Curatorial Governance

“The curator is someone who insists on value, and who makes it, whether or not it actually exists,” says David Balzer, author of Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else.

As web3 rightfully peels back the curtain on the processes and systems that control our digital universe, curatorial governance feels like a topic that will shape the next decade of digital life. Curatorial governance refers to the formalized set of processes, rules, and principles that are used to assign different amounts of value to different cul... See more

The intent of this piece is not to deride public opinion; the goal of this piece is instead to figure out the pros and cons of each of the typical four sources of information (public opinion, experts, personal networks, intuition) one uses to make decisions, in order to create repeatable processes of organizing information that combine the best of ... See more

Even if most people don’t have a practiced intuition or diverse networks to produce strange objects, listening to one’s own network or intuition is much more likely to voice heterodoxical opinions on the value of a cultural object compared to the wisdom of the crowd or experts as there is less noise.

Instead of using aggregated engagement data on consumers’ revealed preferences, it's actually more valuable to disaggregate “the crowd” into specific communities and clusters, and to pick cultural objects that spike in particular communities or are at the intersection of two to three communities, rather than the objects that are broadly liked.

When determining whether a cultural object has value, is it best to trust:

We can define an expert as someone who has spent a significant amount of time studying a related field, and as such it’s reasonable to assume that experts are slightly better at avoiding the problems of information cascades, binary voting, and free market default values... This is because the time afforded to experts to think allows them the space ... See more

However, this greater time spent thinking also causes experts to be more rigid and dogmatic in their thinking. This combined with the ivory tower that experts can sometimes live in can result in them completely overlooking important, left-field new ideas.

The hope is that one day blockchain-based social media and community tools can create a portable resume or data set that will allow one to take one’s curiosity and obsession data from platform to platform; for now though, creating holistic cross-platform portraits of experts is key. Allowing active discourse participants / future experts to share t... See more