Curate all the things: How to Take Control of What You Consume

A bazillion years ago, in the great library in Alexandria, you could find some cool books.

You didn’t have ebooks, or newspapers, or a local library. If you wanted to read the best things humans had written down you would need to travel to one of these vast collections.

You would trawl through their archives and pick something out. If you encountered something notable, you would copy it out by hand into a scroll that you could take home.

Reproducible media has always had gatekeepers. These people were called curators. They didn’t have everything - they selected what they thought were the best ideas, and occasionally the most dangerous ones, and they created archives you could visit.

Archives grew at scale, and we called them libraries. Then knowledge became digital and information moved online. Some bright kids in California had the vision to make the world’s knowledge searchable. They would index all the information they came across, and make it discoverable through search.

When Web2 came along, everyone became a publisher. If you had a keyboard, you were a writer. You could type up your best thoughts and instantly publish them to a wide audience.

Photo was next to go digital. Then video. Now information is a multi-media offering that almost entirely exists online, to be accessed via search or broadcasted via television and radio.

But now we have a problem. The curators have become the constraints. One of the biggest issues people have with social platforms, publishing platforms and news platforms is identical: with so much information out there, who controls what we see, what we engage with, and what opinions we form as a result?

Now you have a choice. Decide what to eat or be spoonfed.

Curate what you consume or you'll have 'content' blasted at your eyes until your brain turns to mush.

Become your own master curator.