For centuries, the answer to this question was relatively clear. Programmers decided, artistic directors, critics, editors. People with names, with positions, with an identifiable point of view. One could agree or disagree with their choices, but you knew where they came from. Curation had a face.
Today the answer is more opaque. A growing part of what people discover in culture, a film, an album, a performance, a book, reaches them through recommendation systems optimised for engagement, not for value. The algorithm has no taste. It has objectives. And its objectives rarely coincide with those of a programmer or a critic.
This is not entirely new. The cultural industry has always had commercial logics that shaped what reached audiences. What is new is the scale and the invisibility. When a programming director chooses a performance, that choice is public, defensible, contestable. When Instagram decides that a particular type of cultural content will appear in the feeds of millions of people, that decision has no visible author, no argument, and cannot be debated.
The problem is not that algorithms exist. It is that they are occupying a space that once belonged to human curation. And doing so without most people noticing the substitution.
A theatre programmer building a season is making a statement about the world. They are saying: this matters, this deserves attention, this work has relevance now. That statement can be discussed. The algorithm makes no statement. It optimises. And optimisation for engagement tends to favour the familiar over the challenging, the confirmed over the experimental, what already works over what has not yet been tried.
The most silent consequence of this is the narrowing of the field of the possible. Not because difficult or risky work stops being made. It continues to be made, in small venues, in fragile contexts, with precarious support. But because the distance between that work and the audience that might care about it has grown. The intermediary who might once have been an enthusiastic critic or a curious programmer is now, increasingly, a system that does not know what surprise is.
What to do with this? There is no simple answer, and nostalgia is of no use. There is no returning to a time when human curation was the only filter, nor would it be desirable, because that time had its own problems of exclusion and power.
What can be done is to make human curation more conscious of itself. More explicit in its criteria, clearer in its arguments, more willing to explain why a choice was made and what is expected of it. In a world where the algorithm decides in silence, the voice of the programmer, the critic, the cultural mediator gains a value it may never have had quite so clearly: that of being recognisably human.
The question is not whether algorithms will continue to decide what people see. It is whether there will be, alongside them, voices with enough authority to propose something else.
Photo: © Glenn Carstens-Peters
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