Back in the days before the internet I used to have a music collection. Cassettes in the 80’s, CDs in the 90’s, MP3s pulled off Napster in the early 2000’s, an iTunes library I organized by hand up until about ten years ago. Every song got there because I went and found it, or a friend made me hear it, or I took a shot on an album because the cover looked good and I had ten dollars.
Then I moved to streaming and stopped choosing. Ten years on, my library is bigger than it’s ever been and I can’t name a song from it that changed anything — but I still have the last collection I built myself, and it’s better. Every one of those songs earned its place. I’m rediscovering it now, which is a strange thing to say about music I already owned. My taste never grew or expanded. I just accepted whatever the algorithm sent me.
Books nearly cost me more. I went from browsing bookstores and libraries to just downloading them online. The recommendations had me pegged as a manager, so they sold me management — goals, systems, leadership, habits, shelf after shelf of it, all competent, all adjacent to the last one. I became a damn good business manager. None of it made me a more interesting person. Eventually I stopped finishing them, because they were all teaching me what I already knew. That’s what the machine had to offer: a decade of accurate guesses about who I already was, and nothing about who I might have been next or who I could grow into.
And wasn’t the internet supposed to make quality connections with people much easier? People… the algorithm just plain failed at. Finding a friend used to mean meeting someone through someone, one event at a time, over time — and you found out who they were by accident, in the parts nobody was curating. Now the feed does the sorting, and it sorts for volume. The loudest profile wins, and the loudest profile is almost always the most curated one. I can scroll for an hour and come away knowing what forty people want me to think about them and nothing about what any of them are actually like.
Nobody took the job of self-curation away from me. Every trade was reasonable the day I made it. But I used to go find things, and now things get brought to me by something that studied me and decided what I’d probably like. What I’d probably like turns out to be a much smaller category than what I actually love. Plenty of quantity, not much quality.
So I’ve started taking the jobs back and going back to self-curating. I’m reading Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf’s book on what reading does to the physical brain — nothing was ever going to recommend that to a guy who buys books about inventory shrink. I turned off my YouTube history to see what the internet looks like when it doesn’t know me. My library is now expanding and I’m buying new music again, which means deciding which tunes get added to the self-curated collection.
It’s slower than being fed. But if I stay with the algorithm I’ll be optimized into a smaller version of myself.
Meet me at the end of the world.
David Daniels has been writing at DavidDaniels.com since 2001. Download the free life planning workbook, Write Open Act, to start mapping the gap for yourself.