Never Apologize for Having Taste

Your AGING Brain Still Works

I’ve got a recommendation for all of you. Don’t be bullied out of your own taste, especially by someone who evades a counterargument for why it’s wrong.

I tweeted my take on sports team accounts clumsily using Gen Z lingo, not expecting any particular response. This isn’t a high-stakes subject for a lot of people. I’m not an engaged X user, and the algorithm understandably punishes me with a lack of reach (when Spike Eskin tweets out a story of mine, it tends to get far wider distribution). I get it, and accept it. X wants you to use the platform to use the platform. Elon’s less keen on you just using the platform to promote content outside of the platform.

Anyway, there were some responses on there this time, including one from NBA All-Star Michael Redd. Redd in retirement comes off as an even sharper thinker than shooter, but that’s not what I’m highlighting here. Instead it’s this response from Jimmy Spencer, an extremely nice guy who’s worked in the NBA media space for many years.

He’s not technically wrong, by the way. And it’s a less pointed rebuttal than what I received from a Wisconsin sports podcaster.

And certainly less pointed than what I received from a Utah Jazz social media worker, which makes sense.

As subscriber Dan P joked:

Boomer here. Be careful Ethan lest you be lumped in with us. Not get off my post, er, lawn.

There’s an interesting conversation to be had, taken up in the HoS comments, about the incentives that actually govern team social media style. Is it top-down, dictated by teams? Is it bottom-up, dictated by young workers? Is this just what you have to do to get engagement on a certain medium?

I’ll probably revisit that topic, but today I prefer to focus on this idea of being too old to judge slop as slop. And yes, in using “slop” I too am appropriating trendy Internet lingo. But I like “slop,” the term, as opposed to the product. It’s a neologism that works. Out there, in the competitive attention economy, we are besieged by a lot of “slop”: Unoriginal content, divorced from legitimate self-expression, contrived to get our attention. We might overapply the term “slop” but can’t possibly deploy the descriptor beyond the scale of what it describes.

I say that to say this: I tend to know slop when I see it. You probably do too. Similarly, I tend to know quality when I see it. You probably do too. I hearken back to my old Nike post from 2021, in reference to my ripping their horrible ad campaigns:

It’s tempting to fall into the pro-vanguardism template the boomers have handed down to us and sheepishly say, “I must be getting old, because this seems weird to me,” but let’s get real. You dislike this ad because it sucks. You are having a natural, human response to shitty art. This a hollow sermon from a priest whose sins were in the papers. Nobody is impressed by what Nike’s doing here. Nobody thinks Nike, a multinational famous for its sweatshops, is ushering us into an enlightened utopia. Sure, most media types are afraid to criticize the ad publicly. You might inspire suspicion that what you’re secretly against is men kissing and women breastfeeding, but nobody actually likes the stupid ad. No college kid would show it to a new friend he’s trying to impress, and it’s hard to envision a massive cohort of Gen Z women giving a shit about this ad either.

The most common negative response to that post was similar to the critical messages I received for Tuesday’s take: You’re old and don’t get it, man.

As has been covered exhaustively here, history quickly validated my sense that those ads just sucked. Nike’s stock collapsed and the advertising fashions of five years ago have largely washed out of the culture.

Anyone in media could see what I saw back in 2021. It didn’t take a genius to go, “Wow, this is comically bad.” The main reason nobody else was saying it? I’d hazard it was fear of being mocked as behind times that soon stopped existing.

In a lot of cases, my advantage over others in media is simply that I believe my own taste. I’m not necessarily smarter. My taste isn’t necessarily better. I’m just an only child who doesn’t deny my own internal response to stimuli. I’m reminded of the viral clip of famed music producer Rick Rubin explaining that he actually has scant technical knowledge of his own craft. A bewildered Anderson Cooper asks “So what are you being paid for?” Rubin responds:

The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel…has proven helpful for artists.

It’s easy to mock Rubin as some fake guru who gets by on mysterious self-perpetuating cachet. There’s something to what he said, though. Almost everyone has taste, but few are honestly expressive about it. There’s a value in just valuing your own brain.

Which brings me back to sports team accounts and their hack attempts at appropriating Gen Z lingo. You can tell it sucks for a lot of reasons, but a main tell, I’d argue, is the common way it’s defended. Speaking generally, nobody says they personally like it, but instead they allege that someone else, someone much younger and cooler, must enjoy it.

Does that “someone else” ever speak up? Do we hear from the 20-year-old who goes, “Man, I love how the Chargers say mf fr, that really speaks to me”? Of course not. The young likely absorb the contrived play for their attention the same way we absorb the contrived play for their attention: As slop.

Obviously sports team account lingo isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme, but I’d argue that the broader cultural fear of sounding old happens to be. It leads to a lot of preference falsification among thought leaders on matters far more important.

Yes, maybe you’re old. How horrible. There are downsides to this. Perhaps you’re unaware of which streamers are popular. But you still have a mind. You can still recognize quality, or at least hold your own opinion on it. It’s possible for you, an adult, to understand what works. In many cases, the prerequisite is simply to honor your own right as arbiter.