Taste Maker

The internet made everyone a publisher.

It forgot to make enough editors.

That, I think, is where we are now. Drowning in content. Choking on opinion. Surrounded by more information than any human being could ever need.

Every person is now a media company.

Which sounds empowering.

And it was, for a while.

The internet broke the gates open. You no longer needed permission from an editor, publisher, TV producer, record label, or newspaper owner. You could write, film, post, share, build, rant, publish, and find your people.

Brilliant.

But we forgot something important. Publishing was never just about distribution. It was also about judgement.

And judgement is the thing we’ve lost.

The Death of the Editor

Editors used to matter.

At their best, editors performed a vital function. They filtered. They asked: is this worth saying? Is it true? Is it clear? Is it useful? Is it original? Is it ready?

They protected the reader from the writer’s worst instincts. And believe me, writers need protecting from themselves.

I know I do.

Because the first version of almost anything is usually too long, too pleased with itself, too vague, too obvious, or too desperate to sound clever.

An editor spots that. But the internet removed that friction.

Now we can go straight from thought to publication in about 14 seconds.

No pause.
No challenge.
No second pair of eyes.

No one standing between our half-formed opinion and the rest of humanity.

And, dear god, it shows.

The Content Swamp

We don’t have an information problem anymore.

We have a curation problem.

There is too much of everything. The result is not enlightenment, it’s exhaustion.

Every day feels like standing in front of an infinite buffet where half the food is stale, a quarter of it is fake, and the rest might be brilliant but you’ve lost the will to look.

So we scroll.

We skim.

We save things for later and never return. We open tabs like tiny acts of optimism, then close them three weeks later in shame.

We mistake exposure for learning and volume for value. We mistake being constantly informed for being wise.

And the platforms love this because the scroll is profitable.

Confusion keeps us clicking. Outrage keeps us engaged. Novelty keeps us coming back. The machine doesn’t care whether something is good.

It cares whether that we don't notice.

AI Made the Problem Worse

And now, of course, AI has arrived.

Because what the world really needed was a way to produce even more content, even faster, with even less thought.

Fantastic.

Now anyone can generate 40 LinkedIn posts before breakfast. They can turn one podcast into 97 clips. They can produce newsletters, summaries, scripts, captions, carousels, and ebooks without ever really having to sit with an idea.

This is sold to us as productivity. but I’m not sure it is. A lot of it looks like more noise to me.

AI has lowered the cost of producing average content to almost zero. Which means average content is about to become infinite. And when something becomes infinite, it loses value.

This is the great paradox of the content age.

The easier it becomes to publish, the harder it becomes to matter.

Because attention doesn’t scale.
Trust doesn’t scale.
Time doesn’t scale.

We still only have one brain, one pair of eyes, and a limited number of hours before we need to cook dinner, answer messages, sleep badly, and wonder where our lives went.

So in a world where everyone can create, the scarce skill is no longer creation.

It’s curation.

Curation Is the New Superpower

Curation sounds boring. It sounds like something a museum does with ceramics.

But I think it might be one of the most important skills of the next decade.

Because curation is not just collecting links. It’s not dumping ten articles into a newsletter and calling it “what I’m reading.”

Real curation is judgement and taste and context. And guess what? AI can't do this. It can't even be trained to do this. But it's not about joining the dots. It's about experience and life and emotion. Try vibe coding that.

Good curation saves people time and changes how people see the world.

The curator doesn’t just point. They interpret. They help you make sense of the mess.

And that's becoming incredibly valuable because the mess is now the default condition of modern life.

Web 4 Point...Whatever This Is

Web 1.0 was about access.

You could find information. Static pages. Directories. Weird fonts. Terrible design. The whole thing felt like a library built by people who had never been inside a library.

Web 2.0 was about participation.

We all became users, creators, commenters, sharers, likers, posters. The web became social. Which was brilliant until it wasn't.

Web 3.0 was supposed to be about ownership.

Blockchain, tokens, decentralisation, digital wallets, NFTs, all of it wrapped in words that made normal people feel like they’d accidentally walked into a finance conference.

Now I think we’re entering the age of curation.

I'm calling it Web 4.0 because it's a big change.

The next version of the internet won’t be defined by who can publish.
It won’t be defined by who can generate.

It will be defined by who can filter.

Who do you trust to make sense of the noise?
Who helps you understand what deserves your attention?
Who saves you from wasting your life on beautifully formatted rubbish?

That person becomes powerful.

Because they own trust.

Taste Beats Output

This is why taste matters so much now.

Taste used to sound elitist. Like something people said while pretending to understand wine.

But taste is just developed judgement. It’s the result of paying attention for a long time. Taste is knowing what good looks like. Taste is knowing when something is derivative, even if it’s polished. Taste is sensing when an idea has depth.

Taste is what AI struggles with because taste requires values. It requires context. It requires lived experience. It requires caring about the difference between something that is technically fine and something that is actually worth your time.

Output without taste just fills the world with more stuff. And the world doesn't need more stuff.

It needs better filters.

The Return of the Human Editor

So yes, I think curation is becoming a superpower. Maybe the superpower.

Because choosing is where the value is now.

What do you read?
What do you ignore?
Who do you trust?

These are not small questions. They shape culture and politics and business.

They shape how we think.

The curator is not a passive collector. The curator is an active force. A builder of attention. A defender of quality. Your guide through the swamp.

And we need more of them. Because I don’t want an internet with more content.

I want an internet with more taste.

Takeaways for the Week Ahead

Build your filter. Don’t just consume whatever the algorithm throws at you. Choose three people whose judgement you genuinely trust and pay closer attention to them.

Share less, but better. Before you repost, forward, or recommend something, ask: does this add clarity or just more noise?

Become useful. The next time you share an article, don’t just send the link. Add one sentence explaining why it matters.

The internet made everyone a publisher.

Fine.

Now we need more editors.

And maybe the best thing any of us can become, in this next version of the web, is someone other people trust to help them see clearly.

Until next time,

Jon "Taste Maker" Kaye

Choosing to live more deliberately

P.S.

Can you recommend anyone you think is a brilliant curator? I want to find more of them.