Curate or die
Do you know what content you consumed this week?
Not roughly. Not "3 hours worth of reels, two articles, and half a podcast." I mean the actual stuff that entered your brain and is now, presumably, sitting there, composting into whatever you'll create next.
If you asked me to name five specific things I learned this week from my phone, I'd stare at you like you'd asked me to recite the periodic table backwards (not that I can recite it normally). I've lost my input memory.
For most peeps, the algorithm dictates what enters their brain now, and they've stopped noticing. This is fine if you work in accounting. It is an emergency if you need to be creative for a living.
The sameness problem
Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker writer, noticed something strange while traveling. Coffee shops in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, and Berlin started looking identical. Same exposed brick. Same Edison bulbs. Same fiddle leaf fig in the corner. Same vaguely Scandinavian furniture.
Not coincidence but algorithm optimization in its own way.
When everyone uses the same platforms, consumes the same feeds, saves the same Pinterest boards, you get the same outputs. The aesthetic flattening is just the visible symptom. The real damage is underneath and much, much more serious: how you think, what you find interesting, what you believe is POSSIBLE.
Jaron Lanier, the guy who literally invented virtual reality and then spent the next three decades warning us about social media, put it bluntly: "When we're on social media, we let ourselves be guided by the algorithms, so we start to become dumb in the way the algorithms want us to."
Here's the thing that should terrify every creative person reading this: We're entering an era where AI can produce perfectly polished, aesthetically flawless work in seconds. The only thing that will matter soon is being real, honest, original. Raw and real is the future, my friends. And you cannot be original if your inputs are identical to 8 billion other people's inputs.
Austin Kleon nailed it when he said: "You are a mashup of what you choose to let into your life."
If you're not choosing, something is choosing for you.
You are what you consume, you are what you think, you are the sum of things you read, watch, listen to and think about (and more importantly, so is your output). So if its garbage in, it is (you know what it is).
Three ways the algorithm specifically screws creatives
It doesn't know your dormant curiosities. You've always wondered about Brutalist architecture. Or 1970s Japanese jazz. Or how mushroom leather gets made. But you never searched for it, so the algorithm has no idea. That curiosity sits in a drawer, gathering dust, while the feed serves you the same five categories it already knows you'll click.
It feeds you the temporarily compelling over the genuinely interesting. The discourse. The trending audio. The rage-bait. The hot take about some celebrity or political drama. By the time you look up, your curiosity about fermentation science has been buried under 47 notifications about nothing.
It has no depth. The algorithm serves surface. The niche blog by the expert who's spent 30 years obsessing over a topic? Buried on page 47 of Google. The reel by someone who Googled it yesterday and spoke confidently into a ring light? Front page, 2 million views, and absolutely useless.
Build your own feed
Curation isn't a vibe. It's a practice. A boring, unsexy, calendar-it-like-a-dentist-appointment practice.
Here's how you can start.
Step 1: The curiosity dump. Make one list. Right now. Things you've always wanted to understand but never pursued. Indian temple architecture. Soviet poster design. The economics of K-pop. Drone farming. Whatever weird thing lives in the back of your head. Write it down before the algorithm overwrites it with another meal prep video.
Step 2: Find your anchors. For each curiosity, find ONE source that goes deep. A blog, a newsletter, a creator who actually knows things. Not a generalist. Not someone chasing views and followers. A weirdo who's been obsessing over this topic for years. Plug them into an RSS reader (Feedly, Inoreader - doesn't matter which). RSS is chronological. No algorithm. The feed stops when you've read it. Revolutionary concept, no?
Step 3: Set your scouts. Google Alerts for keywords on your curiosity list. AI tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity) can be asked to give you weekly summaries on niche topics from sources you specify. Newsletters from actual humans who curate specific corners of the internet. The goal: automate discovery without automating selection.
Step 4: Let it breathe. Never read immediately. Save to Pocket or Instapaper or Raindrops. Let it sit for a week. When you return, ask: am I still curious? If yes, it's signal. If no, it was clickbait. Delete without guilt.
Step 5: Schedule it like it matters. 45 minutes. Twice a week. On your calendar. If it's not scheduled, it doesn't exist. This is your curiosity practice. Treat it like going to the gym, except for your creativity, and without the icky guy who doesn't wipe down benches after using them.
Step 6: Give yourself a semester. Every summer (or whenever you have a slower stretch), pick one subject from your curiosity list and build yourself a university-style reading list. Pretend you're auditing a course.
I did this last year with dogs and animals. I found actual books that are from the point of view of an animal, and more like a serious POV, not like 101 dalmatians, and I got to understand more about their reality and experience. It was the most useful thing I did for my writing all year.
You can find syllabi for almost anything. Google "[topic] + syllabus + PDF" and you'll find what some professor assigned their students at some university. Steal it. Make it yours. or ask your favorite LLM to make you syllabus with a few books, videos, podcasts, and a newsletter.
Step 7: Keep the weird. Brief notes after each session. What surprised you? What do you disagree with? What rabbit hole do you want to fall into next? This is where the compounding happens. This is where you stop being a consumer and start being someone with actual thoughts.
The point
The algorithm knows what you liked yesterday. It uses that data to predict what you'll like today. It is a machine for looking backward.
Curiosity looks forward. Toward what you don't yet know you'll love. Toward the strange connection between two ideas that nobody else would think to make because nobody else has your specific, weird, curated diet of inputs.
Your originality lives in the gap between what everyone else is consuming and what only you would think to seek out.
The algorithm doesn't just hide the niche content from you.
It hides the weird you.
PS: If you try the semester thing, email me what subject you picked. I'm always looking for syllabus recommendations. DM on twitter or email me at kjb.akash@gmail.com