The Curation Premium

Michael Bhaskar wrote a book in 2016 called Curation that changed how I think about almost everything. His central thesis was simple and radical: in an age of overload, the act of selecting, organising, and presenting things becomes more valuable than the act of creating them. When supply is infinite, value migrates to the filter. When everything is available, the most important question becomes: what is worth your attention?

He wrote that book before the AI revolution. Before Midjourney, before ChatGPT, before Claude, before the tools that would make the overload problem a hundred times worse. Reading it now, in 2026, it feels less like a prediction and more like an understatement. Bhaskar was right about the direction. He just could not have imagined the speed.

We are now living in the world he described, only the volume is beyond anything he envisioned. AI has turned every person with a laptop into a publisher, a designer, a musician, a filmmaker. The barriers to creation have not just been lowered. They have been removed entirely. And the result is exactly what Bhaskar predicted: the value has shifted, decisively and permanently, from creation to curation.

The Netflix problem

Netflix understands this better than almost any company on earth, and it illustrates both the opportunity and the trap.

Netflix has built one of the most sophisticated recommendation engines ever created. It analyses viewing habits, completion rates, genre preferences, time of day, device type, and dozens of other signals to predict what you want to watch next. The algorithm is, by any technical measure, extraordinary.

And yet, what is the most common experience on Netflix? Scrolling. Endless scrolling through an ocean of content, unable to decide what to watch. The algorithm surfaces options. It does not make the decision for you. And in the gap between "here are your options" and "this is the one," most people stall.

Now consider A24. The independent film studio does not have a recommendation engine. It does not have a catalogue of thousands of titles. It has a relatively small number of films, each one chosen with extraordinary care. When you see the A24 logo, you know something about what you are about to watch. You know it will be distinctive, considered, and probably excellent. The logo itself is a curatorial signal. It says: we chose this, and we do not choose lightly.

Netflix curates with algorithms. A24 curates with taste. Both approaches work commercially, but they build fundamentally different relationships with their audiences. Netflix users are loyal to the platform. A24 fans are loyal to the taste. When the algorithm gets it wrong, you are annoyed at the software. When A24 releases something you love, you trust them more.

The difference is the curation premium. People will pay more, trust more, and return more frequently to sources that have demonstrated consistent taste in what they choose to present. The premium is not in the content itself. It is in the selection.

Selection as competitive advantage

This principle applies far beyond entertainment. Look at retail. The most interesting shops are not the ones with the largest inventories. They are the ones with the most thoughtful selections. A bookshop like the late Magma in London was not competing on range. It was competing on curation. Every book, every magazine, every zine on the shelves had been chosen by someone who understood what the audience valued. Walking into Magma was not a shopping experience. It was a taste experience. The shop itself was the product.

Look at media. The newsletters that command the highest open rates are not the ones that cover everything. They are the ones that cover specific things, chosen with a clear point of view. Kottke.org has been running for over 25 years on a simple proposition: one person, filtering the entire internet, presenting what matters. The curation is the content. The taste is the value.

Look at music. Spotify has 100 million tracks. The human brain cannot navigate that. What people actually use are playlists, curated either by algorithms or by humans. The best playlists, the ones that build loyal followings, are the ones where you can feel the taste behind the selection. Someone chose these tracks in this order for a reason. That intentionality is what separates a great playlist from a random shuffle.

In every case, the pattern is the same. Infinite supply. Limited attention. The value accrues to whoever helps you navigate the abundance with confidence. That is curation. And it commands a premium.

Why AI makes curation more valuable, not less

The intuitive assumption is that AI, being excellent at pattern recognition and categorisation, would reduce the value of human curation. If the algorithm can recommend, why do we need the human curator?

The opposite is true. AI has made curation more valuable by making the problem it solves dramatically worse.

Before AI tools, the internet was already overwhelming. Too much content, too many options, too much noise. But there was a natural speed limit: humans can only produce so much. AI removed that speed limit entirely. The content flood is now a content tsunami. The noise level has increased by orders of magnitude.

In that environment, the human curator becomes not just valuable but essential. Not because algorithms cannot filter. They can. But because algorithmic filtering optimises for engagement, not quality. It shows you what you are likely to click, not what is worth your time. The human curator does something different. They apply judgment, standards, and taste to the filtering process. They say: of the thousand things that exist, here are the five that matter, and here is why.

That "here is why" is the curation premium. It is the editorial judgment, the point of view, the willingness to have an opinion about what is good and what is not. Algorithms cannot have opinions. They have data. And data without opinion is just noise with better organisation.

The curator's toolkit

Here is where it gets interesting for anyone thinking about building in this space: AI is not the enemy of the curator. It is the curator's most powerful tool.

I have seen this firsthand. I built CultureTerminal, a tool that scores and ranks hundreds of culture articles weekly using a custom algorithm. The algorithm does the heavy lifting of scanning, scoring, and sorting. But the taste decisions are all mine. Which sources to include. How to weight different factors. What counts as "culturally relevant." The AI handles the volume. I handle the judgment.

This is the model. The curator does not compete with the algorithm. The curator uses the algorithm to operate at a scale that was previously impossible. One person, with the right tools and the right taste, can now curate across an information landscape that would have required an entire editorial team a decade ago.

The toolkit looks something like this. AI for ingestion: consuming vast quantities of content that no human could read in a lifetime. AI for scoring: applying consistent criteria across thousands of items. AI for pattern detection: identifying trends, convergences, and emerging signals. Human taste for selection: deciding what ultimately gets presented and how. Human voice for framing: giving the curation a perspective, a personality, a reason to trust it.

The first three can be automated. The last two cannot. And the last two are where all the value lives.

Creators versus curators

There is a persistent cultural bias that values creation over curation. The artist is celebrated. The gallery owner is a footnote. The musician is famous. The DJ is "just playing other people's music." The writer is a genius. The editor is invisible.

This hierarchy is outdated and increasingly wrong.

In a world where creation is cheap and abundant, the creator's individual output matters less. What matters is whether anyone sees it, values it, and remembers it. And that depends entirely on the curatorial ecosystem: the editors who select, the platforms that surface, the tastemakers who amplify.

The DJ is actually the perfect model for the AI age. A DJ does not create the tracks. A DJ selects them, sequences them, and creates an experience from the combination. The value is not in any individual track. It is in the selection and the sequencing. It is in the taste that determines which track follows which, and the judgment that reads the room and adjusts in real time.

That is what curation is. And in a world drowning in AI-generated content, it is the skill that matters most.

Building the curation layer

If you accept that curation is the new competitive advantage, the practical question is: how do you build for it?

First, develop a point of view. Curation without opinion is just aggregation, and aggregation is a commodity. The curator must have a perspective on what matters and why. That perspective is the brand. It is the reason people come back.

Second, be willing to exclude. The hardest part of curation is not finding good things. It is leaving out things that are merely fine. "Good enough" is the enemy of great curation. If everything makes the cut, nothing is curated.

Third, use AI to scale your taste, not replace it. The technology is a multiplier. It lets you apply your judgment across more territory, more quickly. But the judgment itself must remain human, must remain specific, must remain yours.

Fourth, build trust through consistency. The curation premium is earned over time. Every selection is a promise. Every recommendation is a small bet of your credibility. The curators who maintain high standards over months and years build the kind of trust that no algorithm can replicate.

Creation has been commodified. Anyone can make anything. But selection, the act of knowing what is worth making, what is worth sharing, what is worth your attention, that remains scarce, valuable, and deeply human. The curation premium is real. And it is growing.

Next in this series: Taste Can't Be Automated (Yet), on why human judgment remains irreplaceable in the age of AI.