Lately, our taste is being shaped by algorithms and aggregation. But do we really know what we like anymore? Firebrand author and cultural critic Lauren Oyler tells us why judgment matters in a post-criticism world.
These days the culture we consume – movies, books, songs – is determined by platforms aggregating everyone else’s reviews and ratings. So, what does it mean when you say you like something in the age of quantification? And is there a way to beat the algorithm?
Our guest, writer and critic Lauren Oyler, is the author of No Judgment, a recently published collection of essays. She’s a contributing editor at Harper’s, and her divisive, often viral essays on books and culture appear regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times and the London Review of Books. Oyler talks about how to cultivate good taste organically, the difference between professional criticism and the comments section and what it feels like to be called an “ice queen” online.
Also, Vass and Katrina take turns not laughing at each other’s jokes.
This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.
Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany. Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
Subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where we unpack more of the latest in business and technology.
Find the transcript of today’s episode here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:00] I'm Katrina Onstad, the producer of Lately.
Vass Bednar [00:00:01] And I’m Vass Bednar, the host. Katrina, do you want to hear a joke?
Katrina Onstad [00:00:06] I always want to hear a joke.
Vass Bednar [00:00:08] Okay. A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, what'll you have? And the algorithm says, well, what's everyone else having?
Katrina Onstad [00:00:19] Okay, that's a good joke. And I didn’t laugh out loud, but I was laughing internally.
Vass Bednar [00:00:23] Can we edit in, like, a drum roll or something? That's what we need. So credit where credit's due. That joke is from a Google engineer named Chet Haase. And it was quoted in Kyle Chayka’s book, Filterworld. But it got us thinking. What does it mean when we say that we like something, right?
Katrina Onstad [00:00:43] Do we even know what we like anymore, or are we just following the digital herd? This is the age of quantification, right? Every movie, book, the songs we listen to, everything we take in is determined by platforms aggregating other people's reviews and numerical measurements of quality, which we've talked about a little bit on this show. But this week we wanted to go deeper into whether or not it matters that we're all having what everyone else is having. As the joke goes.
Vass Bednar [00:01:07] Yeah, we're going to get a better understanding of the impact of technology on this lost art of criticism and take a big look at how all this measuring is affecting our taste. So our guest this week is a cultural critic, Lauren Oyler. You may have read her work in The New Yorker or Vice or BuzzFeed back in the day. Or you may know her fiction. Her novel Fake Accounts came out in the pandemic. You're most likely to know her for her very sharp, fearless reviews of writers like Roxane Gay and Jia Tolentino. I don't know if you remember this, Katrina, but her scathing review of Tarantino’s essay collection Trick Mirror crashed the London Review of Books website.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:45] I do remember that, yeah. She writes about her peers, these very famous writers, and she's not always as infatuated with them as the consensus dictates. And for that, she has received an outsized share of online hate, actually. And she talked to you about that. I thought it was very interesting when she was describing what it's like to be called an ice queen online, but she seems to have a very thick skin.
Vass Bednar [00:02:07] Yeah. Oyler’s newest book, No Judgment, is a collection of six essays. They're all about the role of criticism in a changing, increasingly algorithm centered world. And she's kind of a throwback, right? Lauren's writing criticism in a moment where criticism has drastically changed. It's being diluted. We have this terrible loss of full time professional critics that are anchored at newspapers and magazines, and the growth of peer review platforms happening at the same time, like Goodreads, Rotten Tomatoes platforms like Letterboxd. These all sort of supplant the kind of work that she does, but in a very different and distinct way.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:45] Yeah, a big chunk of this book dissects the Goodreads phenomenon.
Vass Bednar [00:02:48] Yeah. And if you're not familiar with good reads, it's kind of a cataloging website. It has a social element where you can share a lot about your reading. You can highlight a book you're currently reading, and if you like, once you've read a book, you can also review it. Lauren says that this isn't criticism, it's more of a customer review.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:08] And it does have an economic impact on publishing, right? 150 million users in 2023. Amazon bought it, and these reviews link directly to Amazon, where you can buy these books. And Amazon is responsible for over 50% of book sales in the United States.
Vass Bednar [00:03:24] There's also just like the trolling, you know, people may have fake accounts that they weaponize or terrorize. Peers, authors even trying to extinguish the power of popular reviewers.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:37] Yeah, we saw last year was really interesting. The author, Elizabeth Gilbert, you know, huge writer. Eat, pray, love. You know, she's a brand and a book of hers, which was set in Russia and hadn't even been published yet, got targeted by a group of Ukrainian readers, to the point where she was so uncomfortable that she pulled the book from publication. The book actually wasn't published. So there's a real world, a fact that evidence of the clout and the power of Goodreads when the crowd turns, there's the dark side.
Vass Bednar [00:04:10] Well, Katrina, you're also an author. So do you look at your Goodreads?
Katrina Onstad [00:04:15] I do not look at my Goodreads, and I know that that's actually a problem for my publishers and probably for my career. I don't know if I could bear it. Like, I think there's something really positive about the idea of a community of readers, who are books for, right, if not for the people who read them. And there is this argument that Good Reads shifts the power to readers and away from what I always picture in my head is like Anton Ego, the Ratatouille, capital C critic. And I get that. But for me, reading and writing fiction is more of a solitary, almost a sacred act. To me, it's not quantifiable, right? So it makes me kind of grumpy to see artists’ work reduced to a star rating. Okay. Vass before we go can I tell you a joke? Can we come full circle here? Okay. This is a joke that has to do with what we're talking about today. Why did the yogurt go to the art exhibition?
Vass Bednar [00:05:10] Okay. Yogurt. To see if it was dairy free. Art fermented.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:17] Okay. You're thinking way too hard.
Vass Bednar [00:05:19] Why did the yogurt go-gurt? I don't know why.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:23] Because it was cultured.
Vass Bednar [00:05:25] Man.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:26] You didn’t even laugh. It’s a terrible joke. But the internet told me it was funny, so I believed it.
Vass Bednar [00:05:33] Yogurt went to the art show so it could tell you how many stars the Mona Lisa gets. That's kind of the whole problem. Let's talk to Lauren Oyler. This is Lately. Lauren, when did you know that you had good taste?
Speaker 3 [00:06:03] I remember very distinctly that I was made fun of in middle school for not knowing what was on MTV, not knowing what was on TLR and all this kind of stuff. So then I got one of these little like 13 inch televisions with a VHS for some birthday. And so I watched MTV studiously so that I would know what, in the context of rural West Virginia, like what people were talking about and what was cool, quote unquote. And then I went to an elite Ivy League university where people knew about a lot of different things that I had never heard of before. And it was like quite difficult for me to understand like what was good and what was not, because I think I really didn't read a good book until I went to college. But I think one of my arguments in general is that taste can be learned. And I think there's this idea that taste should be innate and it's inauthentic to like, try. But the classic thing we talk about with taste is taste in clothing. And like some of the best dressers I know, they're thinking quite a lot about it. And I think taste is a lot of time about someone's willingness to put in the intellectual effort to think about why they like what they like or why they just like what they dislike. Right?
Vass Bednar [00:07:15] Yeah. And all thank you to MTV. I wanted to start with taste and learn about your history, developing your sense of your own, because I'm so interested in how technology shapes and reshapes daily lives, often in ways that we don't quite notice or we feel, but we don't talk about. And you have written about how we live in this, like, painfully quantitative world now, where what we like and what we don't like is increasingly shaped by the comments and experiences of others reviews, rankings, and sometimes an algorithmic interpretation. I'm thinking the aggregation of Rotten Tomatoes and others. So how is quantification? How is technology changing our taste?
Lauren Oyler [00:08:01] Well, I think there are two things happening with technology. On the one hand, you have these sort of algorithmic recommendation generators, basically something like Spotify, something like Netflix, and to a lesser extent, Goodreads, Amazon social media in general. Right. So algorithms are guiding you to things that you've already liked. That means on one hand, you know, the rich get richer, the popular get more popular, because what is popular often is catering to the lowest common denominator, so that the most people like it so that you can you can make the most money off of it. Another thing that's happening that I think, you know, it could be a good thing for taste if people are willing to put in the work. Right. You can encounter sometimes these local internet communities, right.
Vass Bednar [00:08:48] What is a local internet community.
Lauren Oyler [00:08:50] On social media I'm friends with another literary critic who tweets a lot about 20th and 21st century European literature. Okay. And he has a stable of followers, most of whom he has not met in person, who are also interested in 20th and 21st century European literature. And if you read Ulysses and you're like, oh, I want to read more things that are like Ulysses and you sort of Google around and you might find these guys talking about weird modernist poetry or anything like that, but that requires a certain initiative, right? That requires you to sit down and say, I'm going to watch MTV all day so that I learn, like, what's cool. So I think that if we start thinking about taste as something that one can cultivate or as something that one can develop and ask something that indeed can be judged, it might encourage more people to use the internet in a way that utopian technologists maybe thought it might be used, which is to say, to use it to find strange work online. And the same is true for film too, right? Like there's the amazing platform movie for independent cinema, also the Criterion Channel. But you can get like a true education in cinema by using these platforms. So I think there's long been an idea that highbrow stuff, arthouse cinema, like difficult literature, there's sort of the realm of the elite. And if you don't like Taylor Swift or something, you're a snob, right? But actually, this is the great thing about culture. Or it could be in the 21st century, is that you can learn a lot for free using the internet.
Vass Bednar [00:10:22] The title of your book of essays is No Judgment. And you, of course, play with this. And, you know, tell us how it's a phrase that can be read a few different rates. It's kind of like the ultimate passive aggressive conversational move. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Why judgment matters.
Lauren Oyler [00:10:42] Sure. So I was writing these essays and I wanted to write one about the concept of vulnerability, which I was encountering a lot, both in arts criticism as well as in my day to day life. As a person who is online and talking to people of my milieu and my age groups, and I'm 33 years. I'm a millennial.
Vass Bednar [00:10:59] I'm a geriatric millennial.
Lauren Oyler [00:11:01] That's great. I think that's a great micro generation to be in. You've got enough Gen-X, but not too much. Basically, we use the phrase no judgment to sort of forestall any criticism, and it's just completely unrealistic. Like we're judging all the time. And if you're talking to someone and they say no judgment, you know that that's not true at some level, right? Like we're judging all the time. The idea also sort of relates to the trend that we've seen over the last ten, 15 years for like identity politics and identity related critique. So what has happened is that we understand taste to be merely a product of a person's circumstances. We say, oh, I like this movie because I related to it because as a woman, blah blah blah, blah, blah. I really enjoyed this movie because as a person of color, blah blah blah blah blah blah, I find this way of thinking about taste to be incredibly limiting because it says you can't like things that aren't in your little group, and if you dislike something that is pandering to your identity group or groups, that means you're a traitor, right?
Vass Bednar [00:12:05] Or you are discounting those groups in some way.
Lauren Oyler [00:12:08] Or exactly you're insulting them, you're insulting it, they're being vulnerable and you're insulting them. And it also completely ignores any esthetic critique whatsoever. And ultimately it only harms the people who are part of those groups because it says you can't think. You can only react, right.
Vass Bednar [00:12:27] I think it's definitely fair to say that cultural criticism had more power in the past, or a more distinct power. You're sort of pointing to that shift in power or the diffusion of it, and maybe trying to call some of it back. Could you refresh us on what the role of a culture critic was in the past, and maybe how you see cultural criticism changing, for better or for worse, in a kind of online environment?
Lauren Oyler [00:12:55] Until very recently, the only way to really publicize the fact that you had a book or a film or an art exhibition coming out was through cultural criticism. So people would read The New York Times Book Review and say, oh, Lauren Oyler has a collection of essays coming out. I think I remember reading one of her pieces in Harper's Magazine a couple of months ago. I will check that up now. You can still see a review of my book in The New York Times, but you can also Google it and you get a wide range, let's say, of reactions to the book in order to sift through all this stuff, to understand that Lauren Oyler is a genius, and you should definitely buy her book. You have to have this kind of critical faculty or your ability to interpret information that's on the internet and on the social internet, right? Because you can't just say, oh, this guy hates her book. Therefore that is true, right? Whereas in the past, these kinds of institutions, people respected them a lot more, let's say. So if you had a good New York Times review, that sort of meant something, and it does still mean something, but we just have a lot more inputs now.
Vass Bednar [00:14:01] Okay. As the media landscape has continued to evolve and contract, there are fewer outlets for longform criticism. You wrote for vice. Vice went under recently. RIP how much of this shift away from cultural criticism is just a business problem?
Lauren Oyler [00:14:22] Well, with regard to the media, it has been very interesting. So this is my second book. I published a novel three years ago during Covid. Yeah. And even in the last three years, the way that I promote this book has changed completely, which is to say, a lot of the websites that I would have done interviews with or places that would have reviewed this book don't exist anymore or are like severely limited in what they cover. And certainly there's an idea that books coverage does not generate the kind of traffic that you need to sustain your business. So if you're going to cut something, you're going to cut arts coverage first. I think that's the sort of rationale of many business minded media professionals. But something that is interesting is that I've been doing a lot of interviews or like guest spots on newsletters, which, especially with the demise of these websites, they are kind of coming into their own. And it's an interesting model for an individual, because if you are successful, you can maybe afford to hire a fact checker, or you can afford to hire an editor to work with you on, like long pieces or whatever. And you have a really dedicated audience of 10,000 readers say. And that's not the same kind of thing. If you're writing for The New Yorker or something like, you don't have that access to that audience, but you can sort of sustain an independent practice that way. If you are one of these people who succeed. Is it good? No, I don't think it's good. It just is what it is. Yeah. And it is certainly interesting to watch I think even if you're watching like through your fingers with your hands over your eyes.
Vass Bednar [00:15:53] Well speaking of having your fingers over your eyes, you occupy two competing spaces. As you mentioned, you're a critic, but you're also an author who is subject to criticism yourself. Could you describe for me like what is it like as an author going to your computer or your phone or your iPad, looking up your first reviews on Goodreads when your novel came out?
Lauren Oyler [00:16:22] You know, I never cared that that much about it because of this kind of collapse of all books in all genres into this. It's like, it's a book and it's like, well, no, you know, my novel is, a literary novel, is somewhat experimental. When editors were rejecting it, one of the grounds on which they rejected it was that it was a, quote, European novel because it takes place in Europe. And because I had a career like writing for a magazine, I wasn't so concerned about what my Goodreads reviews said or meant. And because I have a career as a literary critic, and I have a reputation for being somewhat harsh because I've written some negative book reviews. So whenever someone's writing an article about me, either like Lauren Oyler, the feared literary critic, a German newspaper once called me, I'll translate it a productive angel of death for contemporary literature. Oh, but because of that, I was very prepared to get traditional reviews, some of which would be negative, because everybody wants to whack the pinata and dethrone the ice queen, right? So I'm.
Katrina Onstad [00:17:30] Going to.
Lauren Oyler [00:17:32] Try again.
Vass Bednar [00:17:33] Good luck. Good luck guys.
Lauren Oyler [00:17:35] That this is all to say, like, I wasn't so worried about Goodreads because I had these people who were going to try and negatively review me and like a paper.
Vass Bednar [00:17:41] Okay, well, you have a thick skin.
Lauren Oyler [00:17:44] It stings. It doesn't feel good. It's not like I'm like impervious to criticism. But I do think that quite early on, I determined how to tell which criticism is something I should actually think about and consider and like what is a true weakness? And which is just like being me, because people like just saying stuff, you know? Yeah. So on Good Reads. And on social media in general, it's a lot of people just saying stuff and it's totally there. Right. And I think like, it's good that people should have outlets for their opinions about things. However, is it the law? No. And, you know, this is a cliche, but a lot of cliches are true, which is like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. As you mentioned, I used to work at Vice, and I wrote a lot of articles that were online only articles during kind of the peak of the digital media clickbait era. I like saw a lot of people saying mean things about me, and I think that helps you develop that thick skin. And also I think, of course, there are many people who couldn't do it and don't want to do it, and that's perfectly fine as well. I don't think that everybody should want to be a quasi public figure because it is quite unpleasant. But, you know, sometimes people are like, why are you like this? And I'm like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know why.
Vass Bednar [00:19:06] You responded to an early review of your book through a very casual tweet. Why should artists engage with their critics, if at all? What was making that decision like?
Lauren Oyler [00:19:19] So on a sort of spiritual theoretical at grand artistic level yes, I believe that artists and critics should be having conversations, and I believe that artists and critics should really believe what they're saying and and be able to defend it. Right. And so I'm happy to get into an argument with someone who doesn't like my work. If that person were like trying to read it in good faith. The review that you're talking about, which was in The Observer, was not done in good faith, but it did come out at a particularly useful time for me in terms of publicity. I think it came out like two or even three weeks before my book was going to be published in the UK. And the kind of publicity dictum is like, do not respond to criticism because it's going to make you look bad. It's going to make you look like you have thin skin. In this case, I reasonably assumed that if I were to draw attention to this ridiculous review, a lot of people would agree that this was done in very bad faith. And it was sort of crossing the kind of line that I believe is unacceptable. And what she said in this review. She insinuated that I was lying about being tall. She called me a poor little squirrel, like, you know, she did all this kind of stuff where a lot of people review books in bad faith, but they don't, like, insult the author. And because of that, I did respond and I just tweeted, here are some things that this person says that are sort of ridiculous and that made everybody talk about my book. So that's why I did it, right. Like, you know, I've gotten lots of bad reviews and I don't draw attention to them. But in this case, I made a kind of evil PR calculation.
Vass Bednar [00:20:48] I was going to say on the flip side. What do you say to the ‘Don't be such a snob’ crowd? Who doesn't think that the end of cultural criticism as we knew it is anything to actually worry about?
Lauren Oyler [00:21:01] Well, it's not that they think it's nothing to worry about because they think it should die, right? So don't be such a snob. It's like, why do you like this kind of difficult stuff that threatens me? I think that that is kind of the psychology behind that kind of comment. Or like, don't criticize Marvel movies because many people enjoy them. Don't criticize Taylor Swift because many people enjoy her. You're sexist if you criticize Taylor Swift because teenage girls like her. Again, that is a sort of conflation of who we are with what we like. And my feeling is, I think that people should be empowered, at least in the realm of culture, because they're so disempowered in terms of like their housing, their health insurance, their ability to afford food, and their ability to effect political change, that there's no need to give up cultural ground as well. There can be many great things in culture. It's not like we have to elect the culture president every four years, and he dictates the policies about who you should like and who we don't like or whatever.
Vass Bednar [00:21:59] So maybe we could just touch on another real world example of the collapse of criticism, with Pitchfork folding into GQ, Pitchfork really mattered, especially for, I think, Canadian bands, right? Real music critics writing lengthy reviews, industry and music lovers followed it quite closely. This is a throwback too. But we wouldn't have like Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene seeing the success that they did and they have without Pitchfork. But what does Pitchfork's demise tell us about where we are with criticism? And does the end of Pitchfork Matter for music?
Lauren Oyler [00:22:36] This is an issue in every aspect of culture. Like there are literary magazines closing, like magazines that used to be dedicated to books and websites as well, that have vanished. I think something that is interesting about Pitchfork is that many serious music people would have said the demise of Pitchfork happened long ago, and many people believe that Pitchfork sort of sold out to pop optimism. So you get these long theoretical essays about Taylor Swift using, like, Foucault or whatever. And to me, that seems like a waste of energy. So my question basically is, did they cede their ground when they sort of soften and try to appeal to masses who are never going to read Pitchfork anyway, right. Like, maybe the Swifties are going to find your bad review of one of her albums and yell at your social media manager.
Vass Bednar [00:23:25] I feel like Swifties will find where you live and like Geo locate you as well.
Lauren Oyler [00:23:30] Yeah, the actual audience for serious criticism is much smaller than like a general audience. And it should be. I think this idea that we need to pander to, like the kind of average consumer in order to save our skin, is sort of misguided, because the people that you need to attract are people who are going to be interested in serious criticism, who are going to be interested in, like, music reviews as an intellectual exercise and talk about an album in depth. I have to believe, because I am kind of an optimist, that there are possible untapped audiences of people who would like serious criticism, who basically are not being served. And the issue is kind of a nonstop growth mindset, like, we relentlessly have to be growing all the time, and therefore we just need to be constantly getting more and more readers. And then you lose the readers who are more likely to spend money on you because they like, actually like your publication. And they care about publications as publications as opposed to like people who are just clicking around.
Vass Bednar [00:24:29] Just clicking around. I want to round out and just also ask in this vacuum, does the algorithm or do algorithms become an even more powerful force in our lives? What do algorithms do to taste? They seem like they could be part of this depreciation or flattening that you point to, but they could also surface tougher quality, obscure material that we hope for.
Lauren Oyler [00:24:54] Yeah, I think it would be better not to have them, but certainly they're not all bad. But I find incredibly weird music on Spotify because I only listen to basically like niche dance music, like historical and present, like techno, house, disco stuff. So you often find like really weird stuff in your Spotify algorithm. And I listen to like, Lebanese pop from the 60s because I am like one of these like coastal elites, right? So my algorithms are trained effectively. My Instagram algorithm is terrible because I don't really use Instagram for anything except for like looking at clothes and like puppies. But you can also train your algorithms. But then that requires a sense of agency and like active participation in your online life. And I think, like many people don't have that because my job is to like kind of be on the internet a lot of the time and see what's going on. And for some people, you know, that's not their job and that's good because we can't all just sit around on our phones assessing the state of culture. So yeah.
Vass Bednar [00:25:56] Lauren, thanks so much for joining us.
Lauren Oyler [00:25:58] Thank you so much for having me.
Vass Bednar [00:26:12] You've been listening to lately? A Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany and our sound designer is Cameron McIvor. I'm your host, Vass Bednar. And in our show notes, you can subscribe to the newsletter, where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.