All around me is information, and the information is in a state of chaos. Disorganized, sprawling, overwhelming. The overwhelmingness is not unpleasant. (Not always.) There is euphoria in it. The excitement of discovery. Brushing up against the infinite. Synapses firing. Sodium ions rushing through axons. The mind wants to hold it all, and it can’t.

But what if it could? Maybe not hold everything at once, but at least impose an order. There must be a system, a framework, a methodology, a folder structure, a tagging taxonomy, something that can help us make sense of it all and keep all the information neatly categorized and accessible.

This is the project I’ve been working on my whole life. I have spent countless hours making lists, cataloguing items, filling notebooks and Word documents and Excel spreadsheets with my attempts. I used to think of it as a compulsion, an almost shameful (or at least embarrassing) activity I engaged in privately. A waste of time. A pointless, endless, Sisyphean labour.

Then I tried to let go of the shame and think of it instead as a hobby. I accepted that the lists would never be complete and that even if they could be I might never find a use for them. It was liberating to think of the act of researching, compiling and organizing bits of information as an end in itself, no more “useless” or “wasteful” than playing solitaire or doing a jigsaw puzzle. A soothing, meditative activity.

But even with this framing, part of the appeal had to be in visualizing the impossible final state, the tremendous satisfaction that would come from having itemized all the data into an immaculate system, making it legible, useful, manageable. Like the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle clicking into place, just before you pull back and see the full picture for the first time. Ahh!

The utopian dream of having a wealth of information under one’s control, tailored to one’s ultra-specific needs and proclivities. This imagined perfection, always out of reach like any object of desire, forever slipping through the fingers of the mind, is the source of the erotic pleasure that drives the librarian, the archivist and the personal knowledge management enthusiast.

But now I have reached a third phase. What I first thought of as a compulsion and then as a hobby, I now see as a vocation. After spending decades thinking about and experimenting with how best to organize information, and wrestling with all the inherent contradictions and challenges that this entails, I find myself increasingly unsatisfied (alarmed, troubled even...) with the way information is being harvested, stored, hoarded, exploited, deployed, streamed, deleted, memory-holed, corrupted, hidden, censored, processed, commodified, colonized. How information is fed to us not as nourishment, but as a way to capture our attention. How we have ceded control over it to corporations that do not have our best interest at heart and that do not care about preserving human knowledge or culture for future generations. And how these problems are being exacerbated by technology - generative AI, algorithmic feeds, ever more sophisticated methods of tracking and personalized advertising - even as we are told that technology holds the solutions to the problems it creates.

Call it a vocation or a political project, but moving forward this is what I want to focus my work on.

The value of human curation

I have been thinking a lot about how personalized recommendation algorithms have changed the way we discover, access and experience culture. (I’m resisting the use of the word “content,” which is what happens to culture when it is commodified and treated as disposable.) There is an enormous gap between the theoretical benefits of recommendation algorithms and the reality of how we experience them.

The clearest example of this is Netflix, and especially the version of Netflix that existed a few years ago, back when all the playlists had names like “visually striking sci-fi epics” and “inspiring dramas with strong female leads.” The idea was that if you tagged movies and TV shows with enough descriptors, you could then have a machine endlessly recommend ultra-specific genres personalized to each user. And the more you watched, the better the recommendations would get.

In theory, this is a brilliant way for people to discover entertainment tailored to their tastes. In practice, the algorithms are not that sophisticated and there isn’t that much good content on the platform in the first place (a fact that is hidden by the illusion of the infinite scroll, which never lets you see the totality of the catalogue). You end up with the same handful of recommendations repeated in one silly sounding playlist after another.

A couple of years ago I signed up for the Criterion Channel and was amazed to discover that it is almost completely free of algorithmic meddling. The playlists are curated by an editorial team of humans, based on themes, genres or filmmakers. The playlists also include insightful descriptions and bonus content like trailers, interviews and commentary, which help to contextualize the material. There are no personalized recommendations. The catalogue is smaller, but refreshes monthly, and there’s an emphasis on quality over quantity.

Of course, Criterion is targeting a very different consumer than Netflix, but it’s possible to imagine a version of Netflix that would better serve their target audience while providing a more human experience.

The problem is, Netflix is a tech company. They believe (and want us to believe) that we are better served by a machine that analyses countless data points and serves us what it has determined we want to consume. A human-curated playlist isn’t tailored to your specific tastes - in fact it’s more likely to reflect the perspective, idiosyncracies and even biases of the person who made it. But that also means that it might surprise you, challenge you, push you in a direction you might not have gone otherwise. Curation has the potential to expand your worldview, whereas algorithms only collapse it.

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This week’s recommendation

• Only one recommendation this week: I’m reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Absolution and it is fantastic. This is the fourth and final novel in his Southern Reach series. I will almost certainly have more to say about it after I’ve finished it.