There's a colour that'll define a generation. Not a vibrant one. Not a bold one. A colour so safe, so inoffensive, so relentlessly neutral that it became the default setting for an entire decade of interior design, branding, and visual culture. Millennial grey. You know it. You've lived in it. You might be sitting in a room painted in it right now. And Instagram made it happen.
I'm not here to simply bash Instagram. That's too easy and too dishonest. The truth is more complicated and more interesting than "Instagram ruined everything." Instagram did flatten aesthetics. It did create a global monoculture of visual sameness - the same latte art, the same monstera plant, the same white-and-wood kitchen in apartments from Brooklyn to Berlin to Brixton. But it also did something remarkable: it gave ordinary people a visual education that used to be reserved for art school graduates and magazine editors. Both things are true. And the tension between them is worth exploring.
The great flattening
The mechanism is simple and powerful. Instagram rewards certain kinds of images. Bright, clean, well-composed, symmetrical. The algorithm learned early that these images generate more engagement - more likes, more comments, more shares - and so it surfaced them more aggressively. Users, consciously or not, adapted. They started shooting for the grid rather than for themselves. They started arranging their food before eating it. They started choosing paint colours based on how they would photograph rather than how they would feel to live with.
The result was a global convergence of taste. Restaurants in Tokyo started looking like restaurants in Copenhagen started looking like restaurants in Melbourne. Not because their cultures converged but because their Instagram strategies converged. The same subway tiles. The same hanging pendant lights. The same sans-serif logo on the same minimalist menu. It was as if someone had applied a single filter to the entire world and everything came out looking the same.
I saw this happen in real time in advertising. Clients stopped asking "what does our brand look like?" and started asking "what does our brand look like on Instagram?" Those are fundamentally different questions. The first one is about identity. The second one is about performance. And performance, by definition, is about doing what works rather than what is true. When every brand optimises for the same platform, every brand starts to look the same.
The democratisation nobody talks about
Here's the part the critics miss. Before Instagram, visual literacy was a class issue. If you grew up reading The Face and Wallpaper* and visiting design exhibitions, you developed an eye. You learned about composition, colour theory, typography, spatial design - not through formal education but through exposure. If you didn't have access to those magazines, those galleries, those circles, you simply didn't develop that literacy. Design taste was gatekept by access and postcode.
Instagram blew the gates open. Suddenly a teenager in a small town could scroll through thousands of beautifully composed images every day. They absorbed principles of visual design without ever reading a design book. They learned that negative space matters, that natural light is more flattering than flash, that a consistent colour palette creates cohesion. They didn't learn the terminology. They learned the instinct. And that's arguably more valuable.
The generation that grew up on Instagram has a baseline visual literacy that's dramatically higher than any generation before it. They can spot bad kerning. They care about the colour of their phone case matching their outfit. They have opinions about fonts. A sixteen-year-old in 2024 has a more sophisticated visual vocabulary than most advertising creative directors had in 1994. That isn't trivial. That's a genuine cultural shift.
The problem isn't that everyone learned to see. The problem is that everyone learned to see the same thing.
The performance trap
The deeper problem with Instagram isn't aesthetic - it is psychological. It turned taste from something you have into something you perform. There's a meaningful difference between genuinely loving the look of an exposed brick wall and choosing exposed brick because it photographs well for your followers. The first is taste. The second is curation-as-performance, and it is exhausting.
I think about this when I build projects like Modern Retro. The images I generate - 1970s shopfronts for modern brands - are inherently Instagrammable. Bold colours, strong typography, nostalgic warmth, clear composition. They perform well on visual platforms because they're designed to be looked at. But the project itself exists because of a genuine fascination with the collision of eras, not because I was optimising for engagement. The difference matters, even if the output looks similar from the outside.
This is the trap Instagram set for all of us. It made it almost impossible to tell the difference between genuine taste and performed taste. When everyone is posting the same beautifully arranged flat lay of their morning coffee, how do you know who actually cares about coffee and who just cares about the photo? When every apartment looks like a showroom, how do you know who lives there with joy and who lives there with anxiety about maintaining the aesthetic?
What comes after the grid
The interesting thing is that the backlash is already here. There's a growing movement towards what some people call "authentic" aesthetics - messy, imperfect, deliberately un-curated. The photo dump. The casual story. The blurry concert photo that says "I was too busy experiencing this to worry about the composition." This is a reaction to the exhaustion of performance, and it is healthy.
But I would argue the real post-Instagram evolution isn't about rejecting curation. It's about returning to personal curation. Not "what photographs well" but "what do I actually love?" Not "what will get engagement" but "what represents who I'm?" That's what Taste OS is about at its core - developing a framework for understanding your own taste that's independent of what any platform rewards. Your taste shouldn't be shaped by an algorithm. Your taste should shape what you choose to engage with.
I grew up on print magazines - The Face, i-D, Dazed. Those publications had a point of view. They didn't optimise for engagement or algorithmic reach. They had editors with taste who made choices about what to feature and how to feature it. The result wasn't consensus - it was curation. Each magazine looked different because each magazine had different taste. That diversity of aesthetic points of view is what Instagram eroded, and it's what the internet needs to recover.
The complicated legacy
So what's Instagram's legacy? It's genuinely complicated. It gave two billion people a visual education. It raised the baseline of design literacy across the entire planet. It made it normal to care about how things look - not just among designers and architects and art directors, but among everyone. That is a gift.
But it also flattened the world into a single aesthetic. It turned taste into performance. It made people decorate their lives for an audience rather than for themselves. It created a global monoculture where a cafe in Lagos looks like a cafe in London looks like a cafe in Los Angeles, not because those cities share a culture but because they share an algorithm. And that flattening is a loss.
The question now is whether we can keep the education and lose the homogeneity. Whether we can use the visual literacy Instagram gave us to develop our own points of view rather than everyone else's. Whether the tool that taught us all to see can now teach us to see differently from each other.
I think it can. But it requires a deliberate act of taste - choosing what you actually love over what performs well, choosing the personal over the popular, choosing the specific over the universally appealing. That's what I try to do with everything I build. Not what will get the most likes. Not what will look best on the grid. What I actually care about. What actually matters. The avocado toast era is over. The question is what replaces it.
