Good Taste Needs Bad Design

on ambientization, class anxiety, and encounter

The end of the essay offers a glossary of terms to help you orient yourself before, during, or after your read.

At ten, I would have already been successfully acculturated by whatever bands were soundtracking The O.C.’s Bait Shop. In 2010, while shopping with my mom, I remember slipping Vampire Weekend’s Contra into a pile of baby-doll tops at the Hollister checkout – the same year I found Wavves somewhere in-between watching JWoww deliver her infamous “you can stay and get your ass beat” non-ultimatum to everyone’s favourite dirty little hamster. There was so much I was discovering, so much I liked in 2009, that I barely paid attention to the Alabama Arkansas song, and the interminable derivatives it spawned. But recently, Stomp Clap has stopped me in my tracks more than any of the songs I like today. Music I’d consider to be good. Which was unsettling. Because how is it that something I once dismissed and still dislike now feels more present, more perceptible, than what I’d genuinely call good?

Without even controlling the playlist, my every movement is haunted – from creative agency day job to café to curated vintage store to hair salon with a green circle fee to small plates restobar. Spotify has turned everything good into muzak. But this isn’t just about music. In a world where every platform has turned cultural judgement into a feed, I move through my entire day inside good taste, that I may genuinely like but can no longer account for, and that asks nothing of me.

A couple years ago while unpacking why we’d begun to see foodstuffs suffused into non-edible forms of consumption, I offered the context of how we’d entered a tastecession. Still in the trough of the downturn, the tastecession is a condition where taste artifacts become detached from their distinct meaning and reduced instead to a generalized signified of Taste itself. Marking an abstraction from active discernment to passive recognition.

The correct chair.

The correct typography.

The correct film still.

The correct interior lighting.

The correct hand soap.

Think of the kind of commonplace interaction where someone asks you if you know some “taste artifact” and you instinctively respond in the affirmative. Only to realize moments later, that what you really meant was: you know of it. But knowing of is not the same as knowing, the former is recognition. Good taste has become so ubiquitous that everyone knows of. The irony is that that omnipresence is precisely what prevents anyone from asking “do you know” anymore – and anyone from actually knowing. Because if knowing of has become as atmospheric as air itself, one no longer has to encounter which would require a level of effort to get to know; the operative words being get to which imply arriving at, journeying. Knowing of is the person you see around, maybe even smile at, but never interact with beyond a routine shared glance.

Tastemaking, taste ownership, and taste acquisition have long preoccupied some of the most insufferable people on earth, myself implicated: the professional managerial class, the creative class, today’s petite bourgeoisie. Their entire identity depends on a delicate balance: distinguishing their taste from others while also dictating and imposing what counts as good. It’s the work of being cultural intermediaries. This predates algorithms. It predates AI. And it’s not the first time it’s sensed a threat. But platforms have altered the balance and compromised their authority. Taste has been so thoroughly distributed that the imposing function now overwhelms the distinguishing one. We all recognize the codes. We can reproduce the moodboard. Everyone knows of the chair.

But the problem with “good taste” is that it has always been elitist. It has always relied on the power to name itself as active, discerning, intelligent — and to dismiss whatever fell outside its boundaries as passive, vulgar, uncritical. Bad taste, in this story, was what happened to people who didn’t know any better. Which was always the most self-serving myth of good taste: that it alone was conscious.

What feels like divine comedy now is that good taste has become the very thing it once accused bad taste of being. Passive. Ambient. Received. AirSpace, as Kyle Chayka diagnosed a decade ago. Not chosen so much as recognized. A set of cues absorbed without interrogation. Which is exactly why even if this song is stupid-bad, it feels so alive – it does not slip into the background, your encounter with it is active, it’s an affront.

The affront to my taste sensibility is not unlike what Laura Kipnis wrote about Hustler Magazine. How in comparison to Playboy – which paired Shel Silverstein, Haruki Murakami, even Margaret Atwood with vaseline-lensed nude pictorials (always hinting at the gentlemanly presence of a man) – Hustler provoked disgust. Kipnis wasn’t aligning with the politics of Larry Flynt but she was noting that the magazine did attack bourgeois ideals of good taste. What interested her was how Hustler’s vulgarity produced a visceral encounter that respectable culture preferred to disavow. Disgust is not passive. An affront demands orientation. It forces judgment.

I am not suggesting that Hustler and Stomp Clap are equally transgressive, politically comparable, or animated by the same authorial intention. But Kipnis gives us a way to think about the power of “bad” to still be encountered. The things we dislike force a reaction. It makes taste active again, not because the object is secretly good or should be reclaimed as-such, but because the encounter demands that you locate yourself in relation to it. You have to decide. You have to feel the boundary. And in that reaction, taste becomes something more than passive recognition. It becomes yours. This is why “bad taste” can feel strangely alive right now. Badness interrupts the smooth circulation of good. You cannot ambiently consume an affront. Which means that, paradoxically, bad taste may now require more active engagement than good taste.

But not every affront produces encounter. There is a difference between something that asks something of you and that forces you to orient yourself in relation to another world, versus something engineered to merely capture attention. Platform-logic understands your primary taste world well-enough to introduce optimized forms of dislike into it. Ragebait is not encounter, but a reactionary model against yourself.

We’ve become highly adept at recognizing where taste artifacts sit socially, and less good at encountering them before they are placed there. Increasingly, our relation to culture resembles a kind of parasocial taste: a familiarity with the image, meaning, and social coordinates of things without the encounter required to actually know them. Creators like Edmond Lau and accounts like doomscrollforever or pathetic compress culture into starter packs of taste and type, producing broad-strokes recognizability before encounter. What we’ve come to know as taste, good or bad, are really verdicts – socially mediated systems of classification. But what you find to be good or bad, what you like or dislike, is personal. Which is why taste, as it’s become increasingly taxonomized, is such a detriment to taste formation, order precedes encounter, removing the need to decide and shutting the door on interpretative meaning-making. And isn’t that what we want after all? A way of locating ourselves through what we are drawn to, what repels us, what we are embarrassed by, what challenges us? Put simply, to understand who we are through the things we like and dislike?

Instead, what’s emerging is a battle between two elite groups over control, ownership, and imposition of social taste. The PMC respond with horror and rebuttal that their domain of active discernment could be the next frontier of automation. But the anxiety cuts deeper than tech having simply not read Bourdieu. The PMC’s eagerness to point this out reveals its own worries: about class position, social value, and perhaps most importantly, the hollow quality of good taste this group has spent decades professionalizing, circulating, and managing. Tech does not destroy the tyranny of social good taste, it’s simply a change of ownership. It acquires it and scales it. What Emily Segal calls tasteslop, is just the next stage of social taste’s mass-production crisis.

As a response we’re seeing a shift towards slower, more intentional platforms that promise organization, depth, and meaningful discovery without the predatory practices that frustrate us most about algorithmically-driven feeds. Are.na, Sublime, Soot, Cosmos – platforms that position themselves as spaces for thoughtfulness, curation, and cultivated attention. And while some of these platforms, particularly Are.na, genuinely create better conditions for wandering and non-linear discovery, they still reveal how deeply taste has become tied to systems of organization. The danger of being overly-administrative with taste artifacts, is that we increasingly understand where said artifacts sit before we truly encounter them. We know how to place things before we know how to relate to them. And though this may not be the platform’s intent, they can reproduce the same monolingual good taste that is easily recognizable from working inside a creative agency.

When I reflect on my formative years of taste formation – of being on the school playground, talking to my peers about Feist (all of us unknowingly pronouncing it Fee-est) winning a Juno and the next day fiercely debating the merits of Camp Rock over High School Musical – I am reminded of the clashing of worlds, of a multilingualism it requires to be truly culturally fluent. To encounter Un Chien Andalou from your high school drama teacher who bartends on the weekend so that his wife can afford to be a stay-at-home mum. To clutch the same Coach wristlet from your first community dance – where you panicked about the pressures of a grind train – to housing your ticket for a Frankie Cosmos show years later. My taste was formed as I moved through worlds that did not neatly resolve into one another.

What made the encounters possible, and sometimes heightened them, were badly designed environments: spaces where aesthetic, social, and class codes collided. Good design disappears. Bad design interrupts flow. What we call “good design” does not easily account for the discontinuity editing of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, the inside-out affront of Renzo Piano’s Centre Pompidou, the neighborhood block where multiple sounds, scents, and sights press against one another. In these moments where the seams remain visible, taste is once-again alive because it asks something of you. When everything is designed to disappear, nothing is left to encounter. Good design pre-organizes the world, and in doing so, begins to resemble a lineage of post-war uniformity it once sought to disrupt. Only conformity is no longer a closet full of gray flannel suits, but instead:

The Togo Sofa.

Neue Haas Grotesk.

Wong Kar-wai.

The Noguchi Lamp.

Aesop Soap.

Always already there, ambient, and mistaken for individuality: Yesterday’s Organization Man is today’s Creative Director.

Contemporary taste has become increasingly monolingual because it is preorganized through what we call good design – design ideology that directs you, design that anticipates your needs before you articulate them yourself. It’s like staying at a really nice luxurious hotel, only permanently: where you are waited on, where nothing is asked of you because the environment has been optimized for ease, where you come to offload cognitive function in favor of taking it easy. Now that I think about it, a really nice luxurious hotel, only permanently sounds more like something Tony Soprano would say while trying to convince his mother to move into assisted living.

Personally, I never liked Tony.

Glossary

Tastecession A condition in which taste artifacts lose their distinct meanings and circulate instead as generalized signifiers of “Taste” itself. An abstraction from active discernment to passive recognition. We are still in it.

Social Taste The collectively legible system through which cultures organize, rank, and validate artifacts. Less a reflection of individual preference than a shared language of legitimacy that determines what can be recognized as “good” or “bad” in the first place.

Parasocial Taste A mode of cultural relation in which familiarity is produced through circulation, classification, and ambient exposure rather than direct encounter. Objects, styles, and references are known socially before they are ever experienced, generating a sense of intimacy without lived engagement.

Encounter The moment before the verdict. When something asks you to orient yourself in relation to it without telling you how. Encounter requires not-yet-knowing. It is the condition of actual taste formation and the thing that good design, social taste, and parasocial familiarity are jointly optimized to prevent.

Good Design An ideology of design organized around invisibility, smoothness, and optimization. It seeks to anticipate needs before articulation, reduce friction, and produce seamless experience. The hotel you checked into and forgot to check out of.

Bad Design Bad design interrupts flow and exposes seams, producing conditions in which interpretation, negotiation, or attention becomes necessary again.

Monolingual Taste A taste world that speaks only one aesthetic language: legible, consistent, pre-organized. You move through it without the productive disorientation of encountering something that doesn’t fit, without translation. Contemporary good taste is monolingual by design.

Multilingual Taste A mode of cultural formation shaped by exposure to incompatible social, aesthetic, and class worlds. Meaning emerges through movement between systems that do not fully resolve into one another, requiring translation rather than recognition.