Subset is for a particular sort of person. A person with many interests in many different things who ends up in many different places. A person who, in the midst of that roaming, experiences "I saw this and thought of you" moments and acts on them, routing relevant things to interested people via resonant acts of curation. It's designed for curators, instead of consumers or creators. Here's a snapshot of some differences between these web denizens.
Consumers | Curators | Creators | |
Default verbs | browse, receive, scroll, follow, lurk | discover, connect, annotate, contextualise, filter | synthesise, produce, make, generate, craft |
Web footprint | 90% of people online | 9% of people online | 1% of people online |
Things they use | A handful of free consumer apps | A unique and janky collection of disparate apps and tools | An integrated stack of paid tooling and infrastructure |
Operative paradigm | Commerce paradigm; wants convenience, pays nothing, has resulting value extracted | Gift paradigm; non-commercial motives (e.g. curiosity, sociality), resulting value is intangible | Commerce paradigm; wants agency, pays something, has resulting value siphoned |
As far as we can tell these are valid and reliable differentiators. They are mostly characteristics, however. Characteristics are observable attributes. Things like clothes, gender, possessions, hair colour. Character, on the other hand, is a thing revealed by the choices one makes. Especially in moments of high consequence. So, what is it that distinguishes the character of curators versus consumers and creators? The answer, we think, can be found in a theory called active inference.
Active inference proposes that agents perceive the world and act within it in a proactive way designed to minimise the surprises they encounter. In Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior, Thomas Parr, Giovanni Pezzulo and Karl Friston describe it as such:
Active Inference is a normative framework to characterise Bayes-optimal behavior and cognition in living organisms. Its normative character is evinced in the idea that all facets of behavior and cognition in living organisms follow a unique imperative: minimising the surprise of their sensory observations. Surprise has to be interpreted in a technical sense: it measures how much an agent’s current sensory observations differ from its preferred sensory observations—that is, those that preserve its integrity (e.g., for a fish, being in the water). Importantly, minimising surprise is not something that can be done by passively observing the environment: rather, agents must adaptively control their action-perception loops to solicit desired sensory observations.
Think about a typical consumer, scrolling through a social media feed. Now, think about a creator pushing information into that same feed. Both are agents minimising their respective surprise. Parr, Pezzulo and Friston go on to say:
Under Active Inference, perception and action are two complementary ways to fulfill the same imperative: minimisation of free energy. Perception minimises free energy (and surprise) by (Bayesian) belief updating or changing your mind, thus making your beliefs compatible with sensory observations. Instead, action minimises free energy (and surprise) by changing the world to make it more compatible with your beliefs and goals.
Consumers minimise surprise by adapting their information environment to mirror their desired perceptions. Creators, in contrast, minimise surprise by taking actions that either reinforce the state of their reality or shift it closer to the state they wish it would resemble. What about curators? Well, they're built a little differently—to be clear, not better; just different.
They distribute digests of the things that have interested them; they assemble Dunbar goods for the benefit of small groups; they save succinct references to the things they've found and share them with people they know will be interested in them. The perceptions and actions of curators are designed to perturb their surrounding environment and elicit surprise, again and again, and across every domain. They introduce sources of novelty and divergence and interact in ways that catalyse new relationships and insight.
That is the fundamental character of a curator; they choose to maximise surprise.
