Curation
The art of creating value by providing context and meaning to apparently disconnected information bits
Robin Good and
Curation
The winning strategies over the next decade will not be those that maximize short-term AI deployment. They will be those that build and maintain access to high-quality information flows—genuine human expertise, carefully curated training corpora, institutional knowledge that has not been corrupted by synthetic recursion.
Substack • The Cognitive Collapse Thesis: How Polluted Information Loops Are Degrading Both Machine and Human Intelligence—And What It Means for Capital, Power, and Civilization
This bet—that domain-specific human expertise matters more than volume of human annotation—represents one theory of how to maintain quality in an increasingly synthetic information environment.
Substack • The Cognitive Collapse Thesis: How Polluted Information Loops Are Degrading Both Machine and Human Intelligence—And What It Means for Capital, Power, and Civilization
Subsequent research by Gerstgrasser and colleagues at Stanford and MIT (arXiv:2404.01413) provides important qualification: model collapse is not inevitable if synthetic data accumulates alongside real data rather than replacing it. The pathological scenario assumes complete substitution—thoughtful data curation can prevent the worst outcomes.
Substack • The Cognitive Collapse Thesis: How Polluted Information Loops Are Degrading Both Machine and Human Intelligence—And What It Means for Capital, Power, and Civilization
The shift isn’t just about the aesthetic, it’s structural. As loneliness become endemic and public life becomes performative, people seek spaces with intention, coherence, and shared values. Curators, whether they’re running book clubs, shaping playlists, hosting salons, or steering micro-communities, they are steeping into a vacuum left by... See more
the influencer won't last 2026. here's why.
A curator’s authority comes not from personal relatability, but from perspective, context, discernment, and intellectual labour that has since been lacking in recent social media years. That authority is epistemic, not interpersonal as they reduce cognitive load and sort signal from noise. In other words, they cannot credibly hawk sheet masks or... See more
the influencer won't last 2026. here's why.
Unlike influencers, curators do not lead with self-exposure, but with interpretation. A curator’s authority comes not from personal relatability, but from perspective, context, discernment, and intellectual labour that has since been lacking in recent social media years.
the influencer won't last 2026. here's why.
Curation has historically emerged at moments when institutions failed to provide coherence. Salons rose when the Church and monarchy lost epistemic control; DJs rose when record labels could no longer define taste; curators rise today because algorithms are riddled with decision fatigue, influencers are intrinsic to their own needs, and the... See more
the influencer won't last 2026. here's why.
It’s how you build with the same pieces that everyone else has; this is what makes you unique.
How to become dangerously articulate
For brands, archives serve a parallel function: heritage as intellectual capital. Referencing your own past demonstrates institutional depth, creative continuity, and legitimacy that new brands cannot manufacture. In a world of conglomerate acquisitions and proliferating labels, archives prove you were there first. And that you still matter today.