DIGITAL LIFE

Bizarre tech world: Why is the tech industry obsessed with showing off its good taste?

Last week, Palantir, an American company specializing in data analysis and government contracts, put 420 work jackets on sale for $239 each. The garment, produced in Montana with a design inspired by early 20th-century workers' clothing, sold out in hours. The launch is part of a broader movement that has been transforming the relationship between the tech industry and the fashion world, according to The Guardian.

OpenAI maintains an online store with t-shirts and items with a visual identity reminiscent of 1990s websites, in line with an aesthetic trend that values ​​the aesthetics of the pre-corporate internet. Anthropic, in turn, partnered with Air Mail, a digital newsletter aimed at a high-income audience, to hold temporary events in New York and London.

What does it mean that tech bros, once proudly unstylish, have turned their attention to fashion? According to Kyle Chayka in the New Yorker, they are trying to give themselves a veneer of the artisanal, as if personal taste can give your company an edge. “We might call what’s going on now ‘taste-washing,’ an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism,” Chakya writes. Much of this is self-serving: tech and finance prognosticators talk up the importance of their finely honed human instincts yet are happy to have everything around them automated into oblivion.

A greater interest in such things is not necessarily bad. Why should Jeremy Allen White or Fergus Henderson or customers of The Row be the only people entitled to wear a chore jacket? There is a world in which the desire to prioritise human discernment in the face of overwhelming automation is positive. But when it comes to tech behemoths, we have a hunch where this leads: hoarding and optimising for their financial benefit.

Tech’s drive for taste could be fleeting; witness how quickly the industry ditched notions of social justice once it no longer suited it. And when it moves on to the next fad, matters of style and cool will continue in ineffable ways that can’t be optimised or defined only by wealth. And, lest we forget, we don’t have to buy what they’re selling.

Bill Cunningham, the fashion and street style photographer who died in 2016, was a lifelong wearer of the classic blue chore coat. In the lovely 2010 documentary Bill Cunningham: New York, he demurred on the merits of his own style, but clearly he had an eye for what looked interesting. He also explained why he gravitated towards the jackets, which he discovered in Paris, where he saw street-sweepers wearing them: they were cheap, washable and functional, with three big pockets. “And I thought the colour was nice.”

The Met Gala as a barometer...At the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual ceremony in New York, held earlier this month, the presence of major technology companies was notable. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, donated US$10 million to the event, which raised a record US$42 million this year. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, were also present, along with executives from TikTok, Instagram, Snap, and Slack. OpenAI, Meta, and Snap purchased tables for at least US$350,000 each.

Zuckerberg spearheaded one of the most documented image transformations in the industry: he traded his gray sweatshirt for shirts from the American brand Bode and, months before the Met Gala, occupied the front row of the Prada show in Milan.

Cultural capital as a brand strategy...The phenomenon has a name among cultural analysts: "taste-washing," that is, the use of good taste as a veneer to soften the public perception of companies associated with ethical and legal controversies. The concept was described by journalist Kyle Chayka in the New Yorker magazine as "an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies an appearance of liberal humanism."

Technology companies today compete not only for market share but also for cultural legitimacy, especially in the face of increasing regulations, copyright lawsuits, and public distrust of the social impact of artificial intelligence. Associating themselves with the world of fashion and design is a way to build a more palatable image without altering the core of the business.

Palantir itself summarized this stance in a statement. The executive responsible for launching the jacket stated that the garment reflects the company's commitment to the "reindustrialization of America"—and denied any political connotation.

The tech industry's obsession with showing off "good taste"—defined as a refined sense of design, human judgment, and cultural sophistication—is a strategic pivot designed to differentiate products, justify immense valuation, and differentiate human-led creation from AI-generated content. This trend is not merely about aesthetics; it is an attempt to create a "moat" around tech products, making them feel premium, trustworthy, and distinctly human in an era where AI is rapidly commodifying functionality.

Key reasons for the taste obsession(below):

Taste as the New Moat (1.2.8): As generative AI democratizes production, making it easy to create decent software, taste becomes the key differentiator. It's the ability to recognize high-quality work, make better strategic decisions, and create products that resonate emotionally.

"Taste-Washing" AI: There is an effort to give "anti-humanist" technologies a "veneer of liberal humanism," a phenomenon critics call "taste-washing". It's a way for tech firms to make AI feel more personal, artistic, and safe

A Reaction to Generic Content: AI can produce infinite, generic, or "tasteslop" content. Human-curated "good taste" is being positioned as a rare, premium skill that can navigate, filter, and add value to an otherwise polluted online ecosystem.

Cultural Capital and Status: The tech sector is trying to claim the cultural capital usually reserved for fashion, art, or elite, high-end lifestyles (e.g., fashion-adjacent clothing like The Row). This acts as a status signal that the company understands culture rather than just building soulless machinery.

Anxiety and Validation: This obsession reflects deep anxiety about whether tech economic capital can adequately capture cultural relevance. It's a search for validation that tech leaders are "cool" or "sophisticated" rather than just efficient producers of code.

mundophone