We are often more certain than the evidence really allows.
More quotesPage 68 contains the fact that would change your decision. You will never see it. Page 67 has already lost a fistfight with a notification, two breaking-news banners, a discount code and a spaniel refusing to leave a pond. Abundance can perform censorship without banning a syllable.
That is why curation deserves more suspicion and more respect. A list is an argument about priority. A supermarket shelf, search result, news feed and restaurant menu each make some possibilities easy to notice and leave others technically available in the basement. Placement becomes power long before anyone deletes anything. The curator’s incentive matters because attention is now the scarce material. A feed paid by time spent will favour another minute. A guide paid by better decisions should sometimes help you leave. Both may call themselves personalised. Only one has a reason to stop serving pudding.
I want the selection rule exposed: why this, why now, and according to whose objective? I want the route back to the underlying material, because summaries acquire confidence by hiding their discarded alternatives. “The algorithm chose it” is passive grammar doing security work for whoever chose the algorithm. Perhaps the future argument will not be over access to information. We have grotesque quantities of access. It will be over the right to know why one piece reached us while another remained perfectly public, perfectly searchable and functionally invisible.