We see curiosity theater all around.

Audience members asking questions at panels that are actually mini-speeches. People at dinner name-dropping obscure books in conversation but never engaging with their core arguments. Folks on social media starting ‘learning projects’ and abandoning them after a week.

Then there’s curation theater.

Posting endless... See more

This recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations, which in the course of the past decade have taken over our digital platforms. Today’s automated social-media feeds deliver increasingly indistinguishable content now sometimes generated by artificial intelligence;

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