The Taste Trap
In the Age of AI, taste is the differentiator in content and media consumption. While current algorithms keep us in a "Taste Trap," Agentic AI Sommeliers can expand our tastes and influence others.
1. Stuck in a Taste Trap You Can’t Escape
"Did you know that honey never spoils?" I say, feeling a flush of pride at their impressed looks.
During lunch, I find myself regurgitating this "fun fact" I read on Reddit to my coworkers. I don't mention that I've shared this same fact a dozen times before, to a dozen different people.
When I’m done with work, I start my real job:
Scrolling. Tapping. Liking.
Muted earth tones, carefully arranged lattes, and inspirational quotes in trendy fonts. I've seen it all before, but I can't stop scrolling. I skim through the same heated debates I saw yesterday (specialization is for insects and robots; raw milk, yes or no; WEF wants us all to eat bugs; newsletters are dead and so is Search Engine Optimization), and the day before. YouTube autoplays in the background as I get ready for work. Another productivity guru drones on about morning routines and time-blocking. At work, I find myself opening the same websites during my breaks. Reddit for a quick laugh, LinkedIn to see who's changed jobs, back to Twitter—I mean X—to check my notifications. The same trending sound, the same dance moves, the same jokes. Up, up, up, up through an endless stream, half-watching Netflix while I scroll through my phone. Superhuman productivity hacks, complete with Bulletproof Coffee recipes. Huberman decrees, I follow. Try this hack, follow these steps. Make smarter money decisions. Founder stories. Cracked engineering teams. 10 websites that should be illegal. The latest AI agent framework. AI movies and TV shows incoming. Oh, look, European cathedrals. Before bed, Warren Buffett's face fills my screen as he dispenses investment wisdom I've heard a hundred times. My kayfabe productivity is complete for today. I plug in my phone and close my eyes, already anticipating tomorrow's scroll.
I have 10,482 tabs saved. I’m not sure when I’ll ever look at any of them again.
I’m stuck, seeing the same content, thinking the same thoughts, leaving the same tabs open, saving the same articles for reading later, day after day, every day.
But it's easier to ignore it, to keep swimming in the comfortable waters of my own Taste Trap. After all, the algorithm knows what I like. I’m just feeding the algorithm, I tell myself, with things I like—so I won’t waste time on stupid things.
And what I like is... this. Right? But are these, truly, things I like, find interesting, and represent my taste?
Or are these things I find myself liking, tapping, bookmarking, and saving because they were designed to hack my attention—and install a preference?
2. Captured by Your Own Attention
What does your attention look like? It’s not just your eyes fixating on something on your screen, time spent, or using up your mental energy.
Your attention is harvested, collected, analyzed, manipulated, crunched, and turned into a mixture of code and numbers.
Your attention is a profile, sitting on a Meta or Google server somewhere in northern Sweden, with an extensive list of your personality traits, attitudes, and preferences. You’re typecast and put into buckets of similar users, every one of us stuck in the same Taste Trap.
Your attention is your brain in a state of hyperarousal and constant reward-seeking. Each new post, image, or video triggers a small release of dopamine, creating a cycle of craving and satisfaction.
Your attention span, reward systems, and perception of time are distorted, drained, and degraded—leaving you with a false sense of individuality.
As you interact with the feeds, the algorithm continually refines its understanding of your psychographic profile, creating a feedback loop that is not in your favor—and only meant to improve how to capture, hold, and extend your attention for as long as possible. The Taste Trap is vaste, efficient, effective, and complete.
3. What You’re Truly “Missing Out” On in a Taste Trap
Perhaps most importantly, in this Taste Trap, you and I are losing touch with the fringes of human creativity and thought. It's often at the edges, in the underground and the esoteric, where the most profound innovations occur. Books that are long out-of-print. Schizo anon accounts on X. Obscure and abandoned Substacks.
By staying in your Taste Trap, you’re not challenged, inspired, or transformed by the periphery. You’re missing out on the cognitive challenges that spur growth. Our minds are denied the exercise of grappling with novel concepts and forging new neural pathways. The most challenging, transformative ideas are rarely simple or popular. In a Taste Trap, you have zero exposure to them.
In my trap, I'm surrounded by echoes of my own thoughts. It's a form of self-imposed cultural poverty, a narrowing of my intellect and creativity.
Escaping a Taste Trap requires overcoming powerful neurological, psychological, and social forces. It's not about willpower—it's about rewiring your brain.
How do you even attempt to do this, when huge multinational corporations with bottomless budgets and engineers with addiction PhDs are working double-time to keep you hooked?
You have two options:
First, controlling our algorithms.
4. Control Your Own Algorithms
The discussion around gaining control of our algorithms has become increasingly heated and complex. As someone who's been following this debate, I've noticed it's no longer just a fringe concern but a mainstream issue that's capturing the attention of tech leaders, politicians, and the general public.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder, sparked a firestorm when he suggested users should have more control over the algorithms that curate their feeds. His idea of allowing people to choose their own algorithms or even create their own is the right move.
Algorithms aren't neutral. They're shaping our worldviews, influencing our decisions, maybe even swaying elections.
I've seen calls for regulation, transparency, and user empowerment. Some argue that algorithm control should be a fundamental digital right. Others worry about the potential chaos of a completely open system.
There's a growing movement advocating for "algorithm literacy", which is teaching people how these systems work and how they can be manipulated.
But there’s a stunning failure of imagination in these approaches. We’re fast approaching some early form of AGI—and all people can come up with are more ways to control and manipulate?
Are we so devoid of a pioneering spirit that animated the creation of the internet in the first place, that we cannot dream up ways to make algorithms work for us, other than top-down control?
That’s why there’s the second option:
5. How AI Can Free Us From the Deadening Grip of the Algorithms
Let me talk to you about AI Sommeliers for a minute.
AI Sommeliers are Agents that act as our personal curators, sifting through the internet on your behalf. These AI Sommeliers would be configured to seek out both adjacencies and opposites to our tastes. And they’re platform agnostic. They go anywhere online.
Current algorithms force feed you content that’s a mixture of things you’re supposedly interested in, and things that will keep you hooked and engaged for economic reasons.
But imagine having an AI that is prompted and engineered to binge-watch YouTube videos, read countless articles, and listen to podcasts on your behalf, all to find the nuggets of information and inspiration that you care about most. Basically, it could consume all of the internet for you.
An AI Sommelier like this could digest a three-hour podcast or a 10,000-word article and extract the key points for you. Then research the history of those ideas and bring in counterpoints and alternative facts.
Your AI Sommelier Is a Tastemaker, Like You
The AI Sommelier would be a dynamic, interactive tool that learns and adapts based on your feedback and changing interests. You could configure it to find content that's adjacent to your current interests, helping you expand your tastes. You could set it to occasionally present viewpoints entirely opposite to your own.
This system could work by allowing you to set certain parameters. For instance, You could tell it to focus on finding content that blends philosophy and pop culture—like the graphic novel Watchmen (utilitarianism and moral relativism), video games like "BioShock" (objectivism), or to seek out emerging voices in fields you’re interested in. It might even be able to identify patterns in your interests that you’re not consciously aware of.
Instead of being passive consumers trapped in algorithmic bubbles, we could become active explorers of human knowledge and creativity. What if you could be the most interesting person in the room? You wouldn’t rattle off corny trivia about honey—you could talk about taking care of your own beehive.
Instead of your profile being stashed away in a digital drawer, inside Facebook or Google HQ, with intimate details about yourself being purposely kept away from you—you control the dials.
How Your Agentic AI Sommelier Could Work
Let’s pick a chat interface for an example, as most people who’ve “tried this AI thing” have interacted with ChatGPT.
Inside this chat interface, you interact with your AI Sommelier, which is like an Agent. And this Agent knows your taste profile—what you’re interested in, what excites you, what you’re working on, what you’re worried about, and what matters to you.
This AI Sommelier has several recurring tasks and workflows that run in the background, and are primarily used for Discovery. It’s consuming and observing various parts of the internet where it may come across topics, themes, questions, and various content forms that match your taste profile.
Here’s what that solves:
Your (New and Improved) Taste Profile
As humans, we’re hardwired to observe (consume) inside any information environment but we’re rewarded by our orientation (actions we take) in the same environment. You will have a greater return on your attention if you direct it toward action rather than consumption.
There’s not enough time, attention, or energy on any given day for you to observe everything. So you’re kept in a Taste Trap by inertia, FOMO, and trying to catch everything that might matter. It’s the classic “just in case” learning. And what you want is “just in time” learning, instead.
The Taste Trap has been perfected with “endless scroll”, where there’s no bottom or end. You’re constantly fed “new” posts, over and over and over again—all to keep your attention hooked.
Instead, enter your AI Sommelier who observes and consumes for you. And you can adjust what gets consumed by turning the dials of your taste profile.
Want less on growing your own tomatoes, but still curious about other vegetables you could grow in your backyard? Turn the dial.
Wondering what the counter arguments are for Nietzsche's continued influence on modern philosophy? Turn the dial.
Want more, or less, of new and various podcast episodes on the latest AI developments? Turn the dial.
Want your assumptions on software development challenged weekly? Turn the dial.
And at a chosen interval (say, every Tuesday at 9am), your AI Sommelier has prepared a packet of the latest research for you—in whatever multimedia format you want, or all of them.
Curated Consumption, Done For You
Want that digest on what other vegetables to grow, presented as a video? Done, using Generative AI text-to-video, turning text research into an 8-minute video overview, complete with voiceover, images, video, and a 68 year old grandma telling you what else you can grow.
Want a podcast series on Nietzsche's continued influence on modern philosophy? Done, with AI voice generators (sounding suspiciously like Scarlett Johansen) recapping bullet points, academic papers, books, and talking-head videos.
If you want to go deeper at any point, your AI Sommelier will happily give you references and point out the rabbit trails worth pursuing.
Turn any research modality into another form. And it’s not just the format—you can get the counter arguments, certainties versus uncertainties, important dates, important people, tracing the lineage of ideas, introduce dissenting voices, nuance, and hear from a devil’s advocate.
You can get the full spectrum, a complete picture. You get the context that can accelerate your neurological and physiological process of taste development, developing a more refined judgment and discernment.
This way of information gathering and analysis expands our knowledge—and fundamentally reshapes how we develop and articulate our preferences and judgments.
We're essentially creating a new framework for understanding and communicating taste itself. This framework lays the groundwork for what we might call a "Taste Protocol."
6. The Future of Taste in the Age of AI are Protocols
The concept of Taste Protocols change how we share and discover content, ideas, and experiences. These protocols would act as a standardized way to encode our tastes for sharing, much like how current internet protocols standardize data transmission.
Imagine being able to import someone's taste file or integrate it with your own. This could work similarly to how we currently share playlists or reading lists. You could potentially "try on" the taste profile of a respected critic, a favorite artist, a friend, or even a historical figure.
The technological aspect of these protocols would need to be sophisticated enough to capture the subtleties and complexities of human taste, yet standardized enough to be widely compatible and easily shareable.
Taste Protocols could learn and adapt over time, evolving with your changing preferences and experiences.
These protocols could interface with various platforms and services. Your taste protocol could inform your streaming recommendations, your news feed, your travel suggestions, your ideas, what you’ve learned, and what you’re hoping to explore more of.
Imagine "taste fusion" becoming a new art form. Digital artists could blend the Taste Protocols of disparate individuals or cultures, creating entirely new aesthetic experiences. A mash-up of 18th-century Baroque with 22nd-century Martian colony art?
Perhaps the new internet protocol is called TasteIP, designed specifically for AI Sommeliers.
At its core, TasteIP would be a standardized way to encode, transmit, and interpret taste preferences across the internet.
Each user would have a unique TasteIP address, similar to an IP address, but representing their taste profile. This profile would be a dynamic, encrypted data structure that evolves based on the user's interactions with content across the web.
AI Sommeliers would act as interpreters and navigators of the TasteIP ecosystem. These AI agents would constantly analyze and update a user's TasteIP profile, while also scouring the internet for content that matches or challenges that profile.
The protocol would support taste-based routing. Instead of typing a URL, you could input a taste query, and your AI Sommelier would route you to the most relevant content across the entire internet, regardless of platform or format.
Even better, it should have total privacy with zero-knowledge proofs, allowing platforms to match content to users without actually accessing the full taste profile. Users could also set different levels of taste sharing for different contexts.
What I’m describing is a different way of using the internet—instead of you being used by the internet and a handful of massive corporations harvesting your data for their own fun and profit.
7. Liberating Your Taste with Agentic AI Sommeliers and Protocols
We’re right on the cusp of a fundamental change in our relationship with media and technology. For the first time, in a long time (perhaps ever), media and technology can be done on human terms.
We’ve spent decades conforming and distorting ourselves to fit and adapt to technology. Hunched backs, dopamine hijacking, squinting eyes, tapping fingers, anxiety, neck pain, emotional triggers, wrist pain—our whole minds and bodies have been assaulted.
But now, thanks to AI Sommeliers and TasteIP protocols, all that can be flipped and reversed. The future of media interaction is not in passive scrolling or algorithm-driven feeds, but in the cultivation of personal taste.
Your own AI Sommelier can shift the current model of attention capture to one of taste cultivation. If you can set our own parameters, explore adjacent ideas, and encounter opposing viewpoints, you create the necessary friction for genuine engagement and growth.
Our ability to navigate this vast sea of information—our taste—will become the key differentiator. The AI Sommelier becomes not just a tool for discovery, but a partner, helping us to articulate and refine our beliefs, thoughts, and judgments.
In the age of AI, taste is not just about preference—it's about agency. It's about reclaiming control over our attention. The future of media consumption is not about what an algorithm thinks we want to see. It's about using AI to discover what we didn't know we needed to see.
In other words: you become more of what you are, expanding your individuality (instead of being stuck in an echo chamber. At the same time, we can trade our Taste Profiles and let people see the world through your eyes.
Instead of stuck in a Taste Trap, you’re liberated. And your Taste grows, changes, and in turn, influences others, too.
Talk again soon,
Samuel Woods
The Bionic Writer