MK

Truly democratizing cultural creativity, one might argue, would promote the development of skills and capacities rather than minimize the need for them.

The inherent contextlessness of platforms like Twitter also works in the opposite direction, though: It’s easy to use the language of social justice to justify anything we want, and by doing so, weakens real, meaningful activism.

Flat is in essence a process of homogenization. Today it doesn’t matter where an influencer lives, because she dresses like she’s from the internet, and that’s all that counts.

Welcome to the flat era of fashion. Flat is what happens when consumers buy clothing on the basis of how it looks in two dimensions, in an image to be shared on social media.

Some invest a lot of time and skill in crafting TikTok videos, but neither time nor skill is required. If TikTok “enables everyone to be a creator,” as its former mission statement proclaimed, this is because creative labor on the platform has been automated and deskilled.

Spotify, for example, has invested heavily in its own curation services — both algorithmic and human — after finding that many of its listeners were baffled by superabundance, burdened by excessive choice and uninterested in charting their own paths through the digital wilderness.

Vigorously participatory curatorial subcultures certainly exist, but in practice, they require too much time and energy to have a broad appeal. People enjoy sharing their discoveries with friends, and they may at least occasionally rate and review items. But most people, most of the time, leave the hard work of curation to others — or to