Many insightful cultural theorists and strategists have written about this struggle: Kyle Chayka on the filterworld flattening culture, Matt Klein on cultural stasis amidst creative surplus, and Beth Bentley on meh-ification. The focus has generally been on how algorithms have warped contemporary culture.

We are in the era of:

• algorithm randomness


• content fatigue


• aesthetic slob


• “same content, different creator” type of posts


• AI-generated sameness everywhere you look

Top-left: Human-made and Human-curated

This was most of the past. Nowadays, it’s things like local culture for local things. A local music festival. Online, it’s newsletters, and sites focused on reviews of people that you explicitly follow. It’s group chat rooms, sharing things they made with each other. It’s old-school blogs. This quadrant will... See more