Somewhere between the barrel leg jeans and the brown bubble plates, Kelly Meharg started to wonder whether her taste was actually hers. Turns out there’s a name for that.
I knew something was wrong the minute I looked in the mirror.
On the way out to a work event, I saw myself. Like, saw myself. In a pair of mid-wash, mid-rise barrel jeans.
Now, nothing against those of you gals who can rock a barrel leg. I applaud you, I salute you. But me? No. No no nooooo.
Firstly, they simply don’t flatter my body shape – long torso, tiny legs (wait is this why I just got a corgi…) a tummy, and thighs that are brilliant for netball but not so much for a lot of what we now call *fashion*. I like to minimise my bottom half, not accentuate it… so why the hell am I trying to leave the house looking like West Auckland’s answer to MC Hammer?
‘But they look so cute online,’ I grumbled to myself, turning around to find my old faithful pair of Levi’s straight legs.
Then I looked around my house. Chrome vase. Brown bubble plates. Chequered rug. Platform slides? My house and wardrobe look like a highlight reel of other people’s Instagram feeds, and I really started to question… do I actually like any of this stuff? Or did I just see it a million times on my phone and… think I liked it?
And therein lies the big problem – ‘I saw it online’.
I swear I used to be a little interesting. I mean, I know I’ve always been a basic bitch – it was literally the first story I ever wrote for Capsule (I stand by the fact that basic bitches could, even now, save the economy). I love a trend – I love exploring why trends are trends. But I think I used to be good at taking the bits of trends I actually liked and morphing them into my own individual taste. Now? I have a phone. And I’m starting to suspect it has made me exactly as interesting as everyone else with a phone… which is to say, not very.
Do I like this, or have I just seen it 400 times?
Ok, so once you start asking this question, you can’t stop, and I apologise in advance for what it’s about to do to you.
Here’s my thought process: Do I actually love butter yellow, or has it simply been administered to me, in careful doses, since last autumn? Did I independently decide that I wanted the bob haircut I finally got last year after years of long, looooong hair, or did I just see so many people do it and think I should do it? Why does my Pinterest board for the back deck reno look identical to my best friend’s backyard zoush, and her friend’s, and every deck completed in the southern hemisphere since 2023?
So of course I did a full audit of my life, and the results were not flattering. My “personal style” is traceable, purchase by purchase, to things the algorithm showed me repeatedly. My dream holiday destinations are, coincidentally, the five most posted places on the internet. Even my Spotify, which I’d smugly assumed reflected decades of carefully-honed, eclectic taste, mostly serves me a slurry of songs that sound like other songs I’ve already liked.
Repetition, it turns out, is remarkably good at impersonating preference. See a linen shirt once and it’s a shirt. See it 400 times, styled 400 ways, on 400 women with better lighting than you, and it becomes a personality – your personality. Everyone’s personality. When the fuck did this happen?!
It has a name, and it’s not just you
The patron saint of this particular spiral is Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker whose 2024 book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture put language around the thing so many of us had been feeling. His argument, built over years of reporting, is that recommendation feeds (TikTok’s For You page, Netflix’s homepage, Instagram’s Explore tab) now control most of what we see and hear, and that while these systems promise personalisation, their combined effect is the opposite: a ‘great homogenisation of culture’. The same cafes, the same interiors, the same sound on every video. Kyle started noticing it in 2016 with the eerie sameness of Airbnbs around the world, and it has only accelerated since.
The detail from the book that haunts me most is a young woman Kyle interviews who worries about “what I like is what I actually like”, because her taste has been so thoroughly shaped by Pinterest and Instagram that she no longer trusts her own reactions. In a later interview with the publication Culture Slop, Kyle described this as a genuine anxiety he encountered everywhere: algorithmic feeds destabilise people’s sense of their own desires, he found, to the point where they “don’t trust their own enjoyment of something outside of the context of the feed.”
There’s a cruel layer to this, too. The algorithm is not a discerning friend with excellent taste. As Kyle put it on the On the Media podcast, “algorithmic recommendation is not about quality.” The feed can’t tell whether something is good, it can only tell whether it is engaging, whether it made you pause, whether people like the people you’ve been grouped with also paused. It’s optimising for attention, not for beauty or meaning or the possibility that you might discover something that changes you. Kyle writes in Filterworld that “simply by trying to make a living or entertain ourselves, we accelerate [this].” We’re not victims of the machine so much as its unpaid workforce, liking and lingering and feeding it the data it needs to make everything a little more the same.
Researchers have started calling the resulting exhaustion “algorithm fatigue” – that depleted, faintly resentful feeling of being managed by systems you can’t see or control. If you’ve ever closed Instagram, sighed, and then reopened Instagram within the same 15 seconds, you know it intimately (I feel so much shame when I do this!?).
Why it feels so much worse right now
I asked a few gals about this, and they’ve been noticing it, too. Have we reached a turning point? Or, more accurately, a tipping point? Well, when the huge corporates still have money to make, probably not, but we ARE becoming more aware, and partly it’s because of sheer volume. Screen time research makes for grim reading, with some studies putting the average Gen Z day at nearly eight hours of screens, which is essentially a full-time job with no annual leave.
But mostly, I think, it’s that the content itself is degrading. The feeds are now flooded with AI-generated filler, engineered purely to game the algorithm, which means the machine curating your taste is increasingly choosing from a menu of things no human made or loved. We’ve gone from ‘the algorithm flattened culture’ to ‘the algorithm is now flattening a photocopy of a photocopy of culture’ – no wonder everything feels so… beige.
The great logging off?
The good news is that the backlash has well and truly arrived, and 2026 is shaping up as the year it goes mainstream. Trend forecasters are calling it the analogue era: dumbphone sales are climbing, run clubs and book clubs are booming, film cameras and paper journals are back, and digital detoxing has graduated from wellness fad to status symbol, with even Vogue reportedly framing time offline as the new luxury. Parties and hedonism is even back – stand by for a yarn on that one – and consumer research suggests around one in five people have now attempted a full digital detox, and roughly seven in ten have tried to at least moderate their scrolling.
You can see it here Aotearoa, too. Pottery classes with waitlists (I’ve tried myself to get into the same one for weeks!). Libraries busier than they’ve been in years (LOVE this. Did you know you can borrow stuff like cake moulds!?). Board game cafes on a Friday night full of people in their 30s who have collectively decided that being bad at Catan is more fun than being good at consuming. The unifying theme isn’t really anti-technology, It’s people trying to remember what they liked before they were told what to like, and connect on that level, rather than commenting *omg NEED* under influencers’ Instagram posts.
My week of choosing badly, on purpose
In the spirit of research, I attempted a week of off-algorithm living. Not a detox exactly, more a taste rehab. I asked the woman at my local bookshop what I should read instead of consulting BookTok (well, Book IG in my case, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it does it) and she handed me a novel I’d never heard of (It’s called I Love Dick and it’s everything a book described as a ‘cult feminist classic’ should be). I cooked from an actual cookbook, one with a cracked spine, and made something no one would ever film (Annabel Langbein’s Chicken and Leek pie). I picked a restaurant because we walked past it and it smelled good, a selection method I can only describe as prehistoric, especially for me of the *fussy* variety.
Was it all revelatory? Yes and no. I liked delving into the unknown, but not checking menus and reviews online was wild to me. I honestly don’t know if I missed knowing what I was “supposed” to think about things? But twice that week someone asked what I’d been up to, and I had an answer that wasn’t content, and that felt like progress?
Since then, I’ve employed a few new thought processes before I buy or commit to things – has this come from human connection? Am I being open to new things? And crucially, how do things make me actually feel, rather than a surface level, ‘that’s cute’. I’ve started asking friends for the coolest, weirdest thing they love at the moment. And I’m back to craving a little randomness – the unplugged walks, the random record stores, the café on the corner I always meant to go to – and trying new things.
I mean, I’m not going to tell you to delete Instagram, because I’m not deleting mine either. The feed is useful and fun and more than occasionally shows me a tiny dog wearing a tiny raincoat or goats doing yoga, and I am only human. The goal isn’t purity or total boycott – the goal, I’ve decided, is smaller and more achievable: to be able to answer the question “what are you into at the moment?” without describing something I watched. It’s to own one thing the algorithm would never have picked for me and to like what I like because I felt something, not because I was shown it 400 times first!
(And for the record, I have since decided I do like butter yellow and my chrome vase… the platform slides can definitely take a hike, though, and the barrel leg jeans are GONE. Progress!).
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