Beyond Elegant Consumption (Again)

In my previous post, I argued that “tasteslop” (as identified by Emily Segal) and “literacy-slop” are both symptoms of a similar extractive logic. It's an attempt to produce the outputs of socially-negotiated practices... without the social negotiation.In this post, I want to again riff on Segal's Nemesis Memos post to consider the question: what are the conditions under which legitimate taste and real digital literacies are formed? If the first post discussed what kills digital literacies, in this post I'm more focused on what keeps them alive. Towards the end of her piece, after discussing AI moodboards, tech capital anxiously laundering itself through aesthetic sophistication, and the sloptimisation of culture, Segal observes that:Fresh esotericism can spring up at any moment.This is a really important point. Tasteslop is necessarily parasitic upon the genuine article, as AI slop can only index extant taste markers. So it cannot capture “esotericism” that is still being formed in…