Hey. Hi. Hello. This is a blog about strategy from your friends at Quick Study. Today’s newsletter takes about 4 minutes to read.
Where could an outside strategic accelerator help right now? We sprint with adidas to clarify brand platforms, help Tito’s make sense of emerging subcultures, uncover growth opportunities for spiritual wellness brands, and reclaim relevance for legacy dating apps. Let’s talk about where a fresh perspective (and extra hands) could help your team: hello@quick.study
Let’s start here:
The conversation about AI & taste has quantifiably exploded in the last few months. The phrase “AI taste” was searched over 400,000 times in March, up from 44,000 searches per month this time last year (Glimpse). And yes, while some of those searches are literally people trying to understand if AI can taste things, the real spike has been around the question of discernment, not food. As AI expands into new use cases, the question of taste has become a sticking point: Can technology be taught good taste? How does an algorithm adopt a vision of taste? And is the “good” taste the AI platforms are developing actually good for us?
All this taste talk has us thinking about curation. Curation and taste are a cultural chicken and egg, each fuels the other in a virtuous cycle: curators apply their taste to what they select, and exposure to that curation, in turn, refines everyone else’s. This cycle is now being tested by AI, which has become a curator for many but lacks the depth, context, or discernment that true taste is built on.
Tech’s takeover of curation and its potential impact on culture is something Quick Study discussed back in 2023 when we published our Study Guide on anti-curation. In it, we defined anti-curation as a push against the ways our lives are currently curated and the narrowing view of the world that over-curation produces. We also highlighted three shifts already underway, each reshaping how curation gets optimized, for better or worse:
Changing platform algorithms were reshuffling our consumption behaviors.
The rise of AI was starting to make curation more technical than human.
Trend identification had become a mass market sport, not a niche specialty.
We’ve continued to track these events over the last three years, and they are certainly leaning into the “for worse” side of things:
Our consumption behaviors have been forever changed by the feeds we inhabit online (hello Soloculture), leaving us without the shared realities we once constructed alongside our subcultural communities.
AI has become the preferred “curator” of information for a meaningful portion of consumers, optimizing curation for efficiency and immediate results instead of exploration and discovery.
The combination of “TikTok Oracles” and widely available affiliate marketing tools has crowded out traditional trend identification in favor of slop that prioritizes monetization over actual taste.
Preserving human taste and curation will require a deliberate increase in acts that resist it (or, anti-curation). Crucially, anti-curation does not mean no curation, but instead is a shift in what curation is optimized for. Technology tends to curate results with a focus on efficiency and immediacy. Anti-curation is still a curation of results, but done in ways that optimize toward exploration, discovery or other outcomes that are more thoughtful than instant gratification.
Examples of anti-curation in the wild include flyers for single people in Brooklyn parks, posting TikToks without captions or hashtags to make the audience that sees them feel more purposefully chosen, brands that sell mystery boxes of their undersold products, and Pinterest not allowing phones in its Coachella popup. These examples all show how traditional routes of curation or the consumption of curation can be bypassed to create an end result that feels more differentiated and potentially more successful.
In the spirit of increasing acts of anti-curation, here are some questions to ask yourself:
Where might you step outside the curated paths already laid out for you?
Do you have any past hobbies or habits that favored discovery over immediacy that you could learn from or return to?
How could you bring an anti-curation mentality into how you share and curate for others?
And some questions to ask as a brand:
Where might your audience value or appreciate an opportunity to explore?
How might anti-curation tactics help further differentiate you from your competitors?
What could this anti-curation signal about your brand’s taste, and how will it inform the taste of your consumer?
To find out more about how Quick Study helps brands and agencies get to smarter plans faster, email hello@quick.study. You can also find Quick Study on LinkedIn.