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There was a time when the problem was silence. Too few voices, too many barriers between expression and audience. You needed access, resources, and permission. Then technology emerged, and it opened the gates. What followed was abundance. The democratization of creation, both in production and distribution, became the defining promise of the digital age. Many of us didn’t believe in it at first, or couldn’t see how or why it would become possible. It wasn’t fully real until now, as I believe that’s starting to change. This democratization is finally becoming tangible, and artificial intelligence is the reason behind it.
With and through AI, anyone from anywhere can create almost anything, in the shortest time that has ever been possible. (This is the worst AI will ever be. A small reminder to myself.) The distribution channels are already there, especially social media. What once required skill, patience, money, and years of refinement can now appear in seconds and reach millions simultaneously. The canvas has expanded beyond imagination. But what saddens me is that the larger it grows, the smaller our sense of orientation becomes.
Everywhere we look, something is speaking, showing, selling, sharing. Every app we open demands our attention like a child tugging at our sleeve. The speed of creation has outpaced our capacity to perceive, and it will only get worse from here. We no longer suffer from a lack of imagination but from its overproduction, which makes me wonder what will happen to genuine imagination and creativity themselves. What used to be precious (the image, the song, the text) is now mass-produced by machines that never tire. The world has become a mirror maze of content, and it’s becoming harder to tell what is made to mean something and what is made just to exist.
This is why I believe curators are, and will become, more vital than ever. Creation will no longer be the defining creative act; selection will replace it. Curators will be the ones shaping the experience of the world. For many, curation is just about taste or style, but to me, it’s also about discernment. It’s the ability to recognize what deserves space in a time when everything is fighting for it. The curator is the one who preserves. They give rhythm to the flood. They decide what is worth living, what deserves to stay, and what can quietly fade away.
The idea of the curator once belonged to galleries and museums, institutions that told us what counted as art. But in the digital world, that role has dissolved into the collective. Everyone holds the power to curate, and everyone curates. The playlist you build, the images you save, the people you follow, the books you underline, the way you dress, the things you delete… these are all acts of curation. They define the boundaries of your inner world. They tell you who you are. Every saved post and every ignored headline are a micro-decision that sculpts your perception. We are no longer passive consumers of culture; we are living curators of it. And whether consciously or not, we are editing our own lives.
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The problem is that most people curate without realizing they are doing it. They scroll, share, bookmark, and repost, but they don’t filter. The result is a kind of spiritual clutter, a consciousness filled with fragments that don’t belong to it. True curation begins the moment you stop accepting everything that arrives and start choosing what stays. It’s the shift from passive to active attention, from being carried by the current to guiding the direction of your own tide. And the act of choosing is sacred, because what we let in becomes what we are made of.
AI has forced some of us, and will soon force most of us, to rethink what it means to create, but it will also make us rethink what it means to care. Human value now moves toward discernment, because everything can and will be generated in this new world. Machines can imitate taste, but they can’t feel the gravity of a decision. They can sort, but they can’t sense why one thing moves us and another doesn’t. At least not yet.
A curator’s power is emotional intelligence, which I like to define as the capacity to recognize sincerity in an ocean of simulations. The algorithm can show you what’s trending or what you might be interested in, but only a human can decide what’s true, and, more importantly, what’s true to them.
This shift, in my opinion, will redefine culture. We are entering a time when curation will become the new literacy, an essential skill for living meaningfully in a world of abundance. Just as reading and writing once shaped civilization, curation will shape the next one. Those who learn to filter with care will build the future; those who drown in the flood will simply drift.
Curation creates context, and in the coming years, context will be the currency that determines value, not production.
Yet context alone is not enough, as behind every act of curation lies identity. You can’t know what belongs to you until you know who you are. The most powerful curators, the ones who define eras, movements, or aesthetics, are always those whose choices reflect a deep inner coherence. Their taste isn’t something manufactured; it’s something revealed. Their curation is an extension of their perception, a mirror of their emotional landscape. While for most it may look like they are collecting trends, to me it feels more like constructing meaning. In that sense, authenticity and curation become inseparable. To curate authentically is to filter reality through the lens of your own truth. And the clearer that truth becomes, the more refined your sense of what matters will be.
AI makes individuality the rarest form of intelligence. It can remix and reproduce endlessly, but it cannot originate preference. It cannot have lived experiences. It doesn’t grow up listening to a song that changed its life. It doesn’t remember the first book that made it feel seen. It doesn’t carry the emotional memory that makes a person stop and say, “This one means something.” And that memory, which is personal, specific, and human, is the foundation of all great curation. It’s what allows us to see differently, to connect the invisible dots between art, feeling, and time.
This is why I believe the next generation of big creators will be curators first. Their strength will lie not in producing more, but in perceiving better. Scarcity and context may become the new currencies. The ability to shape culture will belong to those who can weave coherence out of excess, who can recognize what deserves attention and what deserves to rest in the background.
And this isn’t just about art or design or fashion or anything else you might think of. It extends to everything: businesses, friendships, technologies, and even daily routines. Everything will depend on curation. The skill to choose what enters your ecosystem will define the quality of your life.
Curation, however, is not elitism. It’s care. It’s the ability to protect the sacred from the superficial. To choose with attention is to honor what’s real, as much as it is to refuse to let algorithms decide the texture of your thoughts. It’s an act of rebellion against the automation of emotion, because in the end, what’s at stake is consciousness itself. The more the world automates, the more we need curators who can feel. The more information multiplies, the more we need editors of meaning. The more artificial the world becomes, the more human sensitivity will be required to guide it.
To curate well is to understand what’s worth remembering. It’s to accept that not everything must survive, that not everything deserves attention, and that wisdom often lies in the restraint of saying no. It’s to shape silence around what you love so that it can be heard more clearly. It’s to see with empathy, to recognize beauty where machines only see data.
Curation, in its purest form, is a moral act. It is how we decide what kind of world we are helping to preserve.
And maybe the real task of our time is to curate not just content (though it feels like everything has become content), but reality itself, to look at the infinite feed of possibilities and say, “This is what I choose to see.”
Because what we choose becomes what we build, and what we build becomes who we are.
The algorithm will keep amplifying, but the curator will keep remembering. And in the age not of AI, but of AE (artificial everything), memory will be the only thing left that’s truly real, and curation, the only remaining wisdom.
Thank you!🌹
Eduard🌹
The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)
4 comments
I feel that everywhere I look, things are multiplying, but not necessarily evolving. And the more we automate creation, the more I realize that the real art now lies in attention. Not the kind of attention we’re fed through social games, but the kind that shapes how we hold, arrange, and remember what’s already here I think that’s what curating really is: a way of protecting meaning from disappearance Every choice we make is an act of editing reality. What we share, what we ignore, what we revisit, all of it decides the texture of our time If the initial post, where I delved deeper into my essay “Curation as Modern Wisdom,” was about realizing this shift, this one is simply a small reminder to live it. To choose slower. To see deeper. To remember what matters. Curating isn’t a trend anymore. It’s a new way of thinking. It’s the new wisdom. It’s how we keep the human part of culture alive. More on this below Thank you!🌹 The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.) https://paragraph.com/@thehiddeni/curation-as-modern-wisdom🌹
this made my morning, edu! what a great read 🥹❤️🔥 69000 🙏🏼
You can’t imagine how happy this makes me and how much strength it gives me to keep expressing myself!! I appreciate you more than you could ever know, my dear!! Thank you!❤️🌹
Never ever stop, we love you 💜 hope you're having an amazing day, edu!