Nowhere is this creepier than the arena of taste. If we think that a computer program—so much more rational, so much better informed—believes one thing to be better than another, then the choices we make online about what books to read, what songs to listen to, what movies to watch become less independent and more manipulated. Suggestions on Netflix and iTunes and Amazon—all crowd-sourced and data-crunched—start to feel natural and neutral. If you believe a piece of technology can have a belief, then it’s only a tiny step before you start to believe its belief is more important than your own. We’ve all acquiesced at some point to the “you’d like this” suggestion of an algorithm.

Pine or teak? Polyester or silk? Carrie Underwood or Antonio Vivaldi? By such superficial choices do we formulate our ideas of each other—and of ourselves. Recently, moored on the sofa, Kenny and I came to the agreement that we could not abide any further episodes of Chopped. We started scanning iTunes for a movie and this happened: One of us would say, “What about the armadillo doc? You love armadillos.” Then the other would shoot the idea down by citing its aggregated rating. “Two stars? We need some standards.” I can’t call it a debate. It was merely navigation; it didn’t involve our opinions, our critique of the trailer, our knowledge of the director—it was just the repetition of a highly prescriptive rating system. 

At the same time, we were picking through containers of Thai food from a restaurant that had been selected from the top of a Yelp list and we were loosely listening to a playlist sponsored by the curatorial geniuses behind the Mr. Clean products. Nothing we were consuming appeared to be directly related to our personal taste—rather, we were gumming some kind of sanctioned cultural porridge. The question was: who cooked it?

Was it my choice when we finally settled on Pitch Perfect 2? Was it the collective decision of some swarming crowd? Or, stranger yet, was the decision made by an algorithm’s own alien aesthetics?

When we allow sites like Rotten Tomatoes to decide which movies, dinners, and songs we consume, we go along with the myth that our decisions are being made by neutral and unbiased guides. Perhaps we think this is a cure for elitism—a flattening of the critical landscape. It’s rational, it’s the crowd, and so it’s undeniably what is best. We find ourselves nudged toward the quantifiable. Our aggregators of taste have allowed for this myth to grow so strong, in fact, that it becomes invisible: a myth of natural, inarguable taste, doled out in star ratings and unimpeachable bestseller rankings.

But we forget: taste is never natural. If we aren’t making aesthetic decisions for ourselves, then someone or something else is doing it for us. Bestseller lists have guided readers since the nineteenth century, and mass media has influenced everything from pet food selection to travel destinations, at least since the invention of newspapers. But a new and more pernicious level of taste management now prevails. The world leans across the table, holds a spoon an inch from your closed lips, and gives you a determined smile: You have to taste this.