Curators make up almost a tenth of the people online. Unfortunately, they inhabit a terrain that is at best indifferent and at worst adversarial to their default orientation and preferred way of being. Curators engage more deeply than typical consumers yet are averse to sustained creator-hood. Thus, they're forced to choose:
Become a consumer and stifle the innate desire to be more engaged online
Become a creator and compel oneself to be over-active and eventually burnout
Pay the tax required to curate in a landscape that marginalises the activity
Curators are, essentially, forced to occupy a bistable system. They either re-architect themselves and learn how to sustain creation indefinitely, or they settle into a regime of dissatisfactory consumption. The mid-point—curation—is a perch they're swiftly bumped off of: wear and tear, opposing incentives, and the dominant paradigms of the surrounding landscape drag them down. When dragged, most people fall to consumption instead of creation.
The result is a chasm between the two stable states, between the notions of consuming and creating, that is similar in its psychological dynamic to wealth inequality. Describing the mechanics of inequality and the interplay of the agents of capital, labour and technology is outside the scope of this post (and this blog), but the shared dynamic is as follows:
A massive disparity in accumulation
Rationalised by "just world" and "there is no alternative" stances
That is unlikely to be overturned
Manufactures fairytale ascension stories
That combine with systemic exploitation
To sustain and increase the existing disparity
A functional inequality feeds a non-functional experience of inequity which is used to amplify inequality further—at least until the inequity crosses a threshold and the system and its paradigms get reset.
We are approaching that threshold in our digital landscape and in our portfolios of online engagement. The disparity between the creator class and the consumer class is accelerating, and there are many who are seeking a middle way. Tristability, a stable third position, instead of bistability, is needed.
Right now, consumers are gaslit into thinking that creation is both the highest form of being online and a state that is infinitely rewarding and indefinitely sustainable. That's how we end up with everyone from regular families to Monaco Formula 1 drivers alchemising their existence into fodder for aspirational audiences, algorithmic content machines, and slop farms.
But creation is not the peak of existence; nor is consumption the pit. Both are appropriate for different people at different points in time and for varying instrumental and appreciative ends. Unfortunately, there's no mechanism for gentle transitions between the two. The intermediate state is neither easy to get to, simple to sustain, nor wholesome to exit from. Many people are forced, unnecessarily, to skip the intermediate and careen between the poles of creating and consuming, never quite achieving contentment.
With Subset, we want to change that and make the mid-point easy to enter, exit and occupy. We want to make curation a viable default, a feasible alternative to consumption and creation for anyone who wants to try it out. Without such an alternative, our bistable system will tear itself asunder. Without a fundamental alteration to its makeup, the landscape will implode.
The best time for tristability was yesterday. The second best time for tristability is now.
