⬜ The importance of curation

& my book Filterworld.

Kyle Chayka: Hello One Thing readers, welcome back to the newsletter! I’ve been totally occupied with the launch last week of my book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. It’s available in bookstores and online now. You can hear me talk about it on The Ezra Klein Show or Fresh Air, read an excerpt in The Guardian, or read the New York Times review.

So let’s call that the One Thing for today. Here, I wanted to explore one theme of the book, which this newsletter also tries to do: Curation. We talk about “curation” a lot online: You can curate an Instagram meme account, or a Spotify playlist, or your profile on a dating app. The Netflix homepage is “curated.” The word has come to mean a superficial act of choice between one thing and another. But we rarely think about where curation actually comes from.

In the book, I trace the history of the curator back to ancient Rome some 2000 years ago, where “curatores” were public figures who took managed aspects of city life, like the Tiber River, aqueducts, or public games. In Latin, “curare” meant to take care of, and “curatio” indicated attention and management.

Over the centuries, the word took on a spiritual dimension. By the fourteenth century, “curate” referred to a person working as a religious guide. In the 1662 English-language Book of Common Prayer, a curate was the deputy priest of a parish, guiding his parishioners and looking after the “cure” — or care — of their souls. Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, “curator” has specifically described the manager of a museum and its collections, whether artworks or historical artifacts — a steward of objects instead of people.

In the early-21st century, we saw the rise of the “star curator,” figures like Hans Ulrich Obrist, Klaus Biesenbach, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev who arranged art exhibitions for museums, galleries, and biennials that became artworks in their own right. In part due to their cultural influence and visibility, curating was increasingly seen as an aspirational act, a public intellectual performance with a veneer of glamorous cool in the international art-world circuit.

Then the word became popular online, when we were all forced to become curators of a sort in order to navigate the flood of content available on digital platforms. A Tumblr account had to be curated, because otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense. What I think has gone missing in this era of curation is that sense of responsibility that curators used to have. A museum curator isn’t just assembling images for quick consumption on a feed; they are doing research, building context, making connections. They are maintaining collections, both physical and digital, that must survive into the future.

Instagram isn’t the place for permanence and care, because it can change so quickly and completely. Alternative platforms like Are.na are better for online curation, because the company is more independent and promises stability. But sometimes those moodboards are more vibes than information. What we need is more support for the act of curation itself: Not just paying online creators for their content, but paying curators, sustaining the people who find what you like.

One Thing, in our designated two newsletters a week, is an act of curation: of subjects, of information, of writers. We’re trying to build a different kind of context online, one that’s slower, driven by care-taking and the gradual assembling of a particular sensibility. Think of a museum exhibition, complete with labels I hope you’ll follow along.