Robin Good

but lately, i wanted to make something that felt different from a regular post. less like one long argument, more like a little world to enter.

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.

In a world where algorithms optimise, predict, and personalise, genuine unpredictability becomes scarcer. And as a result, human taste - slow, embodied, context-dependent, and stubbornly imperfect - becomes all the more valuable.

And that’s what real taste is: a deep internal coherence. A way of filtering the world through intuition that’s been sharpened by attention.

Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed.

Eventually, large parts of the internet will be an irradiated area where bots create for bots, while we will be building shelters of trustworthiness, where genuine human connection will be the currency.

There is an extreme kind of philosophical skepticism – dating back to the ancient Greek Pyrrho – that there is no such thing as “truth” or the answer. We have only interpretations.

Over the past year, working on a book on curation, I have interviewed more than 30 curators—art and conference curators, creative directors, Instagram influencers, radio hosts, coders, and genetic engineers—and all agreed that saying no is at the core of the curatorial ethos . Saying no defines what matters.

Generative AI lets organizations move from tacit, individual know-how to distributed, remixable expertise.