Curation
The art of creating value by providing context and meaning to apparently disconnected information bits
Robin Good and
Curation
“When we emphasize the artificially quantized, we lose access to the glorious in-between where we all actually live. [...] We lose access to the squishy, indeterminate, and speculative. [...] We are flying with instruments alone.” - Douglas Rushkoff
Thomas Klaffke • Unframing the Future
In an era of information abundance, the ability to filter effectively has become a premium skill. Good taste is cultural literacy: knowing the right references, understanding history, and recognising what matters beneath the surface noise.
Issue 007: The Curation Renaissance
Music
Disorganized information is just noise .
Organized info, contextualized for a specific audience / need is music .
It feels right. (By def it matches an audience's specific interests/problems.)
It has a cool sound. (Brings non-obvious insights (new melodies).)
It’s infinite. (Helps me discover and appreciate more music and artists.)
Disorganized information is just noise .
Organized info, contextualized for a specific audience / need is music .
It feels right. (By def it matches an audience's specific interests/problems.)
It has a cool sound. (Brings non-obvious insights (new melodies).)
It’s infinite. (Helps me discover and appreciate more music and artists.)
substack.com • Home | Substack
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
the critical skill of the future is not generating new ideas but curating those developed by generative AI. The role of idea curators will be crucial in discerning the most promising concepts, refining them to enhance their viability, and promoting them to gain widespread acceptance.
Gleb Tsipursky: With the rise of AI, creativity shifts from generation to curation
We will have so much abundance of ideas, that the true rare skill will not be to have great ideas, but to be able to pick the very best ones from huge pools of alternatives.
To understand the role of a curator today, think of a sieve in a gold rush: the AI provides the massive pile of silt and sand (the data), but the curator's "taste" is the mesh that allows the worthless dirt to fall through while catching the rare, valuable nuggets of gold. Without the sieve, you just have a pile of dirt; with it, you have a... See more
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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
In the age of infinite information, the competitive advantage isn't knowledge—it's wisdom. Not those who know the most, but those who can discern what matters. Not processing power, but purpose. Those who can extract meaning, connect dots across domains, and make wise decisions despite uncertainty are more likely to thrive.
Michael Simmons • Information Singularity: What Happens When Even AI Experts Can't Keep Up With AI
But why has the concept of curation risen to such prominence beyond the museum, and why now? For Steven Rosenbaum, curation “addresses two parallel trends: the explosive growth in data, and our need to be able to find information in coherent, reasonably contextual groupings” (Rosenbaum, 2011, 5). This latter need, to be able to find information,... See more