On outsourcing the ancient human practice of curation to lines of code.

Curation to me is really a good word. It’s become overused on the internet to the point that it seems to just mean picking something — like you can “curate” your Instagram page or have a “curated” skincare routine. But human curation goes back to the real meaning of the word, which literally comes from ancient Roman urbanism where there were curators who took care of certain parts of the city, like the Colosseum games or the river. There was a curator of the river.

Then “curate” became a religious term. There were priests who were curates and their job was to take responsibility for parishioners' souls. And then you get to the modern human curator, the museum curator or gallery curator, whose responsibility is to care for culture. Their responsibility is to build good experiences of culture, to deepen the context we have for it, to tell the stories behind it and illuminate it.

I don’t think the internet is good enough at doing that. The example I run up against most often is Spotify. I listen to a lot of jazz recordings from the 20th century and Spotify makes it hard to even know when those were recorded. I can’t find the date of an album and that hurts my understanding of it. I would hope that more human curation helps you navigate the huge mass of culture we have online. Human curation gives you more ways to access it and more context for it.

A conversation with Kyle Chayka from Dying Breed Dialogues.