Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

Taylor & Francis

Part 1

Homo Curatorius

Taylor & Francis

1 Introducing the Curatorial Imperative

1.1 Do Socks Have Personalities?

On their website, the wool company Smartwool explains to its customers that while “plain white socks are just that—plain”, the curated socks it ofers can demonstrate how “your life is packed with everyday adventures” (Smartwool, nd). Unlike plain white socks, the curated socks have a unique character; they are “bold” and “sure to liven up your sock drawer”. Smartwool has “sustainability targets” for its curated socks aiding customers to “recycle” their “old socks into new goods” (Smartwool, nd). A curated sock is a sock with personality; rather than a boring and ignorant sock, it is bold, animated, and ecological, and by wearing it, the potential buyer can also inhabit these traits.

Socks are not the only items that can have such wonderful personalities in today’s cultural economies. Countless other curated products, services, and experiences promise to lift consumers to greater and loftier states with their charismatic touch: a curated diet helps to “restore the nutrients you are missing”—in contrast to the “poor diet” that “can cause further damage” (Szarka, 2019); a curated ear is “more than multiple piercings” and transforms piercings “from a single accessory to a personally-styled gallery” (Pierced, nd); a curated bookshelf “creates a unique storage solution that also tells a story” (CapitalOne, 2021); a Sotheby’s curated wine cellar promises “fun and personalization” and a “story you should be telling on your own” (Miller, 2018). In information-laden capitalism, the mandate for such stories is—to paraphrase Fredric Jameson—a “cultural dominant” (1991: 3), promising to turn consumption, identities, and lifestyles from contingent and aimless to purposeful and unique. Curation’s promise is to guide, to distinguish, to elevate, to restore, to customize, to add spice, and to carefully pick the best and most appropriate items out of all the surrounding noise and wrap them in an elegant package that leads to self-improvement.

The market employment of the term reflects its overall fashionability. The very usage of the word “curating” in the English-speaking world has increased by more than fivefold since 2010 and by 16-fold since 1985.1 In broader culture, similar references span from low to high; the “curator boyfriend” was the hottest accessory of the year 2020, according to the women’s magazine Elle (2019), while the film The Square, featuring a museum curator as the main hero, won the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Festival. Recently, hit audiovisual productions grapple with the exclusive, curated worlds of consumption, including hospitality services in White Lotus (2021–), luxury cruise ships in Triangle of Sadness (2022), high gastronomy in The Menu (2022), and the wellness industry in Nine Perfect Strangers (2021–2022). In the academic world, the number of subjects that can be curated in the past ten years is truly astonishing. Apart from broadly art-related activities, like “opera” (Mould, 2022), “architecture” (Chaplin, 2009), “pop” (Baker, Istvandity, and Nowak, 2019), “contemporary music festivals” (Farnsworth, 2021) and “dramaturgies” (Eckersall and Ferdman, 2021), curating also applies to spiritual undertakings, like “worship” (Baker, 2010) and “pilgrimage” (Murray, 2021), religious cultures, such as “lived Islam” (Malik, 2023), or even whole countries, like “America” (Rabinowitz, 2016), political spaces, like “(post-)socialist environments” (Schorch and Habit, 2023), “lively objects” (Muller and Langill, 2021), “oral histories” (MacKay, 2017) “trauma” (Micieli-Voutsinas, 2022), “the future” (Newell, Libby and Kirsten, 2016), and even “human remains” (Giesen 2013). Countless more paper titles in refereed and nonrefereed journals capture this moment of curating vis-à-vis almost anything.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003182801-2

Ranging from colloquial to academic uses, references to something “curated” mostly designate the grouping of cultural items, from music to food and films to news. These hand-picked, or sometimes algorithmically picked, selections by authorized experts are expected to place these items within organized narratives. To gain legitimacy, these narratives need to be bound to the authority of experts, that is, either specific persons who enjoy symbolic capital (e.g. “Tom Ford’s curated gift sets” [miamidesigndistrict, nd]) or companies, institutions, and platforms (“Apple News brings you the world’s best journalism […] curated by editors, and personalized for you” [Apple News, nd]). These narratives are shaped by, and themselves shape, the impressions around curated content and the entity that curated them. For instance, when one encounters Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons, curating the line-up of the music festival All Tomorrow Parties,2 this encounter informs narratives both about the curated content, the line-up, the bands, and the music they perform (e.g., “Matt Groening chose them so they must be cool”) as well as Groening himself (e.g., “Groening chose both Hope Sandoval and Daniel Johnston, therefore Groening has an eclectic taste”). Or, when one encounters curated news from a platform like Apple News, they may make assumptions, implicit or explicit, both about what they read (e.g., “The news I read are customized by expert editors of a trusted platform”) as well as about the ultimate guarantor of these groupings (e.g., “Apple is now an expert in news selection”). There is then a mutually constitutive relationship in distributed curating between the items and the narrative that are certified by the authority of the expert.

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Homo Curatorius

I should then say from the start that the omnipresence of curating, as I understand it here, is not merely linked to the increase in the usage and trafic of the very word “curation” and its linguistic derivatives. This book will discuss how this omnipresence echoes a larger cultural economic logic that exceeds the employment of the particular word(s). It is a logic of value production which, via forms of selection, narration, and expertise, mediates labor practices, self-identification, and patterns of consumption intertwined with techno-social afordances and the impositions of platform capitalism.3 I will speak in more detail about how I employ platform capitalism in Section 1.2 and in Chapter 3, but for the sake of clarity let us now say that the term intends to highlight the centrality of platforms in the circulations of the digital economy, that is, of corporate digital infrastructures of data extraction which bring together multisided markets, with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta being some of the leading examples (Langley and Leyshon, 2017; Srnicek, 2017). Platforms mobilize the mass production and circulation of communications (that they then capture as data and value), efecting in what Mark Andrejevich describes as “infoglut”, a disorienting social space of constantly contested meaning and information narratives (2013: 38). In order to generate new forms of value, platforms ofer curatorial afordances to everyday users or themselves ofer curated services. Platform capitalism, I assume, is a dominant productivity model which privileges, encourages, and generates “cultures” in the anthropological sense, that is, forms of interaction, values, meaning, and symbol-making. I use the term “curation” as an overarching concept that allows us to speak about and shed light on these cultures.

Based on these initial assumptions, I conceptualize curation around two main axes that will interweave and feed of each other throughout this book, and the areas to which I apply the term—fashion, food, and life coaching (Chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively). First, curation is a free-floating signifier sounding vaguely positive (similarly to say “creativity”), the employment of which indicates a progressive, forward-looking activity. Curation is an art-related concept that suggests sophistication and up-to-datedness and thus potentially generates customer desire across media markets. This, as I will show in Chapter 2, owes to the global ascent and popularization of the contemporary art curator, an independent, semi-institutional and authorial persona that both creates and organizes.4 In the artworld, the ascent of the curator to a creator-auteur, instead of merely an institutional worker, owes itself to the institutionalization of avant-garde art since the 1960s (I refer to the employment of Duchamp and Warhol as suggestive figures of this process throughout the book). Curation implies a guided creativity instead of a chaotic one, a more prudent form of creativity that triggers bohemianbourgeois or middle-class aspirations. Curators are perceived as neither boring bureaucrats, like blue- and white-collar workers or nerdy academics, nor autonomous workers, like artists. They speak about “posthumanism over pizza”, to refer to the curator boyfriend of the Elle article, and are simultaneously self-reflective, knowledgeable, organized, and partygoers, to refer to the protagonist of the film The Square. In this sense, this first axis looks at distributed curating in relation to the popularization of the term itself, which inscribes, as I will suggest, the afective and historical registers of creativity and organization at once, which correspond to some of the hegemonic subjective investments in contemporary capitalism.5

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Second, as mentioned, curation indicates a logic of value production, self-presentation, and performance, according to which selected items are conceptualized under the vision of an expert. In platformized cultural activity, the spread of this logic, once mostly confined to the corporate world of branding and advertising, difuses sociality at large; it sprawls from presentations of the self in social media, ranging from posting texts, photos, and videos to mentioning, tagging, and location-sharing, the boom of industries of positivity, life coaching, and mindfulness, the sharing of cool imagery of traveling, art openings, and other “exceptional” moments, the potentially constant updating of friends, followers, and fans, the gearing of aesthetics and design to attention-grabbing quests and the overall commodified artification of life. Digital platforms mediate the intensities and degrees of all the above. The logic of curation also informs popular culture discourse, including headlines such as “I have a smaller penis than my girlfriend’s exes—should I get surgery?” or “17 Cute Bikinis Options for Bigger Butts”, published in newspapers as diverse as Guardian and Cosmopolitan respectively, and occupies even the biological futurology, as in the case for instance of CRISPR where people could potentially curate bodily and psychological aspects of their ofspring by editing their DNA (Greely, 2022). In a nutshell, the curatorial logic inhabits the imperative of what to choose amidst the extremes of mass conformity and informational chaos that are both accelerated outcomes of the internet economy. It deepens the ideology of neoliberal capitalism and what Illouz calls “the self as a ‘chooser’ ” (2013: 79); since consumption promises to be a status-bearing practice with ramifications for one’s future, the chooser-self is symbolically uplifted and legitimized. If we zoom out to the larger picture of social class, the imperative to curate and be curated directs working class desire into an aspiring middle-class ecosystem in which meaningful choice is critical for actualizing one’s social identity. Thus, at the anthropological level, the logic of curation, that is, the stories to select and present to the self and others, pushes not only market actors but also everyday users to think of their practices, emotions, and life paths as expressive of a higher vision, “the story you should be telling on your own”, a vision that they choose amidst disorienting complexity, instead of living through random moments.

While curation is a concept that, I argue, can help us codify the cultures of platform capitalism, including the cultures of coolness, authenticity, and inspiration that I will discuss later, this does not mean that these cultures are sui generis or totally new. Quite the opposite: pre-existing cultures are mass communicated, magnified, re-purposed, spread, and diversified across local ofline and online settings resulting in new qualities in attitudes and behaviors as practically anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone encounters platform impositions and afordances. In his reading of an astrology column of Los Angeles Times of the 1950s, Theodor Adorno likewise argued that while superstitious irrationality existed before the formation of mass societies in varying geographies and degrees, it was in mass societies that its “institutionalization has reached, by means of mass production, a quantity which is likely to result in a new quality of attitudes and behavior” (1974: 15). I follow a similar line of thinking in the book. The impositions and afordabilities of platforms recycle and popularize pre-existing values, which were specific to restricted or niche milieus. For instance, the value of meaningful consumption, that is, the idea that a choice should be innovative, authentic, inspired, cool, experimental, individual, or customized, which was limited to exclusive cultural formations, becomes massively dispersed through platforms as vehicle for aspirational class belonging.

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Let us however first encounter a question that one can ask vis-à-vis the project at hand: why to choose the very term “curation” and its ofshoots to speak about cultures of platform capitalism? Why to call this logic “curatorial” and not choose other adjacent concepts to describe it, such as “artistic” or “editorial”? This question has two intertwined aspects. The first is related to the question of how does the employment of a term help reveal and reconstruct aspects of the subject at hand and how is this very choice justified given that it overlaps with other concepts laying in its immediate vicinity? This aspect is elaborated in Chapter 2, where I discuss the historical, discursive, and afective conventions surrounding the concept; for now, it sufices to say that, from a critical theory perspective, theoretical concepts are constructions that help us say and see larger things about the world or participate in polemics for social formations (Held, 1980). Theoretical concepts are thus relays that allow critical reconstructions of the past, present, and future. The question of which concepts to choose (or introduce) for examining phenomena matters not only for determining scientific accuracy but for mobilizing afective, historical, linguistic, and material assemblages into paths of critical thinking. I hold that the term “curation” can efectively generalize and register issues around aspirational consumption and production, class subjectification and ideology, new regimes of labor and economies of coolness, authenticity, and inspiration, that is, of the cultures of platform capitalism I will be speaking about. This is partly so because, curation, in my reading, is a term that, as mentioned, combines the seemingly opposed tendencies between creativity and organization, which are injunctions that shape a dominant ideological horizon of neoliberal capitalism.6 Deploying the term “artistic” to speak about the cultural logics of platform capitalism, for instance, would highlight assemblages of disorganization, individual genius, and impulsive creativity, which, while present, do not suficiently account for the organizational part that this imperative encompasses, for example, to set up oneself as entrepreneur, network, set up pricing mechanisms, among others.7 In contrast, the “editorial”, which is often used by media studies theorists to refer to similar phenomena (e.g., Pitcan, Marwick and boyd, 2018), underemphasizes the fashioning of the self as a work of art or the convention of creative genius. The terms curating, curation, and the curator are more appropriate as they suggest anthropological cultures, solidified to what we can call homo curatorius, which are both inspiring and rational, fun and organized, creative and reasonable. Lastly, as noted, the practice of selecting, displaying, and authorizing content is a ubiquitous composition of value in platform capitalism. In short, I choose to speak about the distributed curatorial logics as many of these practices I describe explicitly mobilize this term, and, on the other hand, I want to highlight the rationality beyond the descriptiveness which sheds light on platform-based social interaction. The platform economy ofers the possibility for ordinary users to curate themselves in a myriad of ways, including the potential to (aesthetically) organize Airbnb experiences, to become a life coach from scratch or to come up with food storytelling on Instagram, which are some of the curation examples I will be discussing in the following chapters. This productive curation interweaves with consumptive curation, that is, to organize a life around a concept, live the best and most customized tourist experiences, self-actualize, or eat the most unique and authentic food. Productive and consumptive curation combine in platform capitalism. A good case in point here is tourist destinations that are (sometimes inadvertently) curated by everyday users who are curating themselves to their audiences via the use hashtags and location tags. The island of Santorini in Greece, a typical photogenic destination known for idyllic sunsets, for instance, gets massive hashtag curation on Instagram from everyday users striving to showcase their exceptional moments to their followers. This crowd curation has real efects as it makes the island more desirable, exclusive, and unafordable for locals while producing unsustainable touristic practices from an environmental point of view.

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If we were to visualize the curatorial imperative, we can imagine two very diferent modes of arranging a commercial space: the flea market and the concept store. The flea market is the utmost non-curated space, as the sellers simply sell their products without having the imperatives of selection, narration, and expertise in mind. There is no expectation that the products will intervene in the general vision or identity of the customer or that the seller’s “unique vision” will be communicated to the customer: the underlying agreement between sellers and consumers is that market exchange is merely functional. Thus, decisions around selection and display in a flea market are mostly hands-on, having to do with fitting as many products as possible in the vendor’s limited space and usually selecting the top selling products to be displayed in the front. On the contrary, the selection and display of items in a concept store are regulated by a theme, a concept that echoes the larger vision of the brand or the owner of the store. The items are expressions, representations, or documents of this concept, and their arrangement in space seemingly conveys an ordered narrative, the customer consumes a story that can intervene in their social identity. To go back to Adorno, it is not that similar shops or curated practices did not exist before but that the increasing difusion of digital platforms in social and economic life intensifies curated forms of social interaction quantitatively and qualitatively. In the rest of this chapter, I present the theoretical points of departure and methodological perspectives informing this book.

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1.2 Theory on Platforms, Cultures, and Curating

The first point to be made after this conceptualization pertains to the role platforms in molding the curatorial logic and its related cultures. I understand platforms, from Google to Facebook and from Airbnb to Uber, as infrastructures mediating production, consumption, and exchange as well as business models involved in the processes of capitalization (Longley, 2017). When I speak of platforms throughout the book, I refer to commercial enterprises; this is not to say that non-commercial platforms do not exist but that it is the commercial platforms that unconditionally govern the internet space (Poell, Nieborg, and Dufy, 2022). There are two approaches to platforms that I will be drawing from, a broader and a narrower one. The broader focuses on platforms in macro sociological terms, as the digita manifestations of capitalist firms that bring together diferent multisided markets, including advertisers, developers, creators and users, and largely rely on the extraction and processing of data (Srnicek, 2017; Sadowski, 2019).8 Apart from GAFAM (Google [Alphabet], Amazon, Facebook [Meta], Apple and Microsoft), the term covers companies that have massively invested in digital services and make use of user data for productive ends, such as media conglomerates, like Walt Disney and Warner Bros, consumer electronics corporations, like Sony and Samsung, and broadcast and subscription on demand video streaming services (SVOD), like Netflix, Disney+ and HBO. There is a narrower approach that puts emphasis on how platforms enable the creative capacities of users, according to which platforms are “data infrastructures that facilitate, aggregate, monetize, and govern interactions between end-users and content and service providers” (Poell, Nieborg and Dufy, 2022: 5).9 Here the focus is on platforms as digital infrastructures which allow and enable cultural producers and everyday users to produce content within a larger “platform ecosystem” (Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal, 2018:12), including creating apps in Google Play Store and App Store, videos on Amazon’s Twitch or Google’s YouTube, performances of the self in Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and ByDance’s Tik-Tok, to name a few. While the first approach mostly focuses on the macroscopic shifts in the political economy of capitalism, the emergence of new value chains or the command of algorithms, the second explores specific socio-cultural practices involving human actors, such as the rise of new cultural intermediaries and experts bypassing the filtering of traditional gatekeepers (Maguire and Matthews, 2012; Patel, 2020), the diferent forms of digital labor (Kneese and Palm, 2020), the content creator ecologies (Arriagada and Ibáñez, 2020) and crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and other digital forms of economic circulations (Langley and Leyshon, 2017). Without losing sight of the former macroscopic role of digital industries throughout the book, I will be mostly referring to the narrower function of platforms, as this is helpful for emphasizing their role in shaping cultural activity. The cultural production and general activity in fashion, food, and life coaching which I examine is shaped in a way that is constantly tending toward curation.

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