Curation Is King

Watch streams and playthroughs: Ashley Bardhan recently argued that watching a video game isn’t so different from playing it. I agree. This guidance won’t surprise anyone under the age of 30. But many gamers in the millennial demographic (or older) have yet to make a habit of watching streams on Twitch or playthroughs on YouTube. If this is your f

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It’s the same bargain as TikTok and YouTube, but what I’ve found really compelling about FAST TV isn’t the affordability or the solid array of content; it’s how liberating it feels to remove some of the choice from the situation.

All of which raises another set of questions, about art rather than morals. Which is a better measure of an artwork, its quality on average or its peaks? How should ambition be weighed against execution, jolting insight against missteps, the good against the bad?

Digital abundance is a mixed blessing: exhilarating, yet flattening and homogenizing. Culture is converted into “content” that blurs together as it flows through the same conduits and across the same interfaces in an endless stream. As we struggle to keep abreast of the accelerating flow of content, drawn by the perpetual lure of the new, we come t... See more

As T Bone Burnett once said, “Major labels figured out that catering to people who don’t need music in their lives makes them more money.” Passive streaming is a prime example—when music plays in the background at shops, hairdressers, or when Spotify keeps going after you’ve fallen asleep. Major labels don’t pay for these streams but heavily invest... See more

“You have the whole history of all recorded music at your fingertips for no money, and that devalues music in general. It doesn’t properly express the work that goes into it, and it certainly doesn’t express how essential music is to the human experience.”