The internet went into a frenzy when Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker first asked “Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste”. Around the same time, Framer founder Koen Bok said that “great taste is what will create the best new products, technologist Paul Graham posted that “taste will become even more important” in the AI age, and former Bytedance engineer Cong Wang echoed the sentiment, writing that “personal taste is the moat.”
The Silicon Valley cliché of taste as the ultimate differentiator has since taken on a life of its own: Palantir launched a $239 “chore coat” branded as a “merch drop,” and Anthropic began hosting dinner parties and coffee shop popups centered around Claude’s “Keep Thinking” motto.
Everyone is talking about taste, but it seems like no one can fully agree on what it means. The broad (and overwhelming) consensus among tech founders, writers, and engineers is that taste is what separates humans from AI when speed and raw execution become increasingly commoditized.
But beyond that, there’s a more important distinction at play. When a concept goes this viral, it gets repeated and reframed so many times that it loses its original nuance. The more interesting question is what happens when the instinct to signal taste outpaces the actual development of it, which is exactly what “tastemaxxing” and “tastewashing” are symptoms of.
What Is Tastewashing?
“Tastewashing” is a phenomenon where tech companies use brand marketing and PR strategies to intentionally associate themselves with art, aesthetics, and the illusion of taste. This is a direct response to an increasing dystopian public sentiment around AI, whether over the oversaturation of “AI slop” or the accelerating displacement of creative jobs.
It’s a term that borrows from the concept of “greenwashing” that was most proliferent in the 2010s, where companies would use PR and branding to make its image appear environmentally conscious when the actual product or operations was in reality far from being so.
The goal was to capitalize on consumer demand for sustainability while masking harmful environmental practices with vague buzzwords, misleading imagery or hidden trade-offs. Now we’re seeing the same thing happen again in the tech space, where AI that attempts to replace human creativity and artistry are branded and repackaged as creative partners rather than the automation threat they also represent.
Who Coined the Term Tastewashing?
The term “tastewashing” was coined by cultural critic and writer Kyle Chayka in his article for The New Yorker, titled “Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste.” In the article, Chayka describes it as “an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism,” meaning that the term is directly tied to an element of inherent irony or hypocrisy.
“Tastewashing” is not synonymous with taste itself; in fact, it’s closer to the opposite. Where taste is developed through time from exposure to things outside your comfort zone, tastewashing is the performance of those qualities without the underlying effort or development.
What Is an Example of Tastewashing?
The most notable and recent examples of tastewashing all demonstrate an attempt to signal and perform taste more than an actual desire to inspire it.
Last year, both Palantir and OpenAI launched sold-out apparel lines, referencing a push into the lifestyle and fashion categories despite the lack of a throughline to their core offering. Palantir’s $239 chore coat, available in bright blue and black, sold out in just 5 hours. The Palantir drop in particular was met with much controversy, and frankly to no surprise — why would the defense technology company be launching merch? The answer dates back to the history and reputation surrounding the chore coat style. Popularized by American workwear brands like Carhartt WIP, the chore coat represents both the hard work and grit of human labor and the more recent left-leaning “performative male” type likely found reading Joan Didion or Bell Hooks on the Brooklyn-bound L train.
For Palantir, a defense contractor with a well-documented history of government surveillance contracts, the choice of garment can be seen as a calculated attempt to borrow credibility from a cultural archetype that stands in direct opposition to everything the company actually represents.
Anthropic is another instance of tastewashing that’s a little more blurry than the Palantir example, which is also what makes it more interesting to examine. Anthropic has built Claude’s brand identity around intellectual preservation: they are the tool for people who want to think, not outsource thinking, and who treat AI as a creative partner rather than a replacement for their own judgment.
This brand identity is reflected in both their social content and their in-person activations. In one of their recent posts, Claude featured photographer Rob Stephenson as part of their “Behind the prompt” series, documenting his process in using Claude Code to create a website to house his field recordings from across New York City. Photographers like Stephenson, as well as artists, designers and creators who collaborate with Anthropic, hammer home the point that Claude deepens your creative practice rather than automating you into oblivion.
Claude responded: From their anti-AI slop “Keep Thinking” popup in the West Village to their intimate dinner party at A24’s Cherry Lane Theatre restaurant, Wild Cherry, every Claude activation is engineered to position themselves as the AI for intellectuals.
Side note, but why is every Claude activation located in the West Village? Could it be that the West Village has garnered a reputation for being the vibey, artsy downtown neighborhood that everyone dreams of living in? Food for thought.
The reason Anthropic sits in a grayer area is that their brand positioning isn’t entirely disconnected from what their product actually does. Claude can genuinely function as a thinking tool, and a lot of its core consumers enjoy using it as such. The question is whether the activations are an authentic extension of that product philosophy or a softening strategy designed to make an AI company feel more palatable to the creative class it’s also displacing. The answer is probably both, and that tension is exactly what makes tastewashing hard to call cleanly.
How Tastewashing Is Impacting Design & Content
Have you noticed an increase in hand-drawn illustrations and organic scribbles in graphic design and brand materials? The phenomenon of tastewashing has bled over to design spaces too, dictating to a certain degree how we design, what we post, and what we signal about ourselves online.
Squiggly lines, imperfect letterforms, textured backgrounds that evoke risograph printing; the visual language of human imperfection is having a moment precisely because AI-generated imagery has made perfection feel cheap.
This is particularly noticeable amongst luxury marketing because they can no longer differentiate on product quality alone. The irony is that most of this “handmade” aesthetic is being produced with the same AI tools it’s reacting against, just prompted differently. There are now plenty of videos and tutorials about how to use various AI tools to achieve the hand-drawn design look, which — well the hypocrisy speaks for itself.
We wrote about this previously too in our LinkedIn article, “Human Creativity Is the New Status Symbol: How Anti-AI Marketing Became a Competitive Edge,” focusing particularly on how the return of behind-the-scenes content echoes this surge in desire for human craft and creativity.
Last year, Apple unveiled a new Apple TV logo, accompanied by a BTS video revealing that the graphic wasn’t created with CGI, but with real glass. The glass was filmed under different lighting conditions, and multiple versions were created to reflect light in different ways. This is perhaps the forced antidote to tastewashing: filmed, indisputable proof of the human work because audience trust is at such an all-time low.
The same logic is playing out in content. Apps like Are.na, Sublime, and Arca have built entire product identities around the premise that they help you curate taste rather than consume algorithmically. The implicit pitch is that using them makes you the kind of person who has discernment.
Substack has followed a similar trajectory, where the act of having a newsletter has become an intellectual identity signal in itself, detached from whether the writing actually earns that positioning.
That’s not to say that Substack as a platform is inherently about intellectualism-signaling; there are plenty of genuinely excellent writers building real readerships there. The signaling dynamic is less about the platform and more about the cultural cachet that having a Substack has come to carry, particularly among people who treat the act of publishing as the point rather than the writing itself.
On TikTok, “how to have taste” has become its own content category. Videos breaking down what it means to be chic, cultivated lists of books and films and habits that supposedly confer aesthetic sensibility, creators performing the process of developing taste for an audience. It’s given rise to what’s now known as the “intellectual influencer”, because being smart and tasteful is now the ultimate status symbol.
What all of this points to is a broader cultural anxiety about what it means to be a discerning human in an environment that’s automating discernment. Tastewashing at the corporate level and taste-signaling at the individual level are responses to the same pressure: if AI can execute anything, the only remaining flex is having the judgment to know what’s worth executing. The tension worth examining is that judgment, like taste itself, simply can’t be performed into existence.
Why Are Tech Companies Obsessed With Taste?
To the tech bros working at these massive AI companies, taste is inherently profitable and tied to monetary gain. Taste is a commodity, a differentiator, a means to an end with the end being profit and business growth. We’re at a point where AI can help you do almost anything at ten times the speed, so the only thing left is to decide what to do with all that execution power.
AI is and will always be a fundamentally tasteless technology by design. That’s less of a criticism of the tech, and more just the reality of how it’s built. AI is a composite of perspectives that will always trend towards the mean: what’s most popular, what’s most likable, what’s most likely to get people to continue to engage. The tradeoff with AI is that you get more volume but you lose variance. Agency, discernment, and the ability to go against the grain has always played a big role in the exercise of taste, but AI agents don’t have that agency (despite what the name might suggest). We tell AI agents what to do and program them to perform tasks for us.
The tech industry’s collective response to AI, echoed by founders, engineers, strategies and consultants alike, is that taste matters now more than ever before. Focus on human craft, lead with creative thinking, emphasize the irreplaceable human element. Most times that’s true to a certain extent, but when every single person in a massive industry keeps repeating the same idea over and over again, you start to wonder whether we’ve overcorrected to the point of oversimplification.
What we’re seeing now is a divergence between two definitions of taste that have very little to do with each other:
- Taste as personal inclination; the slow, friction-dependent development of a sensibility for what’s niche, unordinary, or genuinely different
- Taste as market discernment; the ability to identify what people want and what will sell, derived through audience research and pattern recognition
The tech industry is largely talking about the second definition while invoking the cultural authority of the first. That’s the sleight of hand at the center of the tastewashing conversation, and it’s why you see videos and Reddit threads mocking tech bros’ obsession with taste. Kira Klass of the Substack “On Brand” refers to “taste at work” as being separate to our existing societal understanding of taste: “taste at work” is the ability to “consistently make decisions” that “drive positive business outcomes.” Practicing taste at work is not the same thing as having taste.
What Is Taste, Then?
I’m not going to sit here and pretend to be an authority on what taste is and isn’t, because the honest answer is that it means different things, to different people, always depending on the context.
But what I can say is that there are common threads that show up consistently across how people define it: friction, intention, agency, intuition, and time.
Taste as Friction
Taste requires deliberate exposure to things outside your lane; it develops through the discomfort of encountering something you didn’t ask for, didn’t expect, and had to sit with before you understood why it mattered. Algorithms were the first major friction-removal project, replacing the active work of seeking out content with a passive feed that selected for you. One-click checkout, voice assistants, and recommendation engines followed the same logic: every point of resistance between want and fulfillment, quietly eliminated.
AI represents the project reaching something close to its logical conclusion. As Eugene Healey writes in his Substack piece Friction: The Cure for a Society Bored to Death, removing friction changes how we do things, and in doing so changes who we become in the process. When there’s no fiction, we lose the ability and the desire to practice creativity and to take leaps into the unknown.
Healey argues that “through friction we develop our own unique taste, perspective on the world and conviction in that perspective.” An article in The Cut titled In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing makes a similar case: that the cultural appetite for difficulty, analog processes, and slower consumption is a direct reaction to how thoroughly frictionless our default environment has become.
Taste as Agency & Intention
Taste requires ownership over your own inputs (and no, I am not referring to prompt engineering here). When algorithms, recommendation engines, and AI systems select what you’re exposed to, the resulting preferences are just the product of someone else’s optimization function, trained by millions of other inputs that are not your own.
Another way of thinking about taste is as a product of choices made repeatedly and consciously over time: what you seek out, what you return to, what most importantly you reject. Brand strategist Ana Andjelic, writing in her Substack The Friction Advantage, argues that friction is important because it creates agency and the tension from which genuine preference forms.
Friction creates dissonance, and that dissonance gives rise to the intention and drive to pursue “inversions, contradictions, oddities, and coincidences.”
Taste as Intuition
Noema’s longform piece “Why Human Intuition Is Still Science’s Greatest Tool in the Age of AI” makes the case that intuition emerges when knowledge and experience have been internalized deeply enough to operate below conscious thought. The piece draws a clear distinction between human and machine learning that’s worth sitting with: AI systems can match human performance in brute calculation, statistical inference, and formal domains like mathematics and logic, but there’s a fundamental passivity to how they learn. You give them data and they process it with an algorithm. Humans learn by doing, not receiving.
That distinction matters for taste because taste is intuition with a track record. Sometimes taste in practice will look like not always knowing why something is right; you just know, because you’ve spent enough time in proximity to the real thing that the instinct becomes reliable.
It’s what the Noema piece describes as our ability to develop a feel for phenomena that defy ordinary understanding; a flexibility of mind that emerges from active engagement with the world rather than pattern-matching against existing data. That kind of intuition can’t be prompted into existence.
Taste as Time Well Spent
This is perhaps the most inconvenient truth about taste in a speed-obsessed industry: it cannot be compressed. Taste accumulates slowly, through sustained attention, repeated exposure, and the willingness to be wrong about things for long enough to eventually understand them. The companies most aggressively tastewashing are, almost without exception, the ones most committed to collapsing time as a variable. Taste, in any meaningful sense, has always been the byproduct of doing things the hard way.
At the end of the day, noticing and talking about tech companies and tastewashing raises a mirror to our own complicitness too. The reason why tastewashing (sometimes) works on us is because it’s somewhat a reflection of where we already are as a society. Have we become tasteless by nature of our passive consumption? After all, you can’t successfully perform taste for an audience that still has it.
Perhaps the antidote to tastewashing lies less in tech companies’ responsibility for transparent branding, and more in our individual responsibility to develop a genuine taste of our own so that performance becomes legible. That means reintroducing the friction, seeking out the things that don’t come recommended, and sitting with discomfort long enough to form an actual opinion. Taste, real taste, has always been a practice of resistance. In an environment engineered to make you passive, choosing to think for yourself is the most countercultural thing you can do.
Tastewashing FAQs
What is aesthetic capitalism?
Aesthetic capitalism is the practice of using cultural credibility, design sensibility, and artistic association as economic assets. Rather than competing purely on product utility or price, companies invest in taste as a form of brand equity, betting that how something looks and feels generates as much commercial value as what it actually does. With AI, aesthetic capitalism has intensified because when execution becomes commoditized, the perception of taste becomes one of the few remaining differentiators.
How do AI companies use design and aesthetics as PR?
AI companies use design and aesthetics to soften public perception of technologies that carry genuine cultural anxieties around job displacement and creative automation. The strategy typically involves associating the brand with artists, intellectuals, and cultural tastemakers through activations, collaborations, and editorial content that positions the product as a creative partner rather than a replacement. The gap between the aesthetic and the underlying product is precisely what defines tastewashing.
What is the relationship between tastewashing and humanwashing?
Humanwashing is the broader practice of making inherently anti-humanist technologies appear human-centered, empathetic, and culturally sensitive. Tastewashing is a specific expression of humanwashing, using aesthetic credibility and cultural signaling as the vehicle.
What is Palantir’s chore coat and why is it an example of tastewashing?
Palantir, a defense contractor with a documented history of government surveillance contracts, launched a $239 branded chore coat as a “merch drop” that sold out in five hours. The chore coat carries specific cultural associations: workwear grit on one hand, and a left-leaning intellectual sensibility on the other, making it a loaded garment for a company whose actual work sits in direct opposition to both. The drop is a textbook example of tastewashing because the aesthetic borrows credibility from a cultural archetype that the company’s core business actively contradicts.
What is the difference between tastewashing and greenwashing?
Greenwashing uses environmental signaling to mask harmful ecological practices; tastewashing uses aesthetic and cultural signaling to mask the anti-humanist implications of AI technology. Both follow the same underlying logic: identify what your audience most wants to believe about you, then perform that quality loudly enough to preempt scrutiny. The difference is that tastewashing is harder to regulate and easier to execute, because taste is subjective in ways that carbon emissions are not.
Why is taste suddenly so important in the AI industry?
When AI can execute almost anything at scale and speed, the ability to decide what’s worth executing becomes the scarce resource. Taste, in theory, is that ability; the judgment to know what’s good, what’s resonant, and what’s worth making. The problem is that the tech industry has largely collapsed the distinction between taste as genuine aesthetic conviction and taste as market discernment, using the cultural authority of the first to describe what is essentially the second.