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Bazaar
As with a real-life bazaar, the the Boing Boing Bazaar is full of clothing, gadgets, decor, and assorted gubbins. Photograph: Arnel Hecimovic/corbis
As with a real-life bazaar, the the Boing Boing Bazaar is full of clothing, gadgets, decor, and assorted gubbins. Photograph: Arnel Hecimovic/corbis

Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade

This article is more than 13 years old
Bespoke computing experiences promise a pipe dream of safety and beauty – but the real delight lies in making your own choices

The launch of the iPad and the general success of mobile device app stores has created a buzzword frenzy for "curated" computing – computing experiences where software and wallpaper and attendant foofaraw for your device are hand-picked for your pleasure.

In theory, this creates an aesthetically uniform, and above all safe and easy, computing environment, as the curators see to it that only the very prettiest, easiest-to-use and most virus-free apps show up in the store.

I'm all for it. After all, I've spent the past 10 years co-curating Boing Boing, a place where my business-partners and I pick the websites that interest us the most and assemble them into a kind of deep, wide, searchable catalogue of things that you should know, do, and marvel at.

We've recently launched a store, the Boing Boing Bazaar, consisting of the most interesting inventions, clothing, gadgets, decor, and assorted gubbins that our readers have created, as picked by us. My Twitter account mostly consists of retweets from other twitterers – my collection of the best tweets I've seen today. I am a born curator, and have spent my life amassing collections and showing them off.

But there's something important to note about all these curatorial roles I enjoy: none of them are coercive. No one forces you to read Boing Boing, and if you do, there's nothing that prevents you from reading another weblog (or a couple hundred other weblogs). Order as many gizmos as you'd like from the Boing Boing Bazaar, we'll never tell you that you can't fill your knick-knack shelves from anyone else's curated wunderkammer. Follow me on Twitter if it pleases you, and feel free to follow anyone else you find interesting.

The beauty of noncoercive curation is that there are so many reasons we value things, it's really impossible to imagine that any one place will serve as a one-stop shop for our needs.

Two categories in particular won't ever be fulfilled by a curator: first, the personal. No curator is likely to post pictures of my family, videos of my daughter, notes from my wife, stories I wrote in my adolescence that my mum's recovered from a carton in the basement.

My own mediascape includes lots of this stuff, and it is every bit as compelling and fulfilling as the slickest, most artistic works that show up in the professional streams. I don't care that the images are overexposed or badly framed, that the audio is poor quality, that I can barely read my 14-year-old self's handwriting. The things I made with my own hands and the things that represent my relationships with my community and loved ones are critical to my identity, and I won't trade them for anything.

Second, the tailored. I have loads of little scripts, programs, systems, files and such that make perfect sense to me, even though they're far from elegant or perfect. There's the script I use for resizing and uploading images to Boing Boing, the shelf I use to organise my to-be-read pile, the carefully-built mail rules that filter out spam and trolls and make sure I see the important stuff. I am a market of one: no one wants to make a commercial proposition out of filling my needs, and if they did, your average curator would be nuts to put something so tightly optimised for my needs into the public sphere, where it would be so much clutter. But again, these are the nuts and bolts that hold my life together and I can't live without them.

In a noncoercive curatorial world, these categories can peacefully coexist with curated spaces. There are hundreds of places where I can find recommendations and lists and reviews and packages of software for my computer (Ubuntu, the version of GNU/Linux I use, has its own very good software store). I can use as many or as few of these curators as I'd like, and what's more, I can add in things that matter to me because they exactly suit my needs or fulfil some sentimental niche in my life.

But I fear that when analysts slaver over "curated" computing, it's because they mean "monopoly" computing – computing environments like the iPad where all your apps have to be pre-approved by a single curating entity, one who uses the excuse of safety and consistency to justify this outrageous power grab. Of course, these curators are neither a guarantee of safety, nor of quality: continuous revelations about malicious software and capricious, inconsistent criteria for evaluating software put the lie to this. Even without them, it's pretty implausible to think that an app store with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of programs could be blindly trusted to be free from bugs, malware, and poor aesthetic choices.

No, the only real reason to adopt coercive curation is to attain a monopoly over a platform – to be able to shut out competitors, extract high rents on publishers whose materials are sold in your store, and sell a pipe dream of safety and beauty that you can't deliver, at the cost of homely, handmade, personal media that define us and fill us with delight.

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