On Taste, Travel & What We’re Doing To It

This edition is a longer read, approx. 11 minutes at average reading speeds. I’d recommend pouring yourself something hot, finding a sunny spot, and taking a brief pause in your weekend to read it in full.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about taste. 

It was instigated by a recent episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast, a lament really, called How to Discover Your Own Taste. “Being on the internet just doesn’t feel as fun anymore,” he opines. 

Turns out, our modern tastes have been evolving into something bizarrely and unexpectedly homogenous, due in large part to the last 15 years of life online. After more than a decade of Instagram and TikTok scrolling, the manner in which we drink in visual stimuli throughout the day and across the world has, not surprisingly, fundamentally and irreparably changed. These days, travel to Mexico City, Valparaiso, or Ho Chi Minh and you’ll find that every upmarket, design-aware, pseudo-independent cafe slinging flat whites to 30-somethings looks and feels eerily the same. 

Same goes for every design-minded home and star-powered interiors firm featured prominently in prestige magazines and distributed to the feeds in your pocket. High end interiors are now polished up with an uncanny level of homogeneity, despite their pricetag – a window into the taste vector of the cultural elite (or just those that can afford Togo sofas). 

Not that long ago, environments designed effectively for their “Instagramability” were considered a marketing ploy, a bit gauche. But by now it’s become more than just the norm – these aesthetics are what power the algorithms.

In Kyle Chayka’s book, Filterworld, he unpacks how this increasingly algorithmic environment I came of age in (and directly contributed to in a previous career at Spotify) has flattened our global cultural curve of taste. In my head, I’ve always called this The Khruangbin Effect: walk into one of those hip, mild-mannered establishments anywhere in the world and you will no doubt hear the same dulcet tones of Khruangbin, a band so unequivocally dead center of the global Millennial taste profile that they’ve come to embody a level of aural ubiquity in recent years akin to what elevator jazz once was in the common office building.

If you asked most people 15 years ago, at the dawn of this exciting new technological age, what they thought the impact of a few burgeoning media apps might have on society by 2025, the answer probably wouldn’t have been: a generation of people around the world coalesced into a very middling, expected set of tastes. 

And while benign on the surface, the generational impact of this is maturing as we do, with more complex cultural and societal implications than most could have anticipated. The unintended side effect of a disruptive phase of technology is now, years later, having outsized effects on the way environments, experiences, and communities all over the world are being redesigned, rebuilt and monetized for generic appeal. 

All of this feels particularly poignant as we are sitting on the cliff of yet another giant technological shift that is going to dramatically change the nature of creative stimuli at scale once again. With the proliferation of generative AI, younger generations will undoubtedly grow up surrounded by a visual schema that is increasingly inspired not by nature, culture, craftsmanship, or materials, but by computer simulations built on models that only have awareness of what’s come before. 

In other words, the nature of the stimuli that will surround us every day has the potential to become even more homogenized, expected, predictable – not less. And what becomes the unintended societal consequence of that?

This may be an unanswerable question at this precise moment in time, but one that’s been gnawing at me in recent weeks after a recent trip to Morocco – an unexpected real world case study of what’s to come.


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The trip began as a last minute dash to grab some sun and tagine, return to a renowned stretch of surf coastline, and get back on a board for a quick week amidst the gray doldrums of Danish early-February. A short four hour flight and 90 minute drive would take me back to Imsouane, a small village of a few thousand people on the southern-ish coast of Morocco that I’d first been to a decade earlier. 

Imsouane was once a quaint and quiet fishing town that had, in the last 15 years, become an increasingly well known surfing gem, flanked in both directions by a vast coastline of relentless, varied Atlantic swell. The village itself sat on a staggeringly large, seemingly edgeless bay that was surrounded on all sides by a backdrop of hulking, tanned leather mountains. It was home to the longest right-hand wave in Africa and if you caught it when the conditions were right, you could harness a gentle, ambling ride for over a kilometer in one go, a sensation that when extended that long feels truly like flying.

On the other side of the bay was Cathedral, a generally ripping beach break that crashed into a hillside covered in a checkerboard of small blue and white fishing houses, local Moroccan tiles and Cyprus trees. Despite only being a decade ago, my memory of this place early on in my amateur surfing hobby is a snapshot of a distinct moment in time that may as well have been a century – no hotels, surf camps, yoga retreats, or avocado toasts. Just the overwhelming stench of fish while you paddled out to weave amongst the giant wooden fishing boats and marvel at the pure scale and awe of where you were. That memory is still, to this day, one of the highlights of my aquatic life. 

Chasing mid-winter inspiration, I’d planned to spend this visit at a newer, design-ey surfhouse perched on a cliff overlooking the bay, one of several that’d sprung up in the village in recent years and was, of course, using their Instagram presence well to remind me of the beauty of this pin dropped on a map. I knew implicitly this visit wouldn’t be like the last – so much has changed in the world of travel, design hospitality, and surf tourism in the intervening years. But I wasn’t quite ready to be confronted with where we’ve gotten to.


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Twenty five years ago, a supposedly progressive, young Moroccan King Mohammed VI took power. Raised in post-war Morocco and France, he was the son of a much more conservative statesman, a notorious playboy with European leanings ascending the throne in the pivotal cultural year of 1999. There were high hopes that in the decades to come he would continue to usher in a more modern, mild, prosperous Morocco, a country that has managed to sidestep Islamic social uprisings and government coups, one ripe in stunningly dramatic coastline, rich with history, textiles and crafts, and yet a place where it’s not uncommon nor disrespectful to see foreigners surfing in bikinis while local women in hijab walk along the beach. 

But instead, these years have bore witness to a bizarre and fairly absent reign by King Mohammed, characterized by an estranged and flashy Hollywood lifestyle spent philandering with a pair of German MMA fighters while the country’s population struggles to manage rising inflation and the strain of climate change on their fragile agrarian economy. As they enter their sixth consecutive year of extreme drought, the impacts to the country’s agricultural stability and the communities that depend on it are in plain sight, while the wealth gap of its fractured society continues to widen. 

During this same stretch of years, the Moroccan design aesthetic became a synonymous tentpole of middle-upmarket interiors around the world. It began with the mass production of the unmistakable black-on-white knockoff Berber rugs that proliferated every Millennial apartment throughout America, Australia and the UK in the early aughts. Then, by the mid 2010s, designer riads sprung up in and around Marrakech, quickly becoming the embodiment of the Instragrammable taste vector, a visual array of pink walls, green tiles, YSL Majorelle Blue and all-beige everything, distributed at scale by early travel influencer algorithms to millions of 20-and-30 somethings across the globe. Finally, it culminated with the now ubiquitous LRNCE textiles found in every boutique design hotel from Venice Beach to Menorca, as if to signal: yes, you’ve come to the right place, when, in fact, you could be just about anywhere. 

In recent years, I’ve spent time in many other countries facing this similar trifecta of corrupted government agendas, mounting economic fragility, and irreversible climate impact (Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, to name a few). And with each, economic policy inevitably turns its focus to accelerating tourism as a glimmering hope for foreign dollars and investment. 

Once burdened by bad reputations toward western travelers and especially women, many of these countries have put excessive policing in place to clamp down on petty theft, drug use and assault. The result of these sanitation efforts is a more benign backdrop primed for solo and wellness travel – high priced surf and yoga retreats, hollow artist-in-residencies, and a dearth of late night party venues glaringly thin on local culture, design, history or soul. 

They are, in essence, the middle of the taste graph, in travel and leisure form. The commoditization of escapism – our final frontier. 


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A week before I arrived in Imsouane, the Moroccan government showed up in the village one morning with bulldozers. 

Piecing together accounts from different people I spoke to, villages up and down the Moroccan coast had been told, going back as far as 2019, that most of the traditional homes and small businesses – local cafes, bodegas, locally owned surf shops and the like – were technically illegal and that soon the government would be coming to evict them. After all, “the king owns the coastline,” as several people told me – and free flowing sewage and waste into the ocean had become a problem now that tourism was booming. In an effort to clean things up, upgrades needed to be made. But with the onset of Covid, these plans stalled for five full years until one sunny day in January, with hardly 24 hours notice, bulldozers began to demolish the village as they’d done with several others along the coast. In the span of a few hours, the majority of the village had been razed to the ground, physically evicting the people who’d called these towns home for decades in the process. 

What remained by the time I arrived a week later looked like a bomb had gone off. A scattering of new surf houses and small design hotels built in recent years were of course spared – a collection of white Venice Beach-style, prefab architecture saddled next to heaps and heaps of rubble, as if hit by last September’s earthquake this region was ironically spared from. The entire hillside of Cathedral was gone, a crumbling sand pile of shrapnel and shards of tiles as you looked out at the waves crashing on the beach. Down below in the bay, the fishermen’s boats carried on, making their way out to sea despite an influx of surf camps pouring novice paddlers onto foam boards into the whitewash at a rate I’d never actually seen before. The juxtaposition was jarring; the glaring irony felt almost colonial. 

I headed inside to the surfhouse where I was staying, the nicest of the bunch along the bay with panoramic views of the waves down below. By all surface level instincts, it should have been a lovely place to spend a week: neutral toned linens, soft grass lampshades, requisite LRNCE pillows. Breakfast was included and, if I wanted, I could add an egg to my avocado toast free of charge. The dulcet tones of a generically chill playlist wafted through the lounge areas, overlooking the crowded horizon line.

I managed a few days of decent surfing conditions and conflicted mental conditions before the swell dropped out, and so I took a day trip a few hours up the coast to the small port town of Essouira to wander the medina and have some lunch. The drive snaked through two hours of rolling Argan groves – giant, twisting, centuries-old trees that have in recent decades been in extremely high demand for their use in international beauty products. Argan trees have a fairytale-like quality to them, spikier and more rugged than the olive, their calloused trunks holding generations of secrets from all that they’ve seen. As I drove through hundreds of kilometers of groves, I realized nearly all of them were dead from the prolonged drought. 

As I arrived in town, I entered the medina, these days a collection of stalls mostly hawking knockoff Moroccan crafts produced en masse. Before long, I found myself chatting in broken French with a guy selling rugs. He used to travel down to Imsouane to go swimming as a boy and he looked forlorn when I told him I was staying there.

“Imsouane is gone now,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Its soul is gone.”


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Shortly after, I returned home to Copenhagen and in the days following attempted to recount my strange week to friends who inquired. The most common retort was a somewhat indifferent capitulation: “But isn’t this probably how our parents felt too?” 

No, I’ve decided, I don’t think that’s the case. While tourist driven gentrification and westernization has been happening for decades, planes full of adventure seeking California hippies disembarking in Cenggu in 1975 were doing so to experience a world wholly unlike their own – one they could envisage only through imagination, the occasional photo essay, and stories from the more adventurous who got there first. The exercise of travel was one of true foreign immersion, a suspension of expectation, and the pure exiting of one’s comfort zone in the pursuit of something other-than. 

Travel was, until very recently, the antidote to homogeneity.

But now we’re sitting on the precipice of a very different era. In the next decade, our societies will no doubt be redefined by the dominance of AI-generated aesthetics, polished, pixel-less, and predicated on what we already know; extreme climate impact and the toll it will take on changing landscapes, economies, and societies, especially those along coastlines and fault lines; GenZers coming of age into their 30s as the primary wage-earning generation; and a radically evolving labor market that could fundamentally alter the trajectory of what careers, salaries, workdays, vacation and wellness really means.

So perhaps it would behoove us to play the game we should have played 15 years ago, dangling on the edge of what was to come – and think about the unintended side effects. 

How might our ways of living be affecting what we’ve come to believe we like, dislike, feel inspired by, feel safe around, and find energy in? And how might our ways of living be changing, irreparably, the environments, communities, and cultures we’ve looked toward to provide the visceral stimuli of a colorful life?  

What will these places look like by 2035? And who will be visiting them then - and for what end?

In many ways, this course of reflection has ushered in a sense that this is the end of a certain kind of travel for me. Not in absolute terms, of course – I am, for better and worse, hardwired for exploration. But after 20 years of an aggressive searching for other-than in far flung places – a relentless itch for newness to dictate and curate my sense of taste, creativity, and self – this cultural axis shift that we’re experiencing is bringing with it the realization that perhaps it’s time to generate the cultural and visceral stimuli from less external data points. 

To resist the impulse to continuously collect more, newer, brighter inputs in order to drive the development of our own creativity and taste – and instead allow the stack of racked up experiences and imagery quietly sitting in mental filing cabinets to be put more acutely to work. 

In a way, to encourage the development of our future creativity based a bit more on what we already have.

Perhaps a not so flawed approach after all. 


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Things that helped shape these thoughts:

• How to Discover Your Own Taste, a January episode of The Ezra Klein Show

• The beginning to the 2024 season of Monty Don’s Gardener’s World, a man whose teachings on patience, health and solitude have changed my worldview

• A new Taschen book, The Gourmand’s Lemon, maybe the most beautiful collection of paper, typefaces and words in print

• Dad, for pushing for a better ending

Light Moves is a newsletter from PALTA Studio. It is personal reflections and conversations with others on the continuous process of refining the shape of life.