The Death of the Algorithm: Why We're Returning to Human Curation

For the last fifteen years, the dominant assumption about how culture moves online was that machines would do the moving. Recommendation systems would learn what we liked, sand the edges off our preferences, and serve us an endless, friction-free river of content. The river is still flowing. The water has just stopped tasting like anything.

What's emerging in its place is older than software: editors. Small publications run by people with strong points of view are quietly building audiences that pay for the privilege of being told what to read, watch, and think about. They are not, despite the headlines, a backlash against technology. They are a backlash against the absence of a person at the other end.

The economics are still fragile. But the appetite is real, and growing — and it suggests that the next decade of the internet will look less like an infinite mall and more like a series of well-lit rooms.