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.

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.

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.

Algorithmic recommendations can be formulaic – if a person is creating a playlist, there’s always the potential for chaos, which is kind of fun.

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.

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.

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

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.