Ruby Thelot on Internet Culture, AI, and the Future of Taste

What It Covers

Ruby Thelot, designer and NYU cyber ethnographer, joins the a16z podcast to examine how internet culture fragments into micro-communities, why taste functions as a moral framework during periods of technological abundance, and how AI bots are reshaping the feedback loops that determine what content gets made and consumed online.

Key Questions Answered

• •Trend Verification Method: Before treating any online behavior as a cultural trend, analyze volume data across platforms. Ruby Thelot's firm examined 2,000 TikTok videos spanning five years to debunk heteropessimism as a rising phenomenon — finding dating content is actually 40–50% positive and has declined since 2020. Journalists' personalized algorithms distort perceived prevalence.
• •Machinic Taste Framework: Cloudflare data shows roughly 50% of internet traffic is now bots. As AI-generated content meets AI audiences, a three-way feedback loop emerges between human audiences, platform algorithms, and bots. Creators optimizing for this mixed audience risk producing content shaped entirely by machine preferences rather than human ones.
• •Balkanization and Babelification: Internet culture splits into insular micro-communities that develop unique internal vocabularies — a process Thelot calls Balkanization followed by Babelification. When terms like "looksmaxxing" escape their origin communities, meaning collapses across groups. Marketers and algorithms actively accelerate this fragmentation because niche audiences are easier to target and monetize.
• •Taste as Virtue, Not Preference: Taste emerged in 17th-century England as a moral guide for consuming virtuously amid new wealth — not merely as aesthetic preference. Thelot argues the same dynamic applies now: AI-driven content abundance creates the same pressure to develop principled consumption habits, making taste a practical tool for resisting algorithmic capture.
• •AI Sentiment Gap: Americans broadly distrust "AI" as a concept due to job-loss fears, yet actively use and appreciate tools like ChatGPT for practical tasks — one example being a mother who fixed a plumbing leak using a photo and AI guidance. The disconnect is linguistic: people separate useful tools from the threatening abstraction labeled "artificial intelligence."