people talking were just as concerned about the way the world was going, but obviously in a different context. It’s an advanced technological threat state we’re in now. I’m not downplaying it. Just trying to make sense of it all.
Doesn't feel like a downplay at all, I think every generation is concerned about the way the world is going. I can't imagine what it was like being an adult during the Cold War, the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still in the rearview, the threat of nuclear war looming over everything. Whenever I watch a Marvel movie, I think about "gamma" rays that transformed the Hulk or "the radioactive spider" that made Spider-Man and I'm reminded that those things were what the kids called "copium", a denial of the harrowing reality of how radioactivity affects the body. In that respect, we can see comics as an optimism laundering in a way. But yeah, the technological threat is bizarre and dizzying. I'm happy to have you read and share me, regardless. Please thank your wife for the kind words.
Yes, I was just about an adult when the Cold War ended. I grew up absorbing the news because my parents watched it all the time, and the shadows of the Cold War were cold and dark. I was haunted by the prospect of nuclear annihilation.
Thank you for writing this.
I have been camping out on your page to read this particular piece for weeks and I finally got to read it! It was worth the wait. Really enjoyed reading this one.
This is perhaps the best thing I’ve ever read on Substack.
Your command of language, the way you weave together strands of thought and present a holistic and very persuasive argument is something LLMs will never be able to replicate.
I hope to write like you when I grow up.
I love your writing so much! Your essays truly never ever miss, extremely nutritional!!
you speak (write) so eloquently I am FLOORED every time. thank you so much for posting this!! <3
I love how you bring things together that I had not connected but seem so obviously related once you point it out! Many of those in this piece but the one that stands out most to me is the part about how we don’t care where things come from - food or art. Such good analysis!
I appreciated the structure of this essay, the references and quotes included, your deftness with a sentence and word choice, and the depth and clarity presented here. The clarity isn’t declarative (a common issue with ‘content’) but in a matter of perspective.
So much of the taste-maker writing is declarative instead of questioning. Curiosity and openness is what drives creativity and human ingenuity, and the empathy of connecting to one another.
AI feels like a micro-version colonialism to me, or the same principles that drove it. Where theft and exploitation is the foundation (albeit on vastly different scales). These essays about taste just make me think the person writing/not writing them is screaming ‘please let me be relevant before we all get consumed’.
I am now subscribed and look forward to more of your writing and perspective. Thanks for this.
I loved the taste vs nutrition analogy and am really appreciative of the overall write-up.
The challenge for me is that I think there is some truth in the whole "somebody's gotta tell us what of this crap is worth a damn," but it's tough to discern what qualifies let alone who is qualified to say. To your and @Charlotte Simmons (I am clearly a noob in substackery so forgive the fact that I'm likely not linking to her properly) points, I think there is so much to be gained by identifying what art is the most likely to have the high-emotion visceral impact we consider good art, even if that is separate from what impacts you the most personally. The ability to do so when it doesn't impact you is the cognitive dissonance stuff of real critical mastery. That said, I still like french fries, action movies, silly tiktok videos and the thoughts that flit across the surface like a skipping stone. There must be some room for both without the french fries clogging our mental arteries forever.
I look for art to connect me to another person, let the little imp in my mind jump into the ear of another person. AI unmoors that experience from any kind of meaning as long as it doesn't somehow link back to someone. If the AI provides a prosthetic that boosts an otherwise brilliant mind onto the stage with others who have made it through the educated gates of verbosity then fuck ya, bring it on!
Thanks for the post and look forward to reading more.
Wow! Such a great piece, Inigo!
Thank you for reading!!