As dyadic feedback loops multiply across observers, their temporary alignments accumulate into a larger distribution of aesthetic attention constructed from information. To explore Taste as a system is to play a game of observing how the distributed dynamics of information present as a power law measured through the senses. This sensed distribution presents to us a curve where we measure popular clusters of recurring aesthetic motifs residing in the short head, while niche pockets of divergent motifs nestle in the long tail.
Neither position is better or worse, but each is a position observed by the observer as a human-in-the-loop, limited to particular interpretations depending on the human’s position in the distribution. In other words, not everyone can be in the same place at the same time, observing with the same set of information and the same bias. On the contrary, we observe a short head with a majority of observers in the short head, and it isn’t the case that a majority of observers in the short head focus on the long tail. We observe with the biases from which we construct our individual tastes. Through interaction, those tastes consolidate into cohort Tastes that are perceived and measured along a distribution, which in turn affects the distribution of observer experiences.
The short-head set of observers is unlikely to stray from their invisible boundaries, and the same is true for long-tail observers. Local minima of familiarity and looping encourage the same mechanics and assumptions for every participating layer of measurement and observation. It’s harder to think outside of the box when the current box is repeatedly re-familiarized as a process.
For some humans-in-the-loop, re-familiarization yields less novelty, and searching for the edges through long-tail explorations is core to their observations. In these scenarios, the humans view all distributional opportunities as a metaphysical game board, where the goal is to avoid local minima ruts by finding vectors of flight through temporarily repositioning themselves from local minima to local maxima.
Through this lens, for these particular humans, the search for long-tail strategies reframes reality itself through continually mutating meta-game forms distributed through observation and information, where some play inside games they are not aware are games, and some generate many games, both publicly observed and privately preserved. These players can observe finite and infinite games, where the finite ones center on deciding who wins and who loses, while the infinite games prioritize dialogue and interplay without scoring or demanding a final decision.