I have yet to find a single writer who’s grown a serious following without some kind of niche.
That doesn’t mean boxing yourself in. It means starting with something clear enough for people to get what you’re about, and specific enough for the right readers to find you.
The first six months are for you. Experiment like crazy. Write about anything.... See more
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.
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.
In this new system, AI can generate content quickly, cheaply, and in an abundance that none of us can keep up with. And it’s getting better constantly.
Which means the thing that used to be the product—the content itself—is no longer a scarce resource.
That was somewhat true in the old system already. It is at a new, scaled level of true in the new... See more
There is an observation that has stayed with me. People no longer want the thing. They want the signalling mechanism around the thing. This applies to a Raf Simons archive piece, to natural-wine bars, to particular books, to particular cafe orders. The reference has become the thing, and the work that was supposed to come from engaging with the... See more
Arguably, algorithms already curate the information that we encounter online. They are, as Kevin Slavin puts it, “like an invisible architecture that underpins almost everything that’s happening” (Slavin, 2011). In doing so, they reshape how our culture works and how we understand the world. Unlike Brand, whose view of the curating done by the... See more
Can curation be algorithmic or should it be human?
History shows that successful adaptation requires taking active control of information filters rather than passively accepting them. Just as Renaissance scholars developed personal commonplace books to organize knowledge, and early internet users created bookmarking systems before Google dominated search, we need personalized AI curation systems... See more