Curation

Technology treats the process of consuming and the process of creating as distinctly different, when the reality is that for our brains, the process of absorbing a book is not all too different from the process of producing one. We are always seeking new connections, combining and recombining old ideas to produce new ones. So why is it that we... See more

Writing on methods for gathering ideas, Seneca, the great stoic, suggests that authors should imitate the bees. Like a bee flying among the flowers, we ought to vary our reading and extract useful material from various sources.

What we need is more support for the act of curation itself: Not just paying online creators for their content, but paying curators, sustaining the people who find what you like.

As information volume and complexity grew, simply keeping pace became a specialized profession. In other words, information specialists who do nothing but track developments in more and more narrow domains emerge.

Knowing where to go and what to do is the currency that, in the modern aspiration economy, makes curators more important than influencers. They guide their audience through culture by putting forward a selection of images, references, codes, product releases, or memes. Curation gives even mundane objects value by connecting them with a point of... See more

The curator relationship operates at a fundamentally different psychological level than advertising. An algorithm might know you like blue Oxford shirts, but a tastemaker knows why a particular blue Oxford matters in a lineage of blue Oxfords. This contextual knowing, placing objects in historical and cultural frameworks rather than recommendation... See more

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.