Tech is full of bullshit hot takes these days. One (of many) issue I have is the tenacity many leaders have to use, abuse, and misuse certain words. Here are some the technocracy seems especially determined to undermine.

Taste is a credentialing mechanism. It reproduces and reinforces existing power. It’s a rubric distributed through infrastructure and controlled by those who already hold social capital. It’s used to distinguish, divide, and sort the credentialed from the uncredentialed regardless of the underlying merit of the work being judged. Claiming taste is the differentiator in an age of commoditized creation is the rubric describing itself as merit.

Slop is machine-generated output that mimics human expression. It is slop by definition, independent of quality. An AI song might get millions of plays, but it’s still slop. The term marks the absence of a real live person behind the work, not the work’s technical execution.

Psychosis is a mental state marked by a disconnection or loss of contact with reality, where a person has trouble telling what is real from what is not. It is a collection of symptoms, not a standalone mental illness. Calling a critique “psychosis” lets its user skip right on past the argument and diagnose the person. Dismissing the environmental impact of data centers as anti-AI psychosis is precisely that move.

The capitalist technocracy will attempt to claim, redefine, and regurgitate words without acknowledgement or respect for the people, places, and past from which they originated and evolved from.