I had an uber-wealthy boss. He had an extensive and expensive wine collection. He was so wealthy that he had his own curator on retainer. My boss paid this curator to select wines from his collection for various occasions. You know, just like you and I do for family dinners.
It hit me yesterday that we are all being … curated.
In the good old days, we were simply put in buckets. Or siloes. Or cohorts. Or closets. We were either born into a container, or we opted-in to one, or the currents of life put us in one. Colors were excellent containers. White, Black, Red, Blue. Such a feeling of … belonging.
In recent years, technology has sprinted past us on the track.
I select the news which fits my worldview. I consume the media content which validates me.
And the algorithms read it all.
They track my clicks. They track my music tastes, and often offer me new music which is pretty good. Some of them can even track my eye movements. They recognize my face, even on a bad hair day.
And they have ample data. I spend between three to five hours online a day. That’s up from zero just twenty-five years ago. Two billion people have been born who don’t understand that there was once a different way of life.
In the good old days, someone--a person--had to pull the puppet strings. We knew we were manipulated, but someone had to put effort into it. Someone was paid to manipulate us. There were only so many hours in a day. How much could they do, really? And this was back before the internet had taken root. We believed we were capable of individual and original thought.
Now, we’re groomed, funneled, trained, brainwashed, and yes … curated, by a fucking algorithm. How fucking humiliating is that?
The old containers just ‘happened’. You were born black or white. You selected whether you were red or blue. Mostly, they were nouns: cohorts, closets, siloes, teams, buckets. Nouns are facts, things. Containers exist without agendas.
To curate is a verb. It means that someone or something is doing something to someone or something else. To curate implies intent. It implies an agenda.
So, someone with an agenda sets the algorithms. And the algorithms are set-it-and-forget-it, right? Come back in a day and see how the clicks and eye movements have responded to the tweaked algorithm. Cheap. Easy.
Creepy.
So, my fantasy is to beat the algorithm. To break it. They’ll write sagas about me. Yeah, that’s it.
I think you’d either need to go off-world or off-the-grid to break the hold of the algorithms. And these days, it may be easier to go off-world than off-the-grid.
So, Tom, what’s your point? Okay, I buy the curating argument. Novel twist on the silo thing, by the way. But so what? What should I do differently? If I agree that we’re being curated, who’s doing it? And to what end?
I don’t know yet, Sparky. I’m sure that my former uber-wealthy boss has something to do with it.
What I DO know is that the first step in any 12-step program is Acceptance of the problem.
Your humble servant, Tom Madsen.
