Beyond Elegant Consumption (Again)

In my previous post, I argued that “tasteslop” (as identified by Emily Segal) and “literacy-slop” are both symptoms of a similar extractive logic. It's an attempt to produce the outputs of socially-negotiated practices... without the social negotiation.

In this post, I want to again riff on Segal's Nemesis Memos post to consider the question: what are the conditions under which legitimate taste and real digital literacies are formed? If the first post discussed what kills digital literacies, in this post I'm more focused on what keeps them alive.

Towards the end of her piece, after discussing AI moodboards, tech capital anxiously laundering itself through aesthetic sophistication, and the sloptimisation of culture, Segal observes that:

Fresh esotericism can spring up at any moment.

This is a really important point. Tasteslop is necessarily parasitic upon the genuine article, as AI slop can only index extant taste markers. So it cannot capture “esotericism” that is still being formed in the kind of spaces that pre-date subreddits. As Segal notes, with a nod to Bourdieu:

To put it another way: if significant cultural capital can be spun up by any random group of people who share an esoteric or notably artificial sensibility – if camp or subcultural capital can grow anywhere like wild mushroom spores, uncategorizable and somehow irrepressible – there will always be cultural capital that elite lords can’t properly access or control

I think the same is true of digital literacies. While platforms and institutions can credential the surface features of competent digital practice, they don't always generate the communities of practice, the productive friction, or indeed the partial legibility that makes those features meaningful.

Elegant consumption, fifteen years on

Back in 2012, when I was working at Mozilla, Mitchell Baker gave a short talk at MozFest that I've quoted ever since. The phrase, which you've probably heard or read me using before, was “elegant consumption”. She used this to warn of the danger of interfaces so smooth and delightful that we become trapped as mere consumers of other people's content.

The Web Literacy work I led at Mozilla underpinned the Webmaker programme, which was an attempt to resist that tendency towards elegant consumption. We built tools, activities, and approaches to help people understand how the web works; to help them read, write, and participate on the web. Participation is key.

I've got a separate post brewing about what comes after web literacy, but the problem of “elegant consumption” hasn't gone away. In fact, it's become much worse: platforms are better at keeping people inside them, interfaces have become smoother, and recommendation systems are more accurate. As a result, we arrived at what Segal describes around tasteslop, and what I have been calling literacy-slop: the appearance of digital competence, sustained by platforms that make it unnecessary to develop actual fluency. You could conceptualise tasteslop as elegant consumption applied to cultural capital. It looks like participation in culture, but is actually consumption of pre-digested signifiers. Elegant consumption has no stakes; it's dead inside.

Proof of work and productive friction

Segal's collaborator Martti Kalliala describes good taste as having “a huge proof of work element to it”. Although somewhat mysterious, we can agree that taste is a skill built through time, exposure, repeated acts of judgement within a social context.

In a recent post I used the phrase productive friction. I said that “sometimes the more human outcome is the one that introduces a pause long enough to notice, judge, and choose differently”. That post was a reflection on running a session with a pilot cohort of organisations trying to reduce their dependency on Big Tech platforms. In that context, the temptation is to reach for the most frictionless tool. But that tool is often the one that removes your agency most efficiently, as it makes the decision for you without you knowing.

Kalliala's mention of proof-of-work in relation to taste and my discussion of productive friction are in the same ball park. We're both arguing that effortful, situated practices can't be automated away without also removing the things that made them meaningful in the first place.

I've experienced this recently, moving away from Spotify after 17 years as a paid subscriber. Creating an auto-generated playlist has its uses, but it's entirely different to a mixtape I made for my wife when we first got together. There may be overlaps between the two, but I'm not sure her reaction to “here's a playlist I asked Spotify to generate for you” is the same as a cassette tape where I've thought carefully about the tracks, their order, and their lyrics. There has to be proof of work and friction for things to be meaningful.

With digital literacies, this matters in learning contexts. The constructive element of digital literacies that I identified in my doctoral work means actually building things – making meaning through practice. The cognitive and confident elements are about not only knowing your way around digital systems, but having the agency to try things, recover from failure, and push back if they don't meet with your expectations or values. It's about developing skills and competencies through exactly the kind of friction that smooth interfaces are designed to remove.

To use an analogy, just like learning to swim, there's no shortcut to this. You have to get into the water and struggle for a bit. It's not enough to just wear a swimsuit and pose by the side of the pool.

Small communities and partial legibility

Returning to the idea of “fresh esotericism,” I find it interesting that Segal talks about this being predicated on partial legibility. In other words, this is cultural production that's not immediately searchable, categorisable, or indexable. It's a shared reference that only makes sense if you were there; an in-joke. In many ways, it maps onto my continuum of ambiguity.

In the world of aesthetics and fashion, this can come across as elitist. But there's a different way to understand this: real cultural capital forms in communities which have shared histories, norms, and stakes. It doesn't form in algorithmically-curated feeds. Indeed, these feeds are where it's extracted.

The same is true of digital literacies, with the civic and creative elements focusing on producing work within communities where your judgement is visible and contestable. In other words, someone can say that you are wrong. The meaning of what you make is socially-negotiated with others who care about it.

I think this is why people are increasingly retreating to dark forest spaces. It's where the interesting stuff happens. It's where communities develop their own norms and vocabularies, maintaining a partial legibility that requires shared taste and digital literacy skills.

Who gets to define what counts?

Segal closes her piece by observing tech capital's anxiety: it keeps trying to fully capture cultural capital – and keeps failing. Why? Because cultural capital has a stubborn tendency to grow in the cracks. Segal calls this incomplete capture.

Structurally, something similar is happening with digital literacies. There are so many frameworks, definitions, and approaches because everyone wants to own the definition of what counts as “digitally literate”. This desire, I think, stems from the power play of attempting to own the credentials, the training, and the pipeline.

You can see this in the rush to define AI Literacy. It's the same game: you can package up the definition, framework, and credentials. But you can't package up the cultural capital that comes from the practices, taste, and judgement.

My argument, which I've been reiterating for 15+ years at this point, is that digital literacies can't be defined in advance and just handed down to learners. They have to be co-constructed with the communities who are going to live with them. Literacies are contextual and socially-negotiated, not extracted.

The civic element involves understanding that literacy is always a political concept. Who gets to classify? In whose interest? Whose version of “tasteful” or “literate” gets to become the default? Tasteslop and literacy-slop emerge when the classifying function is automated at the expense of the social body that has previously performed that classification.

Final words

The “wild mushroom spores” that Segal talks about are still there, and always will be. Fresh esotericism forms in the cracks of platform monoculture, meaning that real, legitimate digital literacies develop in communities of practice that can never be fully captured by institutions or platforms. I suppose the bigger question is whether we're building the conditions that expand the monoculture (paving over everything) or whether we're intentionally creating more generative spaces (cultivating the soil). I'm particularly interested in this in terms of credentialing, where we need less microcredentialing and more Open Recognition.

Mitchell Baker's phrase is more relevant than ever: we still need to move beyond elegant consumption. Not because consuming things is wrong, but because if that's all we do, the social body withers. The habitus I discussed in my previous post doesn't form, and the classifying function gets outsourced.

And, in that situation, what are we left with? Endless sloptimisation.