For about twenty years, the great democratising promise of the internet was access. Anyone could publish, anyone could sell, anyone could learn anything from a stranger in a ring light. It was, genuinely, a marvel. It was also the beginning of the end of access as a thing worth having — because the moment everyone has access to everything, access stops being the differentiator. What you can reach no longer says anything about you. Only what you choose does.
This is why taste is quietly becoming the most valuable faculty a person can possess, and why it makes so many people so uneasy. Taste is undemocratic in a way the modern temperament finds embarrassing. It implies that some choices are better than others, that judgment can be wrong, that you might simply have it or not. We would much rather believe in hard work, in process, in the level playing field. Taste says, with a small apologetic shrug: the field was never level, and you can tell within four seconds of walking into the room.
The machines made it urgent
The arrival of machines that can generate a competent anything — an essay, a logo, a symphony in the style of late Brahms, a passable imitation of this very sentence — was supposed to make human skill obsolete. In fact it did something stranger. It made execution nearly free and threw the entire weight of value onto the one thing the machines cannot do: knowing which of the ten thousand competent options is the right one.
A machine will give you forty logos in a minute. It will not tell you which one is good, because "good" is a judgment rendered against a sensibility, and the machine has no sensibility — it has an average. And the average, it turns out, is the one place taste never lives.
Taste is the ability to tell the difference between the competent and the correct.
Everything around us is becoming more competent and less correct. The hotel lobby that looks like every other hotel lobby. The restaurant with the Edison bulbs and the reclaimed wood, indistinguishable from its sibling four thousand miles away. The "elevated" everything. This is not the failure of taste; it is the triumph of its imitation — the spread of taste's outward signals without the judgment underneath. We have mood boards instead of moods.
It cannot be bought, only built
Here is the genuinely hopeful part, and it is hopeful precisely because it is hard. Taste is not innate, despite its reputation. It is built — slowly, expensively, through the only method that has ever worked: paying sustained attention to a great many things, most of them bad, until the difference between the good and the merely fine stops being a matter of opinion and starts being something you can feel in your teeth.
This requires the one resource nobody has any more, which is undistracted time spent with things that do not immediately reward you. You cannot speed-run taste. You cannot summarise your way to it. There is no listicle of the fifty films that will make you a person of judgment, because the judgment lives in the watching, not the list.
In an age that has made everything else faster, taste remains stubbornly, gloriously slow — which is exactly why it is about to become the rarest and most valuable thing a person can bring into a room.
So perhaps the most countercultural act available to us is also the most old-fashioned: to care intensely about whether something is good, to develop the patience to find out, and to be willing — quietly, without a content strategy — to be the person in the room who simply knows.