Rolling in recs

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on recommendation culture vs. sponcon.

In April, I went to Abraço, a coffee shop in the Lower East Side, and ordered an iced sparkling espresso with whipped cream. I was, by my count, the fourth person in line that Saturday afternoon to order the drink, leading another customer, presumably a regular, to ask one of the baristas why so many people were ordering it. “Some food influencer posted the drink on his Instagram,” the barista responded. “Everybody’s been getting it.”

I wrinkled my nose at the sentence, though I knew exactly who he was talking about. I was among the influenced. A few days ago, I had seen the drink on one of Alex Delany’s (formerly of Bon Appetit fame) bimonthly “best things I’ve eaten recently in NYC” posts. I don’t necessarily consider Delany an influencer. He’s a food and beverage consultant with 280,000 Instagram followers, but the distinction is important—if not for my own ego, than Delany’s. He rarely posts branded content. Instead, people follow him for a different kind of content, one that’s only grown increasingly popular: the personal recommendation or, as we like to call it at Dirt, taste.

Blatant sponcon is old and on the outs. The personal recommendation industrial complex has taken over the feed. We can blame TikTok for turning everyone into a wannabe influencer. Or perhaps it’s a side effect of “casual Instagram,” where people are motivated to approach posts with “authentic” nonchalance. These days, it’s common for promotion to come before the followers. A recent NYT article details how Gen Z likes to “play influencer,” even without a guaranteed payoff. “It’s just something on the side to help make more money, and it’s cool to be able to promote stuff that you like, obviously, and to tell your friends to buy it,” said one 19-year-old. But if there’s no money to be made, isn’t “influencing” just a matter of semantics? What distinguishes that from a recommendation? (Earlier this year, the “de-influencing” movement led to discourse about the death of the influencer. Contrary to popular hearsay, advertisers are investing more, not less, in influencer marketing.)

Recommendations have long been the basis for celebrity book clubs, playlists, shopping guides, and travel itineraries, but people are distrustful of suggestions that seem impersonal, sponsored or, at worst, AI-generated. Publications, as a result, have pivoted to a more recommendations-based format that revolves around a celebrity or personality. There is GQ Recommends, New York Magazine’s “What [Random Celebrity] Can’t Live Without,” and the Strategist’s style advice column with How Long Gone host Chris Black. We are happily guilty of perpetuating this and have kept track of what our readers respond to. For example…

• Over 10% of the people that saw our Weekend Edition clicked through to Camper’s Milah TENCEL boots.

• Over 4% of the people reading clicked on this handmade baguette lamp.

• And 3.5% of Weekend Edition readers were curious about Brunch slippers.

Lately, I can’t spend five minutes on TikTok or Instagram without encountering a recommendation. Most lists don’t even prominently feature products, but simple activities or pure vibes. I recently went down a rabbit hole of capybara videos, at the behest of Lucy Sante’s recommendations on Dream Baby Press. Maybe it’s time we reconsider the word “influence” in a digital world where anyone can offer an opinion.

2010s influencer culture has severely poisoned our brains, such that we’ve grown deeply suspect of posting. It’s considered a form of labor; our online activity is consumer data that companies can harvest for advertising purposes. As such, there’s little joy left to it. But perhaps recommendations can be a conversational return to a less commodified way of existing online—a collaborative culture of sharing things we like that don’t always require others to spend money. Recommendations for free digital ephemera are traded on the Dirt Discord every day: links to songs, art, PDFs of books, recipes, and moodboards. Let the good recs roll.

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• The Supreme Court rules against Andy Warhol’s foundation in a 7-2 vote, limiting the scope of the fair-use defense to copyright infringement in the realm of visual art. Justice Sotomayor penned the majority and Justice Kagan the dissent, in which Kagan writes: “All I can say is that it’s a good thing the majority isn’t in the magazine business.” (NYT)

• As Disney continues to feud with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, CEO Bob Iger pulls the plug on a nearly $1 billion office complex scheduled for construction in Orlando. (NYT)

• I skipped on Chloë Sevigny’s closet sale, erroneously believing that the items would be too out of my budget. Reader, they were not!

  • For The Paris Review, Sophie Kemp described buying a “baroque white linen horseback riding suit” for $85 and a “gorgeous sleeveless Victorian blouse with a high neck” for $65 (!!)

• I enjoyed this conversation between curator Regina Harsanyi and artist Craig Barrow on designing an exhibition space for digital art. (Outland)

• Bumble acquires Official, which is basically a couple’s therapy/love life admin app.

• My motto for this summer: I love a 3D printed shoe!

• TikTok is exacerbating what Instagram did a decade ago for food: Make ugly, gross-looking shit go viral. (Grub Street)

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