The Case for Meat Space: On Feeds and America’s Loss of Taste

October 13, 2020

For those who could no longer taste their food, it was already too late. They had the virus.

By the time we understood loss of taste as a symptom of coronavirus we had already begun working from home, collectively deciding that Zoom, Facetime, and Virtual Learning are not real, per se, but are real enough. We consolidated every aspect of living into our Feed. Every ‘like’ recorded and used to serve us more and more of what we like.

Our faculty of taste, that ability to discern beauty from banality, had already been outsourced over the last dozen years to a nascent Artificial Intelligence hellbent on selling us more stuff. Or at least on keeping us engaged. Over time, the algorithm learned that what really keeps us hooked is not beauty or pleasure at all, but outrage and fear. The target shifted from taste to mere sensation— all the easier to control. Rather than being an ‘arbiter of truth,’ Zuckerberg had become an arbiter of sensation, determining for billions of people what is visible and invisible.

Projects like Miranda July’s Somebody (2014-15), an app in which virtual messages were sent to friends in real life via a third party stranger-messenger, suggest that this all could have been very different. Somebody exposes the potential the internet once had to connect strangers from different walks of life. But what has emerged has been no tech utopia at all, but instead a splintering, walling-off, and radicalization of America’s already numerous subcultures. 

screenshot from somebodyapp.com

Unlike food, the Feed does not nurture or sustain. It is not communal. It is tailor-made and yours alone. And it is not reality. Confusing it with reality or using it as a substitute, as we seem more willing to do during a pandemic, has dire consequences we are seeing play out in American Democracy. The question at hand is whether we will worsen or recover. Whether we will go deeper into the Rabbit Hole or turn a corner and reclaim our sense of taste as a uniquely human faculty grounded not in virtual space, but squarely within our bodies— in Meat Space.