Findings by MWS

for the past decade or so, the internet rewarded the curator. the person who could sift through abundance and present the “best” things in a way that felt effortless and aesthetically coherent. the curator removed noise. they created trust by smoothing edges. recommendation became a form of care.

but ai has made curation ambient. when any chatbot can instantly generate a competent list of books, restaurants, or ideas, curation stops being scarce. it becomes infrastructural. invisible. expected.

critique, on the other hand, cannot be automated in the same way. real critique requires taste, risk, and a willingness to be wrong. it reveals the critic as much as the thing being critiqued. it creates tension. and tension is what produces meaning. friction forces you to locate yourself in relation to something. it asks you to decide.

the paradox, as you point out, is that when everyone is empowered to critique, critique itself becomes abundant, and abundance erodes authority. the question shifts from “what should i pay attention to?” to “whose attention is worth trusting?”

i suspect the critics who will matter most are not the loudest or the most correct, but the most legible. the ones whose taste forms a coherent shape over time. not because they never contradict themselves, but because their contradictions feel human rather than strategic. you begin to understand how they see, not just what they see.

in that sense, the future may belong less to curators or critics in isolation, and more to people who expose their reasoning. people who let you watch them arrive at taste.

it also reframes the role of disagreement. disagreement becomes less about winning and more about revealing the structure of someone else’s thinking. the most valuable critics are not the ones who eliminate uncertainty, but the ones who sharpen yours.

and maybe that’s the real shift: from outsourcing judgment to rehearsing it.