Proof of Taste

The name of this essay, and also coincidentally of this newsletter

Another girlie starting another newsletter at the intersection of fashion, tech and web3. Honestly, at this point I’m just sorry. That said, I will very much try to make it worth your while — scouts honour.

I named this newsletter Proof of Taste because I’m hoping reading this newsletter will be the ultimate proof that you have taste.

Separately, however, I believe that in addition to the many Proofs web3 enables, from Work to Attendance, web3 also uniquely enables a Proof of Taste.

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I have spent a lot of time thinking about how web3 will enable brands to better co-create with their communities. In exploring this narrative, however, a core assumption is always implied: that consumers actually want to co-create with brands in the first place. I’ve argued why brands want to co-create with their customers, but why exactly do consumers want to co-create with brands? 

The answer comes back, as many things do, to Status. In his canonical piece Status as a Service, Eugene Wei argues that on social media, individuals create content as a Proof of Work by which they accrue Status. 

In the new social media era, however, an over-proliferation of content has made it such that the new “work” is curation rather than creation. Creation requires consumption which ultimately requires wealth, but curation requires only one thing… Taste. Thus, taste is the new means by which individuals accrue Status. 

Curation is, at its core, simply association with products and brands that are inherently tasteful. In order to have our taste affirmed, it must thus come not just from other individuals, but rather from those brands themselves. 

In co-creating with brands, consumers externally affirm their taste, thereby engaging in the new Status consensus system: Proof of Taste. 

From Conspicuous Consumption…

In Wei’s world of monkeys seeking status via content creation, consumers *create* content on various social media platforms as a Proof of Work in order to acquire social capital, ie. Status. Content creation, specifically on “visual” platforms like Instagram and TikTok (on which this piece focuses), often requires consumption. In a creation-driven world, the Status value chain looks like this:

Thus, status, consumption and, as a result, wealth, are inextricably linked- but this is nothing new. In fact, in 1899 Veblen coined the term “Conspicuous Consumption” to describe the act of consumption as a means of projecting identity and gaining status. This has evolved into what Toby Shorin today calls the “Starter Pack Era”, in which “classes of people are identified through oblique subcultural references and the products they are likely to consume.” In this era, goods are, in a sense, reduced to “investment assets where one can extract social capital” (h/t Dena Yago).

Creation-driven social media does indeed beget a PoW… Proof of Wealth. As we have shifted from content creation to curation, however, so too has the value chain shifted.

… To Conspicuous Curation

It is nothing new to argue that the over-proliferation of products, brands, content and more has caused a shift such that we have moved from an era of creation to one of curation. In Curators All the Way Down, Gaby Goldberg argues that today’s curators are Malcom Gladwell’s “Coolhunters” of the ‘90s—responsible for sifting through an over-saturation of digital content to disaggregate signal (cool) from the noise (uncool). 

Thus, the new form of Wei’s “work” being done is no longer creation, but rather curation. The tool by which we enable curation is not consumption (and by proxy, wealth), but rather Taste. The new value chain looks like this: 

Rayne Fischer-Quann describes how the rising importance of curation has made it such that it has become increasingly common for people—but women especially—to express their identities through artfully curated lists of things they consume or, importantly, aspire to consume. Said differently, it doesn’t matter whether you actually read Patti Smith in the Ground Support café in Soho, as long as you are seen as the type of person who would. 

The use of curation to acquire capital currency marks a shift from Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption, to Conspicuous Curation.

In Wei’s social media era, Proof of Work required creation, and thus consumption, and ultimately - wealth. In the Curation era, neither consumption nor wealth are prerequisites for Status – simply Taste. Taste is the new tool by which individuals can acquire Status.

Taste as Culture Capital

Pierre Bourdieu coined the term relative taste in 1984. In doing so, he argued that those with cultural capital (i.e., those in upper-social classes) could afford to access high culture (and the objects within music, art, etc.) and thus were able to acquire and exercise taste.

This structure has been inverted in the Starter Pack Era. 

In addition to supplanting consumption with curation, social media also allows for unabated proliferation of “culture” through society — anyone of any class with a computer or a phone has access to all the art, music, and fashion in the world. As such, rather than needing cultural capital to acquire taste, anyone with taste can acquire cultural capital. 

Acquiring Cultural Capital 

In order to exhibit taste and thus acquire cultural capital, we align ourselves with the products and brands unto which society has already ascribed taste, as this association improves our brand equity. 

This is in much the same way brand partnerships work. There are many reasons for brands to collaborate, however, I believe the most important is the opportunity for a brand to directly compare and contrast itself against another, thereby cementing the identity of their own. This is particularly true of high-low collaborations. In fact, the further the two tectonic plates (ie. the brands), the higher the mountain (brand equity, revenue, etc.) they form when they collide. 

In contrast, when we curate brands in our own life - the affirmation is unidirectional. We affirm the status and taste of the brand by choosing to curate it in our own lives, however the affirmation never flows back from the brand. But what if it could? What if there was, in fact, a Proof of Taste?

Proof of Taste 

Co-creation is the ultimate Proof of Taste. When brands co-create with their consumers, they are allowing consumers to imprint their tastes onto the brand’s products (which society has already determined to be intrinsically tasteful) and, just like a brand partnership, the taste of each party is affirmed in turn.

Not all consumers will be able to co-create—one can imagine a future in which co-creation is limited to individuals based on their reputations or their Proof of Taste. This might include those who have purchased from the brand before, who have attended an IRL event, who have posted about the brand on social media, etc. But also will evolve to include proofs of taste that shares credibility and status with both the tastemaker and the brand.  

Imagined one step further, many co-creation initiatives will be competitions of sorts, in which communities vote on which co-creations are best. This is the ultimate affirmation of taste, as now both the brand and its community have agreed on mutual taste. 

In web3, we purchase artist NFTs to prove we were early – a Proof of Time Stamp, effectively. We attend events and collect NFTs to prove we were there – a Proof of Attendance. In the future, consumers will co-create with their favourite brands to prove their unique taste – Proof of Taste.

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