Curators All the Way Down

In short, with democratized access, the web became more saturated than ever before, and as consumers, we began to spend more and more time trying to sort through it all. In a state of analysis paralysis, how do we disaggregate signal from noise?

When we look back over the past 100 years, traditional commerce (and the culture it indirectly endorsed) was primarily curated by a single person’s point-of-view. Even when commerce moved online, to places like Amazon or Farfetch, retailers still controlled the types of things consumers purchased. Online commerce didn’t innovate a new shopping expe... See more

Now, in today’s state of overabundance, this power dynamic has shifted. Consumers are only getting smarter, and we want something better — better sources, better designs, and better durability (both in value and sustainability). Today, it’s fidelity over convenience. And when curation is at the forefront of every purchasing decision, trust is curre... See more

The shift to putting creators in the driver’s seat was a long-awaited one. But no good thing comes without unintended consequences. Users were uploading 300 hours of video to YouTube every single minute; over 100 million photos were posted to Instagram each day. Even when we look today, it’s impossible to keep up with the number of new Tweets, emai... See more

So it’s fitting that exactly a decade later, we’ve come to another watershed moment. Software has eaten the world, and now it’s a commodity. It’s not about the technology anymore. The era of the engineer has ended; the era of the curator has begun.