On Why Technocrats Will Always Miss the Point of Taste

Technocrats have a particular kind of power. They shape systems, optimize processes, and increasingly define the infrastructure of modern life. From algorithms that decide what we see to platforms that mediate how we communicate, their influence is everywhere. Inescapable in modern life. And yet, for all that influence and power they wield, there’s something they reliably fail to produce or embody: taste. Not just aesthetic taste, but the broader, harder-to-define quality we call “cool.”

This is why these gazillionaires covet being cool and want to own the narrative that the only way to navigate the future is through having taste.

None of this is an accident. It’s structural. Let me tell you why.

Taste emerges from ambiguity, contradiction, and risk. It lives in the gray areas where rules are bent or broken, where intuition overrides metrics, and where meaning is negotiated rather than engineered. A lot of things we dub cool? Not cool. A lot of things we never think will be cool? End up that way. Technocracy is built on the opposite premise: that the world can be measured, optimized, measured, and made legible through data. That what works can be quantified, replicated, and scaled.

Cool doesn’t survive that translation. Never has, possibly never will.

Back in 2010 does anyone ever remember Klout? It was an app to note that you had actual online clout. But it was so easy to game, people who really had no clout ended up having a high Klout score. This is what technocrats want to do again but are failing at miserably. Why? Because they have to live in the real world where taste thrives.

Let’s consider how taste actually forms. It’s rarely the result of committee decisions or optimization loops. It comes from subcultures, from small groups of people experimenting without guarantees. Most of them trying to do it underground. Away from the popular cliques that make daily life unbearable. Scenes develop in obscurity before they’re recognized by the mainstream. By the time something is widely legible as “cool,” it’s already on the way to becoming something else. If anything, most mainstream taste is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. And that’s what the technocrats, most who lack any social awareness, cannot read in the room.

Technocratic systems are designed to detect patterns once they exist, not to nurture the fragile conditions that allow them to emerge in the first place. They are excellent at identifying trends after they’ve taken shape, packaging them, and distributing them at scale. But in doing so, they flatten the very qualities that made those trends compelling. Would they have discovered the early acid house scene? Doubtful. If anything, they would have said it was cool in 1991, three years after its initial birth.

Think about how recommendation algorithms work. They analyze past behavior, cluster it, and suggest adjacent content. The result is a feedback loop: you get more of what people like you already like. This creates efficiency, but it also narrows the field of discovery. Surprise—the essential ingredient of taste—is minimized. Risk is filtered out.

Cool, on the other hand, depends on the unexpected. It requires exposure to things that don’t fit neatly into existing categories. It thrives on friction, on a feeling of things being slightly out of place. When everything is optimized for relevance, that friction disappears and delivers what technocrats love: slop.

There’s also a deeper cultural mismatch. Technocracy values clarity, explicitness, and transparency. It wants systems to be understandable and outcomes to be predictable. But taste often operates through opacity. What makes something cool is not always explainable in straightforward terms. In fact, attempts to fully explain it can strip it of its appeal. You don’t call something cool because its optimized and mainstream.

This is why corporate attempts to manufacture cool so often feel hollow and have failed in the past. The tech bros of today are just following a pattern followed in the past. Ask the “Organizational Man” what they thought was cool back in the 1960s when the beat poet movement was considered cool. They tried to co-opt it and were laughed out of the room in typical fashion.

When a brand tries too hard to signal its relevance, borrowing the language, aesthetics, or symbols of a subculture, it exposes the underlying calculation. The gesture is legible as strategy rather than expression. And once something feels engineered, it loses its edge.

Sadly, the only people who think there is an algorithm for creativity are engineers.

Technocrats, by training and disposition, tend to approach problems as systems to be solved. If something isn’t working, the instinct is to gather more data, refine the model, and iterate. But cool isn’t a problem with a solution. It’s a moving target shaped by context, history, and human perception. It resists closure. It likes open systems, kind of like the open web now killed off by our billionaire tech privatization overlords.

There’s also the question of incentives. Technocratic environments reward predictability and scalability. Success is measured in growth, engagement, efficiency—metrics that can be tracked and optimized. Taste, however, often involves making choices that don’t scale, at least not immediately. Way too much risk for the accountants. It might mean alienating a broad audience in order to resonate deeply with a smaller one.

Those choices are hard to justify within a system that demands quantifiable returns.

Even when technocrats recognize the importance of taste, their methods tend to undermine it. They might hire “creative talent,” establish innovation labs, set up a brand studio, or build tools intended to foster expression. But these efforts are usually constrained by the same metrics and processes that govern the rest of the organization. Creativity becomes another input to be managed rather than a force that can reshape the system itself.

The more power technocrats have to shape culture, the more pressure they feel to systematize it. And the more they systematize it, the less room there is for the kinds of emergent, unpredictable dynamics that produce taste. Produce meaning. Create anything worth paying attention to because it’s “cool.”

Taste requires a willingness to be misunderstood. Early adopters of new styles or ideas often look strange or wrong to the majority. That’s part of the process. But technocratic systems are optimized to minimize error and maximize acceptance. They smooth out the rough edges that might alienate users, even when those edges are precisely what make something interesting.

This is why those corporate conformists touting that taste will be an important skill in the 21st Century on their LinkedIn newsfeed while being no different than some “Real Housewife of LA” aren’t going to do anything unique either. All part of the same clique at the neighboring high school cafeteria table.

In the end, the problem isn’t that technocrats lack intelligence or creativity. It’s that their tools and incentives are misaligned with the conditions that produce taste. They can amplify, distribute, and monetize cool once it appears, but they can’t reliably generate it.

In fact, all of the tools they build now are great at amplifying, distributing, monetizing and tracking. Generative AI is great at these things. But not good at initial creations of anything unique. Mainly because creativity requires a formula that is part “copy/transform/combine.” While technical systems say they can do this, the person with lived experience deciding what goes into the system to generate the outcome will always matter.

So technocrats will keep trying to sell us on taste as a 21st Century skill to engineer. They’ll refine their models, expand their datasets, and get better at detecting the signals of emerging trends. But they’ll always be a step behind the source. Always a laggard. Always two steps behind. Because taste doesn’t come from systems that seek to control it. It comes from the messy, non-quantified edges of culture, and not inside a virtual reality metaverse, spreadsheet cell or SaaS dashboard.

Geoffrey Colon is a business troublemaker and author of the cult classic business book Disruptive Marketing. Find him here, here, here and even here.