Curation
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 6.26.25
Consider your life experiences. Your family and friends. Your community, your daily commute, your work, and education. Major life events and chance encounters. These are deeply meaningful experiences, but they represent an infinitesimally small fraction of the global human experience.
Yet we still develop opinions on matters far beyond what we directly observe. We gossip about friends of friends. We argue the repercussions of political policies in foreign countries. We worry about housing markets, financial markets, and geopolitical tensions. We worry about war, the White House, and who we want to win Love Island. We watch TikToks, Reels, and Shorts from travel influencers explaining why cycling to Ses Illetes is the ultimate summer flex, or why we’re obsessed with AI-generated avatars narrating our day-in-the-life micro-vlogs from sleeper trains across Europe. We face a constant barrage of information, offering glimpses into a world far larger than our own.
It makes us feel as though we understand the human experience — our societies, customs, and cultures. The trends and eras throughout history. It all seems so clear. We hold our beliefs dearly as they define who we are, but the majority of the information we use to construct these beliefs has been conveyed to us secondhand.
The reality is that the collective human experience is far too complex to grasp. We are simply incapable of knowing every detail. We rely on abstractions, shorthands, and stereotypes to make sense of it all, but it is not enough. We need filters to determine what information is worthy of our attention.
Historically, we relied on journalists at credible institutions to serve as trusted intermediaries. They pursued and reported the relevant stories of the day, shaping coherent narratives for readers to follow. Except the apparent clarity of it all was just a symptom of the incomplete picture being painted.
With the internet, the floodgates have opened. We can access live video from individuals across the globe instantly, for free, from a device in the palm of our hand. Billions of hours are spent posting and consuming content on corporate social networks each day. More information is created every 9 minutes than was recorded in all of human history up until 1986. It is too much to comprehend. We cannot keep up.
So we outsourced the role of curation to computers. They work around the clock to sift through lifetimes of content to surface the exact five-second clip most statistically likely to release dopamine in your specific brain. It is, quite frankly, indistinguishable from magic — if magic relied on consuming a constant stream of sensitive personal information for advertisers to exploit.
The incentives are maligned. Your attention is commoditized and sold at auction. It comes as no surprise that creators study how to maximize algorithmic distribution, resulting in countless hours of content optimized for short-term satisfaction at the expense of long-term positive outcomes. Numerous studies have documented the negative effects of social media consumption, but we do not need science to tell us what we already know. Just look at the words we use to describe the experience of using modern social media — slop, brainrot, and doomscrolling. We spent 2.4 trillion hours on social media in 2024. If this is how we describe that time, are we setting ourselves up for success?
Our curation algorithms should benefit us, not advertisers. This is why Aemula has no ads, does not farm personal data, and puts control of curation in the hands of the community. Our algorithms are open-source, human-readable, and community-governed, allowing full transparency into the incentives of the ecosystem. Our bridging-based algorithm is designed to open new lines of communication across ideologies and help readers explore high-quality perspectives, free of outside influence. Just real people reporting real news and expanding worldviews.
This week, we spotlight writers discussing the harmful effects of our current social media systems and potential solutions to break free from this downward spiral. We encourage you to explore their work and consider subscribing to them directly.
After Babel
Written by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business and author of multiple books including The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, along with editor and researcher, Zach Rausch, as previously featured in our spotlight, “Influence”.
“As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.— Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing”
The Etymology Nerd
Written by Adam Aleksic, a Harvard graduate in linguistics, content creator, contributing writer for The Washington Post, and author of Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language, as previously featured in our spotlight, “Complexity”.
“Even a meme or trend would feel more special when you heard it from a friend, rather than a viral video. There’s something to an organic-feeling, word-of-mouth phenomenon that just carries more authenticity. Again, this is compressed through the algorithmic oversaturation of memes, the same way you might connect less to a painting when it’s surrounded by hundreds of other paintings.
Maybe social media makes us feel worse about ourselves because it removes all these little meaningful actions from our lives—rolling them all into a single, mass-produced experience. Ironically, with more things happening at once, there are fewer things to interpret; ritual demands time and space, but we consume an endless stream of space without time. We end up as detached spectators, looking at paintings in museums rather than churches.”
Techno Sapiens
Written by Jacqueline Nesi, a clinical psychologist and professor at Brown University whose research focuses on how technology and social media impact mental health and parenting, especially during adolescence.
“Researchers in New Zealand enrolled 20 children for a series of workshops, small group interviews, and other activities. Results highlighted just how much parents’ technology use shapes family dynamics, with children highly aware of these patterns.
In some cases, kids’ descriptions were neutral or positive–i.e., ‘My mum and dad and me and my brother watch Peppa Pig on TV.’2 In many cases, though, devices were seen as interfering with time together, leading to frustration or sadness, e.g., ‘I’m sad because mum is watching her phone and isn’t playing boardgames with me.’”
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