alice smith

Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.

In the last ten years, pattern recognition has become a cultural activity. You see that on the bad end, like QAnon, and on the more fun end with the pervasiveness of trend forecasting.

Computers can see us as large groups, but they’re glum and only aggregate us to sell us stuff. In reality, the computers give great insight into the power of common identity between groups. No one’s using that. What’s sitting with the computers is a way of seeing new groups, new common identities between people.

“We’re moving away from the need to say, ‘These items put together are an aesthetic,’ and moving towards a more fluid state,” Panzoni says. Instead of “grabbing” an aesthetic as a whole, consumers can take elements and incorporate them into their own style. “This shift is why we haven’t seen a micro-trend pop in a little bit,” she says.

I don’t think the tools themselves are the problem; it’s how the entirety of human culture has been digested and regurgitated by them.

My perennial thought will always be, if the internet didn't exist in the state that it did now, we would have so many rich, interesting scenes, because people have to work to share that.

The problem goes deeper than this. Increasingly our tech also opens us up to new vectors of anxiety. Regardless of whether you’re working more or less, your nervous system is now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness.