Curating the New Year
I really hate people's in/out lists this year.
1.
Hi. Hello. It’s still me.
We are already several days into the new year so I am sure you have seen, as much as I have, the increasingly arbitrary and capricious lists of items people post, often screenshotted from their Notes app, of what is in and out for the new year. IN: the waxing crescent moon, vamping on a digital piano during set changes, the surprising scent of musky leather from an old paperback novel that remembers on your behalf the cologne of a former lover. OUT: food porn on Instagram, tiny fairy doors inset against a granite doorframe behind the local barbershop where mens’ haircuts run a minimum of $50, San Francisco public defenders.
Too soon?
My boss at work heard me talking about these memes and said, “It’s the internet. No one has to justify their personal beliefs or tastes to anyone.”
Call it capriciousness. Call it context collapse. Call it lack of media literacy or a filter bubble or an overall dumbing down of society. I am not sure how earnestly he wrote it, but I appreciate John Paul Brammer’s biting satire in his own In/Out list when he says aliens and conspiracies are in, as is an overall “Medieval Peasant Mindset”:
Gut instinct. Susceptibility to mass hysteria. Torches and pitchforks. Making songs about folk heroes. Let’s get some lutes and some tunics in this bitch and have ourselves another dancing plague. Shall we burn some heretics at the stake later? Fuck it, having a widow’s peak is a bad omen. Certain nose shapes do make you more likely to be an adulterer. Make sure your four humors are properly balanced, diva, because thinking like a medieval peasant is back in style. Only, this time, we have TikTok. Yay.
The in/out list is, of course, inherently irrational because it is an attempt to articulate personal taste, and subjectivity is nothing if not the defined opposite of objectivity. (I am not, however, arguing that objectivity is itself rational! Chew on that.) But the breakdown, for me, in the in/out lists I’ve seen this year is that there’s not even a paltry attempt to justify the list items. Everything feels so arbitrary. Much as there has been a groundswelling rejection of Spotify Wrapped — I think it’s widespread enough I don’t need to cite one specific writer describing it — for being too dependent on machine learning without enough human curation to contextualize and categorize the habits on display. (Being as paranoiac and conspiracy minded as I am, I suspect, as Kate Lindsay wrote last month, that part of listeners’ discontent with their results comes as much from algorithmic intervention in their streaming habits throughout the year, as with the crunching of the final list itself. I refuse to tell you which artist had my top position except to say I would never seek [him-her-them] out, and the only way that artist could have reached the position would be from cases where I ask Spotify to create a radio station around a title.) But at the paradoxical heart of the in/out list is that it’s an attempt to showcase one’s personal tastes and playact as an influencer.
I’m talking about a curatorial impulse. The very purpose of drafting an in/out list, to act as curator, is to play the role of a tastemaker from one’s couch, which one bought from Ikea because it was cheap and easy and required only an allen wrench to assemble, while sipping on a flavored nonalcoholic seltzer the flavor and branding of which came from a local food delivery service that offered to tack on a quick trip to the convenience store while picking up your Chinese takeout for just an extra $3.99. This is Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld argument that I am parroting: the more that choices are forcibly introduced to us via algorithmic creation — which will trend, as machine learning must, with a flattening impulse into the most predictable and therefore bland outcome — the more any one of us human nodes of the vast interconnecting compute power training our once and future robot king wants to say: “No, actually, I myself found this thing!” —”It wasn’t spoonfed to me from a fast fashion outlet dropshipped from China!” —”I and I alone thought of invoking a sexy pagan forest spirit at the gay dance.”
(And, yes, Caitlin Dewey has already written about the aspect of playing the curator which is affiliate marketing, writing lists explicitly to monetize them.)
The curatorial impulse exists even and especially for people who have never heard of Walter Benjamin or set foot in a museum. (I am an elitist snob!) It is curation without theory, without an underlying aesthetic project. Curation for the sake of egotistical power alone. This is, again, a familiar argument I don’t think I need to cite; I am certainly not alone in arguing that there could a worthwhile return to gatekeeping, to separating out worthy critiques of museums for hoarding objects of colonialism or for ignoring worthwhile artifacts from subaltern communities from a vaster, less worthwhile democratizing impulse. (Acknowledging that history is written by the victors — that determining what is worth retaining in archives in the first place — is not even historiography; it’s a prerequisite to even the most basic inquiry into the past.) Perhaps not everyone is gifted with the taste to be a curator. Perhaps not everyone has the necessary training to look past their own subjectivity, to select objects and allow them to speak to each other among and across different and new contexts.
I’m going to do that thing one always urges undergraduate essayists to avoid and appeal to the etymology of curation, which is the same root as cure, curare, to care for. (I was curious if “care” was one of those verbs that had a Germanic vowel shift the Brothers Grimm loved so much but, no, it’s a different root relating to Old Norse words for sickbeds, grief and death. So there’s something of a pessimistic slant embedded in the historical linguistic trajectories of caring for someone rather than curing them.) Curation, then, as a successful and artistic project of looking after assembled artifacts, is an equally difficult task as creating the objects themselves. In just one essay written for a substack one has to determine what one wants to talk about. And then determining the form that will best suit the raw emotional throughput of words, that skillful development of expertise often called revision: to stick with a thought long enough to identify its parameters, to coax it out from the raw brusque form it initially had and transform it, therefore (hopefully), into art. Curation has to work along much the same axes, but treating each artifact as an underpinning argument in need of coaxing, context, revision.
2.
Another meme I’ve seen in several variations for the new year takes the form of a word search and encourage the viewer to zoom in, prompting: the first 3 words you see will be your mantra for the year. Some are earnest and some are, with the sensitivity and subtlety of the internet today, collections of ribald and pornographic content terms. And as much as I think there’s a distinct lack of intellectual curiosity that disqualifies tout court the vast majority of us as acting as curators, there’s an equally distinct spiritual emptiness evidenced by the popularity and facile nature of these memes. A random grid will inform the divine mantra for your next year! At least with astrology there’s, like, the potential for divine Providence to have placed stars in positions of specific cosmic significance. At least there’s the extravagant sublime of the entire visible cosmos on display. What’s next, I wonder: ChatGPT says to circumscribe a Solomonic sigil in blood on the floor to evoke hidden manipulative Shoggoths behind smiley faces, and people will just ask “how wide”?
You might think I’m going off the deep end. It’s more appropriate to dismiss failures of the intellect than it is polite to discuss spirituality. I am reminded of how I bristled when I was reading Thich Nhat Hahn, in a title I had digitally checked out of the library to read during 2 AM feedings, when Hahn suggested that conscious consumption of spiritually-improving media was necessary — that there is some content that is better spiritually to consume than others. Doesn’t that just reek of elitism, I thought. Or, worse, the same overbearing control that’s overtaking American politics, the sensibility of a religious cult for stay-at-home cucks who want to believe their deity put them on this planet to dominate as many meek women and children as they possibly can: don’t read those things that will make you spiritually weak, only read what I tell you. I hear echoes of this in Michael Andor Brodeur’s summary of the siren song of the manosphere:
The red-pilled reassert traditional masculine roles and almost cartoonishly celebrate patriarchal values, in terms so explicit as to make the whole thing seem almost like unwitting satire. (That so many red-pilled young men find unironic heroes in the fictional antiheroes of the past quarter century—from American Psycho’s Patrick a Bateman to Fitht Club’s Tyler Durden to The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano—lends credence to this theory.)
[...]
Manfluencers reinforce suspicions men have about themselves, hunches offered to them by their dads and older brothers and uncles and coaches and the men they see in public. They capitalize on men’s low self-esteem in order to sell them heroic comebacks acquired through workout programs, intermittent fasting, and mental focus (“grindset”). Manfluencers tell men they are unlovable, that they are only valued when they are of use to others, and that their status is equivalent to their ‘body count’ (number of sexual partners). Because men derive so much of their self-worth from external validation from other men, they eagerly flock on to preconstructed value systems that keep their power in place, while still making their success seem against the odds.
I fundamentally disagree with the premise, and conclusions, of manfluencer content. But I do have to recognize the clarity in eschatology — if not in morality — that they exhibit. (Game recognizes game?) This can be a problem in historical revisionism: hindsight creates narrative teleologies. If you want to uphold a strong man at the center of society, you can find plenty of examples. (And in that act of curation, willfully blind yourself to all the circumstances in which those white strong men benefit, overtly or more subtly.) If you’re looking for modern society to resemble the slow descent into fascism, you can force fit that narrative quite neatly.
I have hesitated, over the last few weeks, about continuing with substack as a provider of these free missives because one is compelled, in today’s digital polemic, to deplatform oneself from the spaces and places that provide services to odious viewpoints. It used to be that Godwin’s law — that any argument on the internet, if it lasts long enough, will invoke Hitler — was an argument for derision. A signal that one’s thinking wasn’t clear enough to think of anything more compelling. These days, it’s far more often that one often hears of the parable of the punk bar where neo-Nazis are treated like termites: throw out the first, nice and genteel one, or all the rest will come, and they’ll eat away at the wood and floors of the whole place. Perhaps the internet, as an argument that modern humans are meant to coexist in open and realtime global communication with each other, has itself worn on for too long.
I’ve taken this dark turn because Alexander Chee linked to a collection of writers’ encapsulation of 2024, the vast majority of whom argue that there is nothing worth considering for the year behind us more than certain horrors in certain parts of the world about which I will decline to offer anything resembling clarity or personal viewpoint. I am not independently wealthy so please excuse these ellisions as paranoia.
But even if I were to say what I think, dear reader of this faulty chronicle, do you think I have anything resembling the foresight or latitude to recognize international affairs as events worthy of our curation together? When I find myself encumbered and distracted by so many other curators of the Internet who are still shouting that Chappell Roan is the best thing to happen to pop music since Lady Gaga, that they are happily blazing with friends on the lakefront for the first time this year, that their amateur pay-per-view site is running a limited 50% exclusive deal for the next fifteen subscribers. When I, in my own petty universe, can hardly keep my head in the direction I think it should be pointing. Can barely recall to which divinities or Buddhas I’ve decided to pledge my immortal soul this week. There are so many times I have picked up a book, watched a movie, started a podcast, and more, and more, consumed so much culture under the false delusion that it will have something curated for me to understand life itself a little bit better. Tricked, once again, that the subject would be used successfully as metaphor.
3.
Do you know, dear reader, that I had every intention of constraining this essay. I had a vision of focusing my efforts on a more narrative passage. I have failed, if you will, in the process of revision as curation.
The drain I’m circling consists of only four axioms: that Kyle Chayka is right to consider digital algorithms as the reason taste is flattening (that Kyle Chayka has had the winningest beat in digital journalism for the last 10 years); that people are reacting to the lack of control they have in self-discovery by posting through it, playacting the influential tastemaker and curator all the harder; that curating what one consumes could, indeed, be spiritually beneficial; that I disagree with the canon and conclusions reached by the people who speak, silent majority that they often fail to be, most frequently about the need to curate content for one’s soul (typically by violently suppressing and censoring any mention they disdain).
There are still several other doors I would like to open. For now, like Stuart Kestenbaum says, perhaps it is best that I simply “gather up whatever is / glittering in the gutter.” Perhaps, some time soon, we can look at those fragments. Perhaps we can see if we can work on curing it, together.
In our imperfect world we are meant to repair and stitch together what beauty there is, stitch it with compassion and wire.