Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more.
Quick Note: I panicked after losing my job during Covid. So I subscribed to every newsletter I could find to stay updated on anything related to media industry. That's when I noticed: the best curators didn't just share links—they had taste. I pull from Paul Graham on why writing is thinking, Kevin Kelly on why questions beat answers, and James Cameron on why he waited 15 years to make Avatar.
This essay is about how taste outlasts AI. It's for anyone who is a writer, a solopreneur building a newsletter, a creator curating content, or just someone wondering how to stand out when algorithms can generate anything instantly.
I panicked when I lost my job during Covid. To stay in touch with the media industry, I subscribed to several newsletters—Neiman Lab, Splice, Axios, Charlotte Ledger, The Mill. I then stumbled upon on a piece by the Washington Post on the growth of Substack, how journalists and writers who had lost their jobs were creating their own micro media empires by building newsletters. While reading different newsletters, I noticed a pattern in how things got curated. I loved Axios’ bullet-point summaries or Splainer’s chatty tone in curating rabbit holes of things to watch, read, and listen.
When Writing Muscle Weakens
I later moved to pursue the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University, and sadly my writing frequency dropped a lot. My style and flair were getting lost as I was offloading my voice by just prompting with ChatGPT. So I decided to focus: to think better and write for myself. Not with the intent of just getting it published, but to organise my thoughts on paper and learn the skill to dissect information I consumed through independent thinking.
Over the past two years, we've seen AI’s rapid growth. Now, essays can be drafted in a passable, readable format. But how do we develop taste when it comes to writing that involves curation? With this as a premise, I wanted to first understand:
How do we write
How do we think
How do we curate
How does taste come into play
Of course, there are dozens of frameworks that tell you about prompts you can use to curate writing in your own tone and style. But I wanted to get a psychological framework of writing—one that outlasts AI. Because writing is thinking, and AI cannot think; rather, it can just dump whatever you feed it. And to stand apart, you need to do what you're supposed to do, which is to write yourself. And enjoy the act of writing.
Writing Is Thinking (And AI Can't Do That)
For writing online to stand out, it has to have exceptional style, tone, voice, and grammar. But sometimes we forget the core part of writing is thinking. One of the world's most popular essayists, Paul Graham, mentions in his piece "Writes and Write-Nots":
"One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people need help writing. The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard."
If you think better, then you're someone who asks good questions. Kevin Kelly, one of the founding editors of Wired magazine and whose essay "1,000 True Fans" created a ripple effect during the early days of the creator economy, talks about how questions are extremely valuable in his essay "With AI, answers are cheap but questions are the future." Here's a condensed version of what he wrote:
"Today we have rapidly improving technology to answer our questions. We have Siri on our phones and Alexa in our homes. We have Google, Bing and Baidu getting smarter every day. Very soon we'll live in a world where we will be able to ask the cloud, in conversational tones, for free, any question at all. And if that question has a known answer, the machine will explain it to us, again and again if need be....
"Yet, while the answer machine can expand instant answers infinitely, our time to form the next question is very limited. There is an asymmetry in the work needed to generate a good question versus the work and speed needed to absorb an answer. While answers become cheap, our questions become valuable. This is the inverse of the situation for the past millennia, when it was easier to ask a question than to answer it. Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, "Computers are useless. They only give you answers."
"The role of humans, at least for a while, will be to ask questions. To ask a great question will be seen as the mark of an educated person. A great question, ironically, produces not only a good answer, but also more good follow-up questions! Great question creators will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new industries, new brands and new possibilities that our restless species can explore. A good question is worth a million good answers. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering. If answers indeed become a commodity, questions become the new wealth."
In the age of information abundance, we can ask good questions only if we read and write a lot. Deep thinkers write with the goal of recording whatever readings they consume and for their ideas to simmer.
The Human Touch in Algorithms
There are so many newsletters that offer us different things to learn or entertain. The more we read, the more we're able to think, and the more we're able to think, the more we can ask good questions. Good questions often lead us to taste. This was predicted by Ben Thompson, one of the coolest newsletter godfathers who runs Stratechery. Here's what he wrote in "Curation and Algorithms":
"Jimmy Iovine spared no words when it came to his opinion of algorithms during the unveiling of Apple Music: The only song that matters as much as the song you're listening to right now is the one that follows this. Picture this: you're in a special moment...and the next song comes on...BZZZZZ Buzzkill! It probably happened because it was programmed by an algorithm alone. Algorithms alone can't do that emotional task. You need a human touch. And that's why at Apple Music we're going to give you the right song [and] the right playlist at the right moment all on demand."
This shows how human touch or rather taste really matters when it comes to curating something people would enjoy.
I then read "Good Taste Is More Important Than Ever" by Nitin Nohria for The Atlantic. He says, "In a world of limitless AI-generated choices, people need to know how to choose best."
"Taste is neither algorithmic nor accidental. It's cultivated. AI can now write passable essays, design logos, compose music, and even offer strategic business advice. It does so by mimicking the styles it has seen, fed to it in massive---and frequently unknown or obscured---data sets. It has the power to remix elements and bring about plausible and even creative new combinations. But for all its capabilities, AI has no taste. It cannot originate style with intentionality. It cannot understand why one choice might have emotional resonance while another falls flat. It cannot feel the way in which one version of a speech will move an audience to tears---or laughter---because it lacks lived experience, cultural intuition, and the ineffable sense of what is just right.”
I started exploring foundational frameworks about curation. I read Tiago Forte's piece, who popularized the concept of having a second brain—using your laptop or phone as a repository for all the things you consume, be it podcasts, movies, books, stories, or articles. In "The Maker's Guide to Content Curation, Part 2: The 7 Pillars," three points stood out for me:
Create a repository of valuable, pre-selected material: It's impossible to curate effectively just by sharing things on social media as you come across them. There's no chance that you'll know whether something is "the best" if you're evaluating it in isolation. The value you provide is putting it into a broader context or narrative. And that requires collecting things in a repository before sharing them.
Weave the personal and the objective: As a curator, you should split the difference, sharing content that has inherent value for others, while also adding your own interpretation or commentary. You want to get people used to hearing and valuing your take on the subject, apart from the plain facts.
Always be pitching something: You heard me right: pitch other people's products and services that you've tried and enjoyed; pitch books and articles you've found valuable; pitch people on trying new things or pursuing their interests; pitch them to rethink or improve an aspect of their lives. Every time you write an article, post a social media update, or meet someone for coffee, try pitching them on something you know will benefit them.
Taste Takes Time (Just Ask James Cameron)
Back in December, I watched watch Avatar 3: Fire and Ash in the theater, and the experience was surreal. The VFX, the production design and James Cameron’s direction was exceptional. But I also wondered why Avatar didn't create a cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe have done over the years. Daniel Paris wrote in the Ankler Newsletter piece "The Strange Case of 'Avatar' and Its Missing Cultural Footprint":
Over the past two decades, we've grown accustomed to the excessive fan service that accompanies mainstream entertainment products: a franchise installment every year, a world-expanding TV series, limitless merch, casting rumors, Comic-Con trailers, co-branded Lego sets, and stories that are mostly the same but add a dash of novelty (i.e., a new actor plays Spider-Man but Uncle Ben still dies). We're given films that serve little purpose beyond sustaining their own existence and generating future monetization opportunities --- artifacts of corporate strategy that keep a fandom flywheel moving. Fortunately, Big Jim [James Cameron] does not care about any of these things (and fortunately, Big Jim does not miss).
Avatar was designed to be watched in a theater as a 3D experience—a cinematic experience that would be nullified if you watched it on TV, as a visual novel, or on your phone. In many interviews, James Cameron kept pushing why it's essential to watch Avatar in theaters for the big cinematic experience. He had a long-term vision. He had drawings from 20-30 years ago, but he waited 15 years as he wanted the camera tech to catch up. Today, the Avatar trilogy is the highest-grossing with a $6 billion figure.
How do you develop Taste in the age of AI
This essay by Every, "What Is Taste, Really? Understanding and honing taste in the AI age" breaks down taste into two types: personal taste (what you like) and "good taste" (what a culture values). Personal taste comes from accumulated experience—trying things, comparing them, articulating why you prefer one over another. Good taste is cultural, often tied to status and tastemakers like Steve Jobs, whom the essay cites as an example.
AI makes execution easy, but taste becomes your edge. You sharpen it by making things, not just consuming. By building, writing, creating—you surface the decisions others gloss over. That's how you develop discernment. Thus, developing taste takes time. To offer something of value—which is what curation is—takes muscle, skills that we build as writers with experience. By reading a lot of content that is of value and ensuring that it offers something either extremely practical or extremely entertaining.
A Small Experiment that I’m looking to test at The Fiction Emailer
To curate useful links to my readers here at the Fiction Emailer, I have a long way to go to develop taste. As a starting point, I decided the following: Rather than just bombarding with weekly curated links, I was thinking to selecting a theme, addressing patterns that fall under this theme, and then offering you a solution you can practically use. And it will all lead to what my newsletter is about—trying to make sense of our world through the framework of speculative journalism and fiction. Here's to a more quality curatorial segment from my newsletter that I hope you'll enjoy.
Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.
Feel free to reach me at [email protected] or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️