alice smith

As Shumon Basar put it, we're living in the era of LoreCore: 'a prevalent stage of reality in which we're all characters; characters who are also audiences.' From Coquette to Mermaid fashion, from Doe to Siren Eyes, codified styles are 'guiding' our characters' journey, while optimizing it for digital consumption.

For thousands of years, Earth’s resources have been extracted by bodies, most of whom were not free. But now it’s our bodies and ourselves being extracted.

- Hans Ulrich Olbrist

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.

It’s long past time that we realized these systems are not benefitting culture. Creators and consumers alike are pushed into preset formats that we may ultimately have no organic interest in. By giving in to algorithmic feeds, we are letting tech companies determine our tastes.

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.

We don’t tell stories anymore.

We sell them.

Wrapped in rhythm. Dressed in sincerity. Built for reach.

And if you listen closely enough, you can hear the moan of the algorithm.

When reading about the motivation for launching these various curation initiatives, it’s clear that it’s not only about rebellion, but also about the critical act of archiving.

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.