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

Summary

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

The a16z Show – August 2, 2026
Hosts: Sophia Du & Sophia Puccini (MTS)
Guest: Ruby J. Thurlow (Designer, Artist, Cyber-Ethnographer, NYU Professor)

---

Overview

This episode spotlights Ruby J. Thurlow, a designer, artist, and esteemed cyber ethnographer, diving deep into the rapidly shifting landscape of internet culture, the proliferation of online micro-communities, transformations in social behavior, and the evolving notion of "taste." The conversation traverses AI’s integration into daily life, the mechanics of digital identity, and how cultural and technological fragmentation challenges traditional understanding of aesthetics and meaning.

---

Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is a Cyber Ethnographer? (01:41–03:29)

• Definition & Scope:
  Ruby:
  “A cyber ethnographer is someone who studies groups of people online and how they behave and what they do. ... I asked people what an Instagram story like meant to them ... building a lexicon ... These are novel behaviors that did not exist two years or three years ago. And we need to build understanding and language around them.” (01:47–02:53)

• Evolution of the Field:
  The discipline now adapts rapidly to technological change, with features and platforms (e.g., Instagram’s Close Friends) creating previously non-existent behaviors.

2. Identifying Real Trends vs. Algorithmic Echo Chambers (04:21–06:59)

• Distinguishing Genuine Phenomena:
  Ruby recounts analyzing the phenomenon of “heteropessimism” (averse attitudes about dating) and finds that “most dating content is, for the most part, positive, about 40 or 50%.”
  Quote:
  “Is this a real thing, or is this three TikToks in a trench coat?” (04:54)

• Algorithmic and Journalistic Bias:
  Trends often appear overblown due to the personal algorithmic feeds of writers and users; micro-behaviors can be mistaken as mass shifts in culture.

3. The Balkanization and Bablification of Internet Culture (08:24–10:20)

• Culture Splintering:
  The web is increasingly made of powerful, generative subcultures, each with proprietary codes and languages. Ruby:
  “We are in a pluri culture... there’s very strong, active cultural epicenters ... that are kind of sometimes touching each other, sometimes far away.” (08:24–09:00)

• Risks of Fragmentation:
  Ruby:
  “When we have something like looks maxing ... that breaks containment ... we no longer know what things mean when we speak to each other online. ... That bablification to me is very dangerous.” (10:10–10:20)

4. Algorithmic and AI Influence on Community Formation (11:42–13:52)

• Marketing to Micro Cultures:
  Brands hire cyber-ethnographers to map and understand digital tribes for hyper-targeted marketing (e.g., Dimes Square shirt at H&M).

• Rise of Machine Audiences:
  With bots comprising ~50% of internet traffic, content creators now perform not just for humans, but for algorithms and bots.
  Ruby:
  “There’s this waltz, this three legged waltz between machine, algorithm and your human audience. ... We will only have bots making things right. ... And suddenly what we’ll see is what I call machinic taste.” (13:08–13:52)

5. The Crisis and Future of Aesthetics (14:18–16:45)

• Why Are There No New Mass Aesthetics?
  Ruby:
  “There are many new aesthetics, they’re just not mass. ... For the most part, mass culture has been subsumed by finance.” (14:37–15:19)

• Search & Synthesis Required:
  True novelty arises at the margins, from unexpected combinatory creativity (e.g., Brazilian funk + Japanese pop on YouTube).

• Critics and Platforms:
  Financial incentives and engagement-driven publishing stymie harsh criticality and discovery of the new:
  “Critics also are no longer doing their job ... because we publish on platforms that are advertising based and so we can't be as mean and as critical as we used to be.” (16:35–16:45)

6. The Meaning and Role of Taste (17:30–21:49)

• Historical Context:
  Taste originally functioned as a moral and social guidepost during times of industrial and cultural upheaval (17th–18th century Britain).
  Ruby:
  “Taste is not just aesthetic preference. Taste is a way for people to consume virtuously.”

• Taste in the Digital Age:
  Taste becomes a skill in navigating abundance and resisting algorithmic capture:
  “Right now we have an abundance of intelligence, abundance of capabilities, and it is a question of how to deal with that so that this abundance is not wreck and destroy society.” (21:33–21:49)

7. Regional and Subcultural Differences (22:20–24:58)

• Fragmented US Tech Cultures:
  Moving through different American cities, Ruby notes “every single region has its own particularities ... their tech, and how they use their software.” (23:54–24:58)

• Emergent Social Norms:
  New forms of etiquette and communication arise constantly—e.g., how often is it acceptable to text someone after a date? There are no established guidebooks.

8. Attitudes Toward AI: Usage, Language, and Fear (25:06–27:57)

• Divergent Perceptions:
  Ruby:
  “Americans don’t like AI. AI is a very broad term. ... But they all use chat. ... They don’t like AI. There’s a bit of a language issue here around what does this technology do for me versus what is the negative impact that’s coming.” (25:06–26:31)

• Threat to Work Trumps Existential Risks:
  The real concern is job loss, not “runaway AI.”
  Ruby:
  “People want to be employed ... I don’t think your average person cares about existential risks, frankly.” (27:57–28:14)

• Journalistic and Algorithmic Amplification:
  Media’s own bias (algorithmically informed) over-emphasizes fear-based narratives, which Ruby’s firm is actively analyzing through large-scale data.

9. Digital Etiquette and Human Connection (28:54–31:46)

• Proliferation of Social Cues:
  The digital world produces new social signals (e.g., story likes) that require interpretation and adaptation.

• Platform-Distinct Vernaculars:
  One’s digital “accent” reveals their platform of choice.
  Ruby:
  “I would argue that there's a Tumblr culture. Right. There's definitely a Twitter culture, Instagram culture.” (30:57–31:19)

• Pushback Movements:
  Youth movements like “The Summer of Ludd” reflect a desire for tech disconnection and reviving in-person social skills.

10. Students and Technology: Optimism and Expansion (32:14–33:07)

• NYU Student Attitudes:
  Students eagerly embrace new interdisciplinary tools—especially AI—for creative project-building; access to information expands ambition.

• Criticality Remains Key:
  The balance, as Ruby sees it, is to create while thinking critically and intentionally.

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Is this a real thing, or is this three TikToks in a trench coat?”
  – Ruby J. Thurlow (04:54)

• “We are in a pluri culture ... cultural epicenters that are ... sometimes touching each other, sometimes far away from each other.”
  – Ruby J. Thurlow (08:24)

• “We will only have bots making things ... we’ll see what I call machinic taste.”
  – Ruby J. Thurlow (13:35)

• “Taste is not just aesthetic preference. Taste is a way for people to consume virtuously.”
  – Ruby J. Thurlow (17:30)

• “I don’t think your average person cares about existential risks, frankly. ... People want to be employed.”
  – Ruby J. Thurlow (28:14)

• “I would argue that there’s a Tumblr culture. ... There’s definitely a Twitter culture, Instagram culture.”
  – Ruby J. Thurlow (30:57)

---

Key Segment Timestamps

• [01:41] — What is a cyber ethnographer?
• [04:50] — Identifying real trends vs. microtrends
• [08:24] — Fragmentation and "bablification" of internet culture
• [11:42] — Marketers and the mapping of micro-communities
• [13:08] — The rise of algorithmic and machinic influence/taste
• [14:37] — The challenge of new aesthetic emergence
• [17:30] — Taste: history, morality, and modern relevance
• [22:20] — Regional culture differences in tech usage
• [25:06] — AI attitudes: language, uses, anxieties
• [28:54] — Etiquette, digital signals, and platforms
• [32:14] — NYU students and the optimistic embrace of AI

---

Final Thoughts

This episode deftly explores how technology, especially AI and algorithms, is accelerating the fragmentation of culture, language, and social behavior. Ruby J. Thurlow offers a historically informed, critical yet optimistic perspective on how individuals and communities can maintain autonomy and virtue—developing "taste"—amidst waves of abundance, automation, and digital noise. The conversation is grounded in both big-picture cultural theory and the lived, diverse realities of digital-native generations in the US and beyond.

Transcript

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Americans don't like AI. AI is a very broad term. They all use chat. And like, I love it, I love chat. But they don't like AI. There's the boogeyman of like, I'm gonna lose my job, but when I talk to mothers in Bryan, Texas, like, oh yeah, like I had a leak in my, in my faucet, whatever. I took a photo and in about an hour or two I was able to fix that thing. I love that there's a bit of a language issue here around what does this technology do for me versus what is the negative impact that's coming in a somewhat near potential future?

[Podcast Host (Narrator)]

Today's episode comes from our list of Recommended Listening, where we feature standout conversations from people across our broader network. This one stuck with us for its thoughtful perspective on AI Internet culture and the ways technology is quietly reshaping how we communicate and relate to one another. MTS hosts Sophia Du and Sophia Puccini are joined by designer, cyber ethnographer and NYU professor Ruby J. Talow to discuss digital communities, online identity, taste and what it means to live alongside rapidly evolving technology.

[Sophia Du]

Today I am joined by my co host Sophia, as well as Ruby Justice Thurlow, who is a designer, artist, celebrity cyber ethnographer and professor at the Integrated Design and Media at nyu. So he's written about everything from Internet folklore to digital memory to AI companions, creativity and the future of culture. And I think he has one of the most interesting perspectives on what it really means to live alongside this technology. So Ruby, I am so excited to have you on today.

[Sophia Puccini]

The question on everyone's mind, what is a cyber ethnographer and also how has the field evolved through the years?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

So a cyber ethnographer is someone who studies groups of people online and how they behave and what they do. So my research ranges from studying furries all the way to now studying how people are using Instagram. I had a recent piece for Protein where I asked people how they what they understood what an Instagram story like meant to them. And so around 500 people, 20 sort of closer interviews to build a lexicon, a glossary of what does this digital interaction mean to people? Is it content appreciation? Is it romantic affiliation? Or is it just, you know, friendship continuation? Which are the three sort of the three partite meeting structure that I built for Instagram story likes with the Mozilla Foundation. Recently I did research on Close friends. Okay, so we have this new thing now called Close Friends on Instagram. If you're in my close friends. Are we acquaintances? Are we like families and how do we choose who gets to be in these different sort of digital spaces? These are novel behaviors that did not exist two years or three years ago. And we need to build understanding and language around them.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And that's a big part of my research.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Sophia Du]

What's interesting here is that cyber ethnography is not something that's necessarily new. This is not a new field. However, my hunch is that this field has probably been changing a lot in the last few years, or at least in the past decade, with just the progress of technology and the introduction of new types of social medias, new types of online behaviors. Even just Gen Alpha, just a generation underneath has a whole different interaction with their technology than we do as Gen Z or than millennials above us. And so I'm curious to get your perspective on how this whole space has changed.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

I mean, there's the. There's the goats. Like Dana Boyd, I mean, she's a big inspiration for my own research. A big of me trying to understand what close friends meant, was looking at her research on MySpace top eight when she was. She was at Microsoft for a long time. Now she's at Cornell as a professor and she was leading a team at Microsoft Research. And so people have been doing these things for a long time, but of course, the cycles are accelerating and the features are getting shipped faster and faster, and we have these changes. And I like to say that every novel technology leads to changes in being, communicating, and belief. And the faster these things happen, the less time we have as researchers or academics to do the research and do the interviews. But I think it still needs to be done because million, if not billions of people are using these tools and these features.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah, yeah, totally. So one of my questions was like, basically, how long does it take to identify a new social phenomena online? And then how many of them are actually perceptible versus imperceptible? Because I think, for example, like a lot of teachers, if they have young kids and they're teaching like Gen Alpha, they will like, be very confused for a long time about like, what is this new six, seven thing? And, and so they like, they. There's a whole layer that they are just like, not privy to. So. Yeah. What do you see?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

So this is one of the hardest things to do on the Internet.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

I like to say, is this a real thing or is this three TikToks in a trench coat? Right. Because oftentimes what feels like a trend, which feels like a novel social behavior can just be super micro, super small.

[Sophia Puccini]

Right.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And so what my firm, R2S, what we do at 131 is we do a lot of, like, quantitative analysis of social media to see how prevalent is this thing really? 6, 7 was definitely real. Not only do we see an increase in the mentions of that on social media, we also see the behavior see through the irl. And when you're doing interviews with teachers, when I'm traveling the country asking people how they're using technology, I'm also seeing that sort of leap over into the physical world. A good example of this is there's been a few articles about this thing called heteropessimism. This is the sort of aversion that certain straight women have about dating men. And I was like, okay, is this a real thing? So we went what we did, we took a look at the top posts about dating on TikTok, editing over a million views, take a look at 2,000 videos, and then, you know, using the scripts, identifying did heteropessimism grow since 2020 on TikTok reels and across different platforms. And we found that dating content is mostly positive. But our beloved journalists, I think, because of their algorithms, I think are getting hit with a lot of that content, and then they think it's a trend. But when I take a look at the Data at the top, 2000 videos across five years, I can say that, like, it's actually kind of decreased over time. And most dating content is, for the most part, positive, about 40 or 50%.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah. That's fascinating. So there is like a sort of loud minority phenomenon.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Exactly.

[Sophia Puccini]

With content. How many of the trends do you see are, like, entirely sort of like the proportion of them is just, like, wrong, like erroneous.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And. And it's not only the loud minority. It's also the people who write about them have specific algorithms.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

You know, they have specific lives that push certain things to them. And so that also has an influence on what gets reported.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

So I'm a critic. I write for magazines, and sometimes I'm looking for a piece, and I'm gonna go on social media and I'm gonna try to find something interesting that does not mean whether it's a fashion trend, whether it's a behavior like 6, 7 that. That actually has any prevalence in the rest of America, you know.

[Sophia Du]

So how do you determine that? How do you actually determine what has prevalence? How do you determine what might just be a biasee that's on your algorithm or on a different journalist's algorithm?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Well, you do research, but, you know, sometimes when you want to write a piece, you don't have time to do full research. So you actually will interview the tiktoker, the person who's made that first post. So there still is something happening. But the question to me is always, is this only in Bushwick or is this actually happening outside?

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah, that's so true. So what have you observed about where culture starts? Because, like, there's. There's been a lot of, like, culture theorists that talk about this, of how, like, you know, they're very contained environments, that sort of breach containment. And it's all like, very, you know, small subcultures that are honestly pretty weird. Like, for example, the, like, incel subculture ended up, you know, trickling out. And like, now everyone uses terms like looks, maxing, for example. And there's been a million examples of this sort of thing happening online. You mentioned furries. I feel like this is another one where it's like a very core group of people, and then, like, things just start, like, coming out of there. Like, they start emanating out of there.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Yeah, we're definitely in a period of what I would call a pluri culture, right? Where before we had 10, five channels, we all watch the same things. Now we are in a pluri culture where there's very strong, very generative, very active cultural epicenters that are kind of sometimes touching each other, sometimes far away from each other. That something that feels as big as, like a show like White Lotus of Succession. If you take a look at what the viewership for that is compared to a show like mash, compared to even this finale for Loss, not that many people have seen it, but if you're on X, it feels like everyone's watching Succession, right? And yet the numbers kind of when you compare them to even a show like Big, more people watching Big Mac, they're watching Session, which kind of sounds crazy when you think about it. And so I think what's very important for me and you know, my friend Ruyi and I worked on this on this paper called the Balkanization and Bablification of the Internet. So the Balkanization is this splitting of our monoculture into these small digital enclaves. They've been Balkanized. And on our little insular digital islands, what do we do? We have speciation. We develop our own languages, much like the turtles on the Galapagos Islands, right? Our own specific vernacular, our own specific language. And the problem with containment, with being so insular, is that when we have something like looks, maxing or anything that breaks. Well, because now we've Been sort of abellified. We've developed our own unique idiosyncratic micro languages. We no longer know what things mean when we speak to each other online. You know, we're using the same word, but they have like completely different meaning. If you're in the furry community, if you're in the incel community, if you're in a, you know, high fashion Twitter, whatever it is, and you're using the same word and mean completely different things because you've been in that digital bubble and, and that's the kind of, that bablification to me is very dangerous.

[Sophia Du]

And those digital bubbles too, there's some external incentives to group people into specific individual bubbles because it's easier to market to them. And you know, even on like Spotify it's like, oh, you are a pink pony princess pop girl. And then everyone's like, oh, like this is the my culture. These are the people I identify with. And it's almost people want to feel like they're part of a tribe and at the same time companies want us to also feel like a part of the tribe. Are you seeing that just happen more and more and more and more that there's are just such tiny sub niches of our new culture?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Yeah, I mean a big part of my job when I do consulting, you know, anywhere from H and M to Pepsi, is to kind of go into these small digital communities and like map them.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah, yes.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

That H and M knows what, what to sell, you know.

[Sophia Du]

Interesting.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

H and M recently had a dime square shirt last year and that is based on research that was done on different digital communities.

[Sophia Du]

As someone who's in New York for two weeks over a few weeks ago, not sure if you know, dime square, it's a new micro neighborhood.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Oh, I know, but so, so people want to market, right? They want to be able to say, okay, I have this specific group. And it also makes the job of the algorithm easier because the title, the name, the nomenclature makes it more legible to and the algorithm.

[Sophia Du]

How is this now playing into our current modern day world where you don't just have people who are deciding these algorithms, but rather it's artificial intelligence that are deciding these algorithms. Is this accelerating the development of these micro communities, of these labelings of almost these decisions that get made by algorithms, less humans.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

So I have an essay that came out recently called Machinic Taste for Random Art where I kind of talk about this. So we might have seen the numbers from Cloudflare coming out this year. About 50% of Internet traffic as they See, it is bots. What does this do? So you had a period of time where people were posting to their friends, then you started posting to their followers, and then they started posting an audience. When a creator or a poster develops an audience, what we see is that their content changes. They become captured by their audiences. Meaning when they see that something works, they tend to do more of it. The concept of audience capture I get from my dear friend Matt Klein, who's the head of insights at Reddit. The thing that's happening now is that not only is their audience capture, but to get to your audience, there's also a gatekeeper, which is the algorithm. Yeah, that's why Mr. Beast looks like that on every single video with the big text. Right. And even our beloved tech podcasters also kind of do the same kind of Mr. Beast face in order to get views. And so you have audience capture, you have algorithmic capture. And now when your audience is now 50% bot, 50% human, we suddenly see machinic or agentic capture happening too. Because who is responding to your post? We see this on X. It's not just human, it's also bots. And so there's this waltz, this three legged waltz between machine algorithm and your human audience. And if we predict, as I do, that the number of bots is going to increase, suddenly it may just be that we will only have bots making things right. We'll only have AI generated content, an AI audience. And suddenly what we'll see is what I call machinic taste. We'll actually get to see what are the aesthetic proclivities? What are the aesthetic preferences of an agent to agent connection?

[Sophia Puccini]

Yes. Yeah, that is absolutely fascinating to me. Do you think that the, like, agents will have diversified preferences or like, do you think that there will be like some sort of conversion, like, well, agents have subcultures is basically kind of what

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

you guys were talking about before. If we have a rich LLM ecosystem with a different kind of models and different kind of weight, then I, we can, one can surmise that they'll have their own specific aesthetic preferences.

[Sophia Puccini]

That's awesome. So speaking of aesthetics, you wrote a piece about or you participated in an event about, like, why are there no new aesthetics? So I wanted to get your take on this because this is something that I think about all the time. Even people like Tyler Cowen have like created fellowships for, like, somebody please make a new aesthetic. So why do you think this is

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

so in the, in the lecture? I think the first thing is that there are many new Aesthetics, they're just not mass. And it's very difficult to make a new mass aesthetic because for the most part, mass culture has been subsumed by finance. I give the example of architecture, I give examples in movies. Right. If you take a look at the graph of sequels over time, just way more sequels than there were before. But I think we also have as an audience a responsibility to seek out the things that are novel. And you know, I say new aesthetics require search. New aesthetics require a novel philosophy as well. Right. We need to start to think about what the world is going to be. New aesthetics require a novel vision of the future.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Also that new aesthetics emerge from synthesis. Like, it's the kid who's making this amazing kind of like Brazilian funk that's like mixed with Japanese pop right now that's being made on YouTube. And I think it's a kid with three screens. He's like playing Counter Strike. He's listening, like he's listening to Brazilian funk and also listening to anime at the same time. And that's how the music sort of like, yes, yeah.

[Sophia Du]

It's become the new aesthetic. Brazilian funk, anime.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

But it's happening. And like, I think it's not at all like the number one. I played Ella Langley's Chasing Texas because I was like, that's the number one song in America. And so there's a difference between the revealed preference of like, that's the number one song. People say we want new things, but are we actually engaging with new things? Are we actually giving that kid a shot? It's very difficult for our current culture industry to do so because all their decisions have been financialized. They will make a movie if they think that, like, it's going to place well, do well. They'll pick a person who already has a following on Instagram if they think the song is going to do well. And the last thing that I deplore, and this is like me talking about my own job as a critic, is that critics also are no longer doing their job. Right. Because we publish on platforms that are advertising based and so we can't be as mean and as critical as we used to be or uplift something that like, very little people are going to care about. Right. There's like a, an incentive to. I think we know the poptimism to be more popular because the platform lives on clicks.

[Sophia Du]

Yeah. So you're almost designing your own human judgment, your own human taste based off of what these algorithms are probably going to be promoting. I am also curious to get your takes on what taste even means. You write a lot about it. And I think this is a very misunderstood term. Even I personally, it's like, okay, I. Everyone's like, oh, taste is the only moat in the AI age. And all of these conversations about it. And I was like, okay, personal preference, like having good style. Okay, interesting reading your works. You really go through the actual historical meaning behind this and how it's almost connected to morality and all of these other aspects of it. And I think this is a really important, important information that maybe isn't talked about quite enough. I'm curious to get your perspective here.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

So I wrote a book called A Few Essays on Taste, where the first essay is called A Brief History of Taste. And I make the case that taste is not just aesthetic preference. Taste is a way for people to consume virtuously. The question of taste emerged in the 17th century at a time where people needed guidance as to how to consume properly. So in 1688, the bill of Rights happens in England after the Glorious Revolution and the nobility's powers are restrained. And as they lose political power, they also lose cultural power at the same time. You have the growth of the British colonies, you have immense amounts of wealth that are being generated in the United Kingdom. And suddenly you have this nouvelle bourgeoisie, you have this sort of new elite that emerges. And there's a belief that this emergence of excessive luxury will lead to the decay of society. Right. There's even Sokola writes in Luxury, 1977 says that they believe that excess would lead to effeminacy, that men would lose their masculinity because things were too good. And so it is in the vacuum, in the reduction of the cultural power of the previous nobility, that the question of taste emerges. And so you have people like the Earl of Shaftesbury, people like Alexander Pope, who write about this in the 17th and 18th century. What's interesting to me is that we're in a similar position now. We're entering a similar industrial revolution. We are faced with, or at the eve, or maybe in the midst of immense amounts of wealth being created. And we're asking ourselves, how do we consume virtuously? And that is why the question of taste is emerging. It mirrors 17th and 18th century English

[Sophia Puccini]

in that sense, like a self governing, like sort of structure that emerges so that people like, in a way, it's kind of like a survival instinct to, you know, like so much content being out there and so much slop being out there.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And so what's notable about this is that what Pope and Shaftesbury tells us Shafbury is, is the first aesthetician of the English tradition. He says taste is harmony with nature. Right. Because he's kind of a deist. He says, well, if nature is God, and so nature is beauty, taste, the decisions must be in line with what, you know, unity, harmony. And that is his perspective on taste. And so the nouveau riche, the person who's tasteless, you know, I think the way Pope says, like his house looks like there's no proportions like a big, big gate. And then he looks like an insect next to the gate. The lake looks like an ocean. Right. Everything's too big because there's too much wealth.

[Sophia Puccini]

Right.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And so it pushes for a natural, harmonious restraint, you know, tasteful decision because it is virtuous to make good aesthetic decisions.

[Sophia Du]

Yeah, it's almost we become ungovernable. Good taste means I can't be fit into this little box that the algorithm is designed for this. And it's almost when people say the importance of taste, it's not just about having a preference or it's not just about the aesthetics of it, but it's this bigger mission of how do you actually become ungovernable? How can you see past these algorithms and all of that?

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah, yeah. That is so beautiful. Like the virtuous point. I just keep ruminating on it. How do you think, how else do you think taste manifests beyond just like aesthetic preference in the digital age?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

I mean, what's interesting to me is that I think it could be effectuated around so many different facets of one's life. Right. If it is truly virtue, then virtue is about like daily actions, right. Not to be like guru and self helpy, but like one can make tasteful decisions in many different spheres of life. I do like in sf, when people talk about like taste and also problems to find. Right. And there are virtuous problems and some problems that are a bit less virtuous, perhaps.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

But fundamentally it is a question of how to deal with abundance. Right. Right now we have an abundance of intelligence, abundance of capabilities, and it is a question of how to deal with that so that this abundance is not wreck and destroy society. That is the purpose and the function of taste.

[Sophia Puccini]

In SF speak. We, we call it like signal to noise ratio. That's like the very SF way of putting it. How would you like, compare and contrast sort of the like, you know, we have like the dime square phenomenon in New York. It's a very different cultural landscape. And then we have sf. And SF is like the complete opposite of all of that. How do you. Do you see these cultures sort of like merging or talking to each other? Like, how do you see that? How do you see them evolving?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Well, I'm not American, so I feel very much like Alexandre Tocqueville. Like, I'm here and I'm just in America and I'm seeing how things are.

[Sophia Du]

Yeah, yeah, it's a good term.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

So I think it's all very fascinating to me. I'm learning as I'm going what the different parts of the culture are. You know, I met quite a bit of. I mean, I'm quite a bit of rationalist here. And I'm kind of learning about that culture. I'm famously banned from. Less Wrong.

[Sophia Du]

Why? What happened?

[Sophia Puccini]

Why? How does that happen?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

You say certain things and suddenly you're banned from there. It happens. No, I mean, I was trying to have, like, I think what was a healthy, productive debate. The essay that got me banned actually ended up being a talk that I gave at Betaworks, the VC fund in New York. It's called the Devil. You know, so it's still out there. I think it's cogent and sensible. I don't know why exactly I got ban. Sometimes you speak truth to power and things go bad for you. But, you know, you learn. And then there's the language. There's a vernacular here that's very specific. Single, tiny to noise, agency, all that stuff. And I mean, New York is like highly diverse. There's everything from Times Square to specific enclaves in the Bronx that are completely different. But I think what I'm learning more as I'm traveling the United States and actually asking people these questions about technology and is that every single region has its own particularities, frankly. Like, I'm going to LA tonight. And LA has its own culture and own thing going on. And the way that they use their tech is very different. And they talk about it is very different.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And same thing in New York. And same thing when I go to Miami or I spend a lot of time in Texas as well. So all these places have different relationships with their language, their tech, and how they use their software. Like, when I'm on a plane and I'm sitting next to a young person, I'm always looking at their phone. And like, I ask them question. Okay. I was on the. I was at the San Francisco Art Book Fair yesterday. It was two. Two young girls talking about how she broke up with a guy. Cause he was texting her too much. And I was like, interesting. What is the proper amount of time that he should have texted you, mind you, the guy texted him, texted her 14 times. And so I was like, okay, is there an acceptable amount of time? Right. This is a novel mode of communication which comes at its new sets of rules. And maybe she has a set of rule and the girl was like, oh no, I kind of like it. He's obsessed. Right. And like we have to find these things societally because otherwise, you know, you grew up, you're 16 and you don't know what it means to be texted 14 times. Right. So yeah, that's kind of like the ever, ever ongoing research as I like move around the United States and try to understand how people use their technology.

[Sophia Du]

How people use their technology or is the conversation more recently how people are interacting with AI or even the sentiment on AI its.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

That's very interesting. I mean, so this is I think the biggest difference that I've seen for the most part. And this might be, you know, a stated versus revealed preference. I find that Americans don't like AI. AI is a very broad term, a very broad umbrella here because they all use chat and like I love it, I love chat. But they don't like AI. Does that make sense? There's like a bit of a divergence there. There's the boogeyman of the data center. There's the boogeyman of like I'm going to lose my job. But you know, if you take a look at anthropic survey, they surveyed 85,000 people to ask how they were using their AI for career advancement. So like at work or life management. And so when I talk to mothers in Brian, Texas, like, oh yeah, like I had a leak in my, in my faucet, whatever. I took a photo and in about an hour or two I was able to fix that thing. I love that.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

But to them it's kind of like Google and it's, that's not the thing that replaces their work and it's going to, you know, put them on unemployment. So there's a bit of once again a language issue here around what does this technology do for me versus what is the negative impact that's coming in a somewhat near potential future.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And that hasn't been really sort of split the good thing, I guess from an AI perspective that people for the most part still like essentially free chat.

[Sophia Du]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

That's like quite useful.

[Sophia Puccini]

Right, right. Yeah, I think that's absolutely fascinating. I was literally at a mass yesterday because my cousin was in town and like our aunt made us go to mass and the Pope or not the Pope, the priest there was like anti AI. He was like giving like an anti. And he was like an ex software engineer. So it was really fascinating. Do you think like we're going to trend towards a more like, maybe a more rigorous like categorization of what AI is so that people can actually be like, okay, I disagree with this part, but I do agree with this part. Do you think like techno optimism will be on the rise? Like where do you think the current. Will it stay very like, you know, segmented?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Tough question, not a seer, but my sense is techno optimism will be on the rise once the claimed benefits of the technology are aligned with the desires and interests of American constituents. What do Americans want? A wife, some food, some clothes to feed their children. Right. In the world of Gilcott, the Gil Scott Heron, it's quite, it's simple. Right. We all know, kind of like the picture of the American dream, which you know, in many ways when you tell, put it very simply, even Dave Chappelle says it's one of the special says you never get between a man and his bread. So I don't know who thought it was a good idea to go on national television and tell people they're going to lose their job. But if I'm an American, which I'm not, of course, but I wouldn't want to lose my job because that's how I.

[Sophia Puccini]

Right.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Be my family. It's kind of very simple, frankly.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And I think the thing that I love with doing all my research is that I get to talk to people who put in very blunt terms, which, you know, I could have written like a five page report on this, you know, make a paper out of all this. But it's quite simple. You know, people want to be employed.

[Sophia Puccini]

Right, Right. So it's more of the threat to employment, you think that is just like.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Yeah, I don't think, I don't think your average person cares about essential risks, frankly.

[Sophia Puccini]

Right, no, totally, I agree.

[Sophia Du]

I wonder too if maybe the people who are talking about this, the journalists who are talking about this, their algorithms themselves are also extra biased to find the things that are going to get people to be super hyper aware or

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

scared or longer at at R2s and 131 we have a paper coming out specifically on that same thing with the heteropessimism. We're going to be analyzing about 5,000 videos on AI to sort of determine what is the current sort of positive negative and see how it checks over time. It's gonna be one of our indexes that we publish in the next month.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah. Another question, because we touched on this briefly. Do you think we're getting better or worse at social cues? Because one could make the argument that there are more social cues to keep track of now that we're online. Yeah. And like now a social cue is like the story like, you know, like, like we are getting literally more and we have to keep track of more. But at the same time, I feel like irl, there's like a sentiment that everyone's just getting more like awkward, you know, like if people are less like, well, socialized in the real world. So what do you think?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

I think everyone should be charmaxing. You know, I think we should leave charmaxing.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

You know, the little, little wave, little finger and little wink. Because for the most part I think there's a lot of beauty in these sort of human to human interactions. We've all heard about the Gen Z stare. You know, you, you ask for your coffee and you get the.

[Sophia Puccini]

Now imagine the Gen Alpha stare.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

It's gonna be easy. But the funny thing is there was this big event happening in New York called the Summer of Ludd. Right. And it's this sort of grassroots Gen Z, Gen Alpha movement. People try to reject their phone and just going to the park together, dancing, having all these events. I mean Washington Post and Wired I think reported about this. So I think you're seeing a bit of a pushback against the infringement of technology across all facets of life. But I think it is very difficult. Right. Think about your book of etiquet that your grandma might have had on a table. This is what you're supposed to do at a restaurant. This, when you meet someone, shake their hands. And now you have this times like all the different apps you're on, right?

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

I can ask the studio, like, what's an acceptable amount of time to respond someone via text? Some might say 24 hours, some might say three days. And these. And people feel very differently about these behaviors. Right. Someone might be insulted that you take 24 hours between like, no, I'm a 72, I'm texts like email, I'm a 72 hour kind of person.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And you have to hold these rules not only just for yourself, but for all different peoples and people in your life, which is highly difficult.

[Sophia Puccini]

You have to calibrate to somebody's like online etiquette, like whenever you meet them.

[Sophia Du]

It's like a different rules for what you do online versus in person. And no one has the guidebook for that yet.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

And whereas like, culture usually is somewhat ethnicity based or nation based, like I'm French Canadian, when I meet someone, I get them at biz, I kiss them on the cheek. The culture online is not specific to what a person looks like, but more which platforms they're on. I would argue that there's a Tumblr culture. Right. There's definitely a Twitter culture, Instagram culture.

[Sophia Du]

It's interesting even from MTs because we're trying to figure out the algorithms for the different, you know, for X has a very specific culture that they want. Instagram has a very specific culture that they want. And yet they try to figure out how to blend all.

[Sophia Puccini]

And it's almost like, like even in real life, when you meet someone, you can tell which platform they're on.

[Sophia Du]

Yeah, exactly. Like, know how they talk.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah, exactly. Based off of, like, what words they use. Like. Yeah, like sense of humor, I think is very. Platforms.

[Sophia Du]

My friends say I have Twitter lingo in my everyday vernacular. I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't know how.

[Sophia Puccini]

Yeah, Like, I remember when I got my first job, my manager was like, you talk Internet? Like Internet? I was like, wow, you talk Internet?

[Sophia Du]

Yeah, yeah, I do know we're at time, but Ruby, I did want to thank you for joining us today. And maybe one last thing for you is you are a professor at nyu, specifically in the Integrated Design and Media Lab. What do you think is the most interesting thing that your students are curious about for this next decade?

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

I mean, my students are sort of gung ho about using it. Like, I think they quite love it, especially because we're interdisciplinary. So you might be an engineer like my students, engineer, but they might not know how to fabricate. And so the ability to be like, okay, I want to make a robot. And then having access to that information, it changes your thesis quite drastically because before maybe you'd find the information. We have a lot of TAs and a lot of help overall, but I've actually seen an increase in the size and the scope of the projects. People feel like they are able to tackle them now. So that's always super, super exciting. Specifically, I teach thesis, so that's the final grad program project. So that's very, very exciting. And then as always, the goal is not to just make something cool and big, but to be critical and to think about it. So we always try to push them to be, you know, intentional and very conscientious in what they build.

[Sophia Du]

Definitely.

[Sophia Puccini]

Totally. Well, that's a great place to wrap.

[Sophia Du]

Yeah, well, thank you so much for joining us.

[Sophia Puccini]

So awesome.

[Ruby J. Thurlow]

Thank you so much.

[Podcast Host (Narrator)]

Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on x1.6Z and subscribe to our [e-mail] thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.