We Are the Tortoise

Loyalty is taste with time and attention applied.

Strategist and Creative Director Douglas Brundage published some required reading earlier this year. He wrote a piece called “Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise.” A man sets jewels into the shell of a living tortoise to match his furniture, and the weight of the decoration kills the animal. It’s a commentary on Silicon Valley discovering “taste” and performing a version of it. It’s visceral.

There are two animals in the story and Brundage focused on the one doing the encrusting. I’m looking down at the tortoise; the thing all that decoration gets aimed at. Because the tortoise is a person. The tortoise is us.

The Number One I’d Never Met

This is embarrassing, so let me go first. For two years my number one artist on Spotify was a band I never once typed into the app. The app served up NEIL FRANCES -- in my Dopamine mix, in Discover Weekly, and across the three cross-country drives I made during COVID. I hit repeat, probably a lot. Then the Wrapped video arrived: the duo, beaming, thanking me for being in the top 5% of their listeners.

I didn’t know their name.

The algorithm built a relationship worth exactly nothing, to anyone, and I can prove it. A year later a friend took me to a Trombone Shorty show at Pier 17. I was interested in the opening act. It was Neal Francis. Different from NEIL FRANCES. the same name, spelled differently, nothing alike. I stood there on a warm summer evening wondering why I didn’t recognize a single song. My favorite artist by a mile, and I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup of two.

Taste Is a Relationship

We spend a lot of energy ranking taste. Good taste, bad taste, my list against yours. That’s all going to be beside the point if we’re drifting toward a world where it’s hard to build taste at all, because it isn’t ours anymore.

Taste is a relationship. It’s the considered “why” beneath the things you love, built from what you’ve chosen and stayed with -- an investment that grows on the inside and shows on the outside. Everyone has it. It’s the most ordinary thing you own and one of the most important, because it’s the record of how you’ve spent your attention.

The people who study taste for a living will tell you it was never really yours -- that your loves were encoded by your class, your parents, the town you grew up in. Taste isn’t sovereign, but the shaping is what makes it yours: it came from a life you actually lived. So the test is connection, not purity. Not good or bad. Just: is this tied to a life you had?

I have fancy tastes and I’ll still tell you there’s nothing wrong with Branson, Missouri. It’s just not mine.

What is mine: learning to cook from Sally Schmitt. She opened The French Laundry in 1978, sold it to Thomas Keller in 1994, and spent the next fifteen years teaching people to make delicious food on an apple farm in Philo, California. I got married at their family’s hotel up the road. I named my dog Philo. Every person I like — even a little — gets Sally's cookbook. None of it was seamless: the line at the Ferry Building farmer's market, emailing in 2024 to order fig and plum chutney, calling ahead to book a room. The friction was the texture, the pause where the relationship actually formed. Hand any of that to something optimizing for speed and there's nothing left upon which to get real purchase.

The Surrender

Increasingly, we let the machine do our choosing. We should be honest that it works. On the one true metric of our love affair with optimization -- ease -- nothing beats it. But what we’re actually after is enjoyment, isn’t it? That’s a different axis entirely, made of the things ease strips out: effort and time.

Ask any city dweller who’s handed the week’s groceries to Instacart. You get the cut of salmon the counter needed to move, the bananas browner than you’d ever pick, the substitution you’d never have made. You take it, because doing it yourself costs more than the small wrongness. Do that a thousand times and you’ve trained yourself to accept the almost-right thing for the privilege of not choosing. We pick ease because we feel it now, in the millisecond of the tap. Enjoyment shows up later, once the time’s been spent. A machine optimizing in real time sees the first and never the second, so it perfects ease and starves the rest.

Sixty-eight percent of us will tell a pollster an AI shopping agent probably isn’t acting in our interest.¹ We hand it the keys in the hundreds of millions anyway.

A preference you actually built survives repetition. You can play the record a thousand times because the history holds it up. An encrusted one only has novelty, and novelty wears out: you get bored. Boredom is how you used to find out the experience is empty. That was a limit of the old machine, it ran out of songs and started repeating, and the repetition was signal. Generative AI makes more, endlessly, new every time, so the boredom never comes and you lose sight of the signal.

I feel bad for both NEIL FRANCES and Neal Francis. I suspect neither could imagine someone spending hundreds of hours with their music and being unable to name them. That's what happens when you’re served up rather than discovered. They're not the same thing.

Run an Audit

Think about something you love and ask it a few plain questions. What do I actually know about this? Where did it come from? What has it led me to? Another record, a city, a person? Who do I share it with? An actual relationship answers without trying. An encrusted is just silent.

The same test runs on a brand. Could your customers answer those questions about you -- where their loyalty came from, what it’s led them to, who they tell? A company that’s automated its way to efficient, silent customers already has its answer.

Brundage gave the jeweler a face. Look down and you’ll see the tortoise: it’s you, still breathing under the glitter. A relationship answers to attention, so stop handing your choosing away and your loves will start filling back in. The encrusting only works if you hold still for it.

So stop holding still.

---

¹ Horizon Media’s “Trust Tax” study, 2026 (1,000 US consumers). The companion figure — three-quarters would trust an AI agent less if its picks were paid for — is Quad / The Harris Poll, 2026.