Taste OS is a scoring framework that makes the implicit explicit. Five dimensions. One hundred points. A shared language for the thing we all recognise but struggle to articulate.
Every brand, ad, campaign, product, or cultural moment can be rated across five independent dimensions. Each scores 0–20. The total is your Taste Score.
Quality of execution. Attention to detail. Material choices. The difference between something made and something manufactured.
What was left out. Elegance through reduction. Knowing when to stop. The hardest dimension to score, and the most revealing.
References and context. Reading the room. Understanding the audience without pandering. Participation in culture, not extraction from it.
Freshness. A genuine point of view. Not derivative, not referential for its own sake. The courage to make something that didn't exist before.
Will this age well? Does it transcend its moment? The difference between a trend and a contribution. The hardest test of taste.
Enter a brand, campaign, product, or cultural moment. Adjust the five dimensions. Watch the score emerge.
From canonical to anti-taste. Click any row for the rationale and a radar breakdown. Sort by any dimension.
The scoring methodology rests on four non-negotiable premises.
You can recognise taste in something you don't personally like. Taste is structural, not emotional. A punk record can be tasteful. A luxury handbag can be tasteless. The framework separates quality of execution from personal affinity.
A fast-food chain is scored against fast-food standards, not fine dining. Taste is relative to category, era, and audience. McDonald's at 60 is more impressive than a Michelin restaurant at 70, because the constraints are harder.
Deliberately "tasteless" is different from accidentally tasteless. Liquid Death knows exactly what it's doing. Temu does not. Self-awareness elevates the score; obliviousness diminishes it. The best anti-taste is a form of taste.
No number is final. Taste OS provides a shared vocabulary, not a verdict. The value is in the discussion the score provokes, not the score itself. Disagree with a rating? Good. That's the system working.
Taste OS is the scoring layer for a suite of cultural tools.
Cultural business news, aggregated and curated. CultureTerminal surfaces what's happening. Taste OS tells you whether it matters. Every story could carry a taste score.
Modern brands reimagined as 1970s retail stores. The MR Score measures retro absurdity. The Taste Score measures current tastfulness. Two axes, one map of brand culture.
The operating system underneath. A shared framework that gives any cultural observation a score, a tier, and a rationale. Taste, quantified.
Cultural relevance vs business performance. 74 brands scored daily from live data. Taste OS measures how good a brand is. Sociology of Capitalism measures the gap between story and reality.
In 1979, Pierre Bourdieu published Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. His central argument: taste is not personal or innate. It is a social signal, shaped by class, education, and cultural capital. Those with high cultural capital set the norms of "good taste."
Taste OS takes Bourdieu seriously but redirects his lens. Where Bourdieu analysed taste as a function of class reproduction, Taste OS applies it to brands and commercial culture. The question shifts from "who has taste?" to "what demonstrates taste?" The five dimensions — Craft, Restraint, Cultural Awareness, Originality, Timelessness — are structural qualities that can be observed and scored regardless of the scorer's own position.
Bourdieu would probably object to scoring taste on a 0–100 scale. That's fine. The framework is a tool, not a truth claim. It makes implicit judgements explicit, which is the first step toward a real conversation about why some things feel right and others don't.