In the 2010s, affiliate marketing became a dominant trend in online business models. The Wirecutter, sold to the Times in 2016, made money by directing its visitors to retail websites like Amazon or Best Buy, taking a small cut of any purchases of items it recommended. In 2017, new York has relaunched its own buying guide section, the Strategist, as a standalone site. In his articles, journalists and celebrities explained which toothbrushes, suitcases or sofas they preferred; revenue from these product SKUs partly explains why Vox Media acquired new York in 2019. Since then, online recommendations have increasingly infiltrated the media ecosystem. Platforms want to tell us what to buy, where to eat, and generally how to live a better consumer life. TikTok shopping videos are a growing part of users’ feeds, with aspiring influencers selling beauty products, kitchenware or sports equipment whose benefits they personally espouse with the energy of QVC pitchmen. Letterboxd, a social network focused on movie reviews, promises to solve the conundrum of what to watch by asking users to rate what they’ve seen so others can follow: “Tell your friends what is good,” says the site’s slogan. Beli, another app, helps you “follow and share your favorite restaurants.” Email newsletters encourage a kind of benign narcissism: In the quest to fill readers’ inboxes, authors resort to sharing the latest books they’ve read, albums they’ve listened to, and podcasts they’ve listened to. they adopted the opinions.

This recent wave of human-made advice is both a reaction to and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations that, over the past decade, have invaded our digital platforms. Today’s automated social media feeds provide increasingly indistinguishable content, sometimes generated by artificial intelligence; In the face of this onslaught, we hunger for proof that a real person actually stands behind the products or works being touted. Since the late 2010s, publications have offered clickbaity guides like “Ten Things to Watch on Netflix Right Now,” but the kind of personal recommendations took hold during the pandemic, when the biggest problem besides that of to avoid, was imposed. COVID-19 was deciding what to watch next on TV. At the same time, social media was entering a more multimedia phase, with audio podcasts and TikTok videos showcasing voices and faces, creating a new generation of micro-cults of personality. If you follow someone’s life voyeuristically online, you might want to know what they recommend eating for breakfast or wearing to bed.

An emblematic outlet of the new recommendations for the cottage industry is Perfectly imperfecta newsletter founded in 2020 by Tyler Bainbridge, software engineer at Facebook. Twice a week, subscribers receive a list of recommendations from young musicians, artists or Internet celebrities on everything from niche cultural products to mundane personal care accessories. Molly Ringwald recommended Criterion Channel. The songwriter MJ Lenderman recommended “Shoes without laces. » Jack Antonoff Saline nasal spray recommended. Each recommended item is posted with a relevant emoji and explained with a brief blurb. The newsletter is designed, as Bainbridge told me recently, “to take you out of your algorithm by just showing you what someone else likes.”

In March 2021, Bainbridge moved from Boston to New York and attracted subjects from the burgeoning cultural scene around Dimes Square, the downtown neighborhood that became a destination during quarantine. “When Catholicism and religion were becoming fashionable downtown, it showed in the recommendations. We have a lot less now,” he said. (Downtown writer Matthew Davis recently recommended praying the Rosary, while acknowledging that it wasn’t a new trick: “People have been doing it for about 1,000 years.”) In May 2023, freshly fired from Facebook, Bainbridge decided to take on the project full time. The newsletter’s combination of pithy irreverence and countercultural credibility proved popular and grew it further, accumulating nearly five hundred topics. Bainbridge also created a separate perfectly imperfect social network where users could post their own unedited recommendations and read those of others. Starting this month, Perfectly Imperfect is moving from Substack to its own standalone website (designed in the lo-fi Geocities style by the same company as the campaign for CharliKid”album) and starts producing videos. The reminder included a message of Olivia Rodrigo– the most famous participant to date – recommending English breakfast tea and a card game called Kings Corner. The site currently has nearly one hundred thousand users. Bainbridge told me: “The goal of PI is to be sort of the universal place of taste. » (He recommended nearly fifteen hundred things on his own accountranging from New York restaurant Congee Village to “being sincere.”)

The word “taste” has recently become a bogeyman in the tech community. Online recommendations are ubiquitous – we’ve been posting our likes on the internet since the early days of Facebook profiles – but “taste”, with its suggestion of a deeper knowledge, perhaps, of Why Or how something good, transforms the act of recommending into something specialized, with an aura of irreplaceability. In a recent essay, “Taste devours Silicon Valley“, entrepreneur Anu Atluru gained attention for her argument that taste was the dominant new commodity in the age of generative artificial intelligence, where knowing how to pilot a machine threatens to supplant human knowledge or skills . “In a world of scarcity, we cherish tools. In a world of abundance, we cherish taste,” Atluru wrote. Since the Internet gives us many options, the choice What to pay attention to, what to consume, or even what to create matters the most. By sharing your tastes online, you can build your cultural capital. As Bainbridge says, “making the right recommendation carries weight.”

Thus, Internet users compete to formulate the best, most authoritative or most provocative recommendations. A friend of mine, newsletter editor Delia Cai, pointed out to me recently that the digital media landscape often looks like “a simple list of recommendations for where to get your recommendations.” Perfectly Imperfect attempts, in some ways, to resist the gratuitous commodification of online personality. The site does not count followers or promote content algorithmically; the publication is done for the simple pleasure of sharing (or, at least, for the chance to have your choices featured in the newsletter alongside those of a more famous person). Perhaps partly because of the lack of commercial motivation, the PI site’s recommendations tend toward the pleasantly banal: “lounge in the sun streaming through the window like a cat,” “be radically honest with yourself ”, the film “Practical Magic”. » The content reads more like a personal blog hub or a selection of Tumblr posts from the early 2010s. There are at least nine suggestions for calling or visiting your grandparents.

One of the problems with recommendations as fodder for the digital content mill is that there are only so many things to recommend. Repetition, or evolvability, is the enemy of taste, because over time it reveals a latent sameness in what we all love to love. Bainbridge acknowledged the problem: “You want to feel unique and you want to feel like you have your own thing. As soon as more people talk about Bar Italia” – a London indie rock band – “or whatever, you feel like less of an individual. » Sharing recommendations online can now present a dilemma when it comes to broadcasting things you’re deeply and personally passionate about: If algorithmic content feeds take hold of them, they risk being broadcast to millions of people and erode your personal right to anything. it’s what you like. (Or worse, fed into the maw of the generative AI and reproduced.) A restaurant becomes insurmountably booked; a musician’s work is disrupted by social media discourse. It might be safer to just recommend a nasal spray.

Much of the recommendation culture remains focused on efficiency. We want to consume the best things, develop the best habits and visit the best places. And yet, uncontrolled efficiency, whether fostered algorithmically or organically, is inhospitable to the development of a deeper sense of taste. Another buzzword – “gatekeeping” – has recently taken on a new and different valence online, to express a desire not to recommend. “Access control” means keeping inside information to yourself instead of throwing it to the winds of the Internet. In another highly controversial recent essay, designer and artist Ruby Justice Thelot congratulated the goalkeeper for erecting “the fence that the enthusiast happily jumps over” but which “stops the dilettante” – in other words, for making it difficult to experience what is recommended without a minimum of investment. Mundane things are an easy source of recommendations; what you really care about most might warrant a little restraint, even if it seems antithetical to the pressures of being online.