#027. Mind the Gap
“You would do it too” is a confession if you listen closely…
If seeing is believing, what cannot be seen becomes harder to believe in.
To spend any meaningful amount of time online is to encounter “taste” as both compliment (“you have it”) and currency (“you’re selling it”). Worn thin by constant use, the word has become shorthand for good things — obscuring the act of selection in favor of the shiny thing before us.
But taste is not a property of the object. Having taste, whether “good” or “bad,” is a communicative act that depends on recognition. For it to accrue value, there must be a perceivable gap between what was available and what was chosen. Onlookers must be able to see, or reasonably infer, that a decision has been made. Something was selected instead of something else. Something was taken, and something was left behind.
A person with near-unlimited access and no selectivity tells you very little about herself. She has taken what was available, revealing the system she is connected to — its generosity, its scale, its incentives — but not necessarily her point of view.
This is the premise on which influence quietly depends. Through repeated acts of selection and display, audiences learn to recognize a certain world: what belongs within it, what falls outside it, and what to consume to move closer to it. This is what makes the good ones an absolute goldmine.
The effectiveness of this arrangement, however, hinges on the belief that choices are meaningfully selective.
Recommendations, partnerships, and purchases must appear to pass through a recognizable filter. This is not to say that every online person must be militantly principled about every heel, hotel, or handbag. But sustained success in the space does require maintaining some discernible relationship between access and selection. That is why we remain so enamored with personal style. You had access to all this, and still produced something unmistakably you. Bravo!
The challenge du jour is not that those we follow lack taste en masse, but that expanded access has made selection harder for audiences to believe in. Viewers can see what is accepted: ludicrously lavish trips, designer bags, handsomely paid partnerships, chartered jets. What they cannot see is the larger field of what was refused.
And refusal is the hidden half of taste.
To whom much is given, little is assumed to be left untaken.
Access has become too expansive and too constant for attendance or endorsement to reliably communicate judgment. At a certain scale, showing up begins to read less as choice than as participation in whatever opportunities have been made available.
This shift becomes most legible in moments of dissonance: a highly visible partnership that feels random, overly lavish, or difficult to reconcile with the world being built. The audience responds with some combination of WTF? and yes girl, get your bag. From there comes the sometimes earnest and sometimes condescending defense: you would do it too.
You would go on the trip. You would accept the bag. You would not turn down this much money.
On one level, the defense is understandable. It appeals to a sort of economic realism, asking the audience to acknowledge the person on-screen not as an abstract symbol of taste but as a worker responding to incentives.
And yet, you would do it too reveals more than it resolves. If anyone would do it, the act carries no information about the person doing it. And isn’t that the whole gig?
The person making this argument is not defending her taste. She is arguing that taste is beside the point — that any rational person, given the same offer, would make the same choice. She has not clarified the distance between offer and decision. She has erased it. And so, if her assignment is taste-making, the moment she invokes rational self-interest as her defense, she has lost the plot.
But not everyone’s assignment is the same.
Influencers, Tastemakers, Creators, oh my!
Alongside the rise of taste-as-currency fear-mongering discourse, the term tastemaker has made its own return. And if the value of taste hinges on whether a choice reads as judgment or mere participation, then influencer, creator, curator, and tastemaker are not simply different names for the same person. When used without moralizing snark, they can be useful distinctions — not because “creators bad, tastemakers good,” but because they describe different ways of creating value.
The influencer’s value lies in her ability to move attention. She can generate awareness, conversation, visibility, aspiration, and scale. Her audience may buy what she links. They may feel attached to her. They may even love her. But the relationship is not always organized around discernment. Often, it is organized around personality, entertainment, intimacy, social fluency, or the simple pleasure of watching someone move through the world. In a culture bursting at the seams with entertainment, that is no small thing.
A tastemaker offers something different. Her value is not simply that people watch her, but that they borrow from her (see delegated discernment). She makes selection feel considered, specific, and repeatable. Creating constraint in a culture defined by excess is no small thing either. Not because constraint is virtuous, but because it is informative. This mode of influence, then, depends not on scarcity itself, but on the audience’s continued belief that selection remains operative.
What that gotta do with me?
For the consumer, this distinction creates a new kind of literacy problem.
To be online is to be surrounded by other people’s choices, each arriving with implied meaning. The challenge is learning to recognize what you’re looking at.
Tastemakers can be useful because they help us navigate abundance. They offer language, hierarchy, and context. A good tastemaker sharpens your eye. She introduces you to things you might not have found on your own and, more importantly, she offers you a framework for choosing.
Influencers offer something else: pleasure, entertainment, access, personality, spectacle, and social fluency. They show what is happening. Sometimes they are what is happening. They are influential not necessarily because they are coherent world-builders, but because of the scale of the platform from which they speak.
Today’s consumer likely needs both. Too much tastemaking becomes self-serious; too much influencing warps your sense of reality. The task is not to reject one in favor of the other, but to understand which function is being performed.
That is how the consumer produces her own distance between access and selection. She receives the full onslaught of what is offered to her — the links, collaborations, trips, trends, discourse, discount codes — and then she chooses.
In the end, we are not trying to access what someone has. We are trying to understand how to choose, so that when abundance reaches us, in whatever form it does, we know how we want to live, dress, and be.
That is the reciprocal demand of the current moment. If we expect the people we watch to maintain discernment under conditions of abundance, we must attempt the same feat.
you gon ruffle some feathers with this one I fear