Flutterby™! : If nothing is curated, how do we find things?

I've always been out-of-step with the world. It was part of my upbringing, elementary school was in a Waldorf community 18 miles from home. By the time I got to high school I didn't really know how to relate to my peers, and my home culture was so far away from what the other kids around me were experiencing that I didn't really know how they found their content. I remember saying "who the hell is Michael Jackson?" when music was passed out in band (probably some marching band arrangement of Billie Jean).

By the time I had disposable income and CDs were in fashion, I kinda felt like I was playing catch-up to the culture I'd seen in passing earlier. I ordered music from record stores, but never really got into the record store as curation.

And as I dive deeper into popular music for my voice practice, I become more and more aware of how "curation" is largely a commercial endeavor any way, that the bands which rise are politically and economically savvy as much as they are technically/musically competent, and the fact that they become pervasive around us is about coordinated marketing campaigns.

And I'm also aware that the ways that properties become breakouts shift based on the technology of the time and the marketing campaigns that support them. It's not at all lost on me that two, two and a half, decades ago record companies were attempting to ruin the lives of kids for pretty much exactly what generative AI companies are doing now; pirating and remixing culture.

And that that framing excuses GenAI companies in ways that I didn't necessarily intend to.

Anyway, interesting to see the kids these days struggling with discovery: If nothing is curated, how do we find things?

Via