Taste Is the Last Human Edge

For twenty years the internet promised us discovery and delivered a feed. Everything optimized for the average. Every restaurant the same warm minimalism, every playlist the same algorithmic mush, every recommendation the same beige as the last one. We called it personalization. It was flattening.

Now AI is pouring fuel on the fire. It can generate infinite competent, forgettable content on demand — passable copy, passable design, passable everything. The average just became free and instant. Which means the average is now worth almost nothing.

Here's the thing most people are missing: when the average becomes free, the only thing with value is the exception. Taste. A point of view. The stubborn, specific, slightly weird choices no model can reverse-engineer, because they come from a human who simply gives a damn.

You can automate a wine list. You can't automate the sommelier who tasted four hundred bottles to choose twelve. You can automate a city guide. You can't automate the person who actually lives there and knows which room has the magic. The mechanical, AI will take. The taste, it can't.

That's not a threat to people with taste. It's the best thing that's ever happened to them. The signal they were always sending just got infinitely more valuable against an infinitely noisier background.

isitfunky is a bet on exactly that. We started as a map of natural wine, but the wine was always the excuse — what we were really mapping was the people with a point of view, and connecting them to the people who were always going to love them. Not the biggest audience. Your audience. Authentic, pure, true.

As AI eats the average, taste is the edge. We're building the home for the people who have it.

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Beige Is a Choice

Every sanded-down restaurant, playlist, and wine list is the result of someone optimizing for the average. Refusing to is also a choice — and it's the only one worth making.