Field Note #3 · On Gatekeeping and Curation

“Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair inevitably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition. Our ‘Age of Anxiety’ is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools — with yesterday's concepts.” — Marshall McLuhan

I have to chuckle at those suddenly reaching for pitchforks and torches because they have finally noticed that there is a great deal of bad, thoughtless writing on the Internet.

This is not a new development. The Internet did not invent bad writing. It merely removed the economic and institutional filters that once constrained its distribution.

Having spent years in page layout and design, I experience a similar sense of amusement when I see people ready to fight civil wars over em-dashes, punctuation conventions, emoji, or other matters of stylistic orthodoxy.

These things do matter. They are part of the craft. But the intensity of the reaction often reveals something deeper than care for quality. (Please, nobody tell them about kerning!)

What is frequently presented as a defense of standards is often, upon closer inspection, a defense of identity — or of status.

Curation vs. Gatekeeping

This is where the distinction between curation and gatekeeping becomes important.

Curation is necessary. All fields of human endeavor require stewardship. Without standards, there is no continuity of craft. Without continuity of craft, there is no cumulative progress.

Editors, reviewers, maintainers, and teachers serve essential functions: they preserve signal-to-noise ratio.

Gatekeeping emerges from a different impulse — less concerned with preserving signal than with preserving hierarchy — the reflexive protection of perceived legitimacy by those who sense, consciously or not, that the basis of their own authority is becoming less secure.

The difference is subtle but consequential.

Curation asks: Does this contribute meaningfully to the body of work?

Gatekeeping asks: Does this threaten my position within it?

Volume and Scarcity

The current wave of anxiety around writing quality — and increasingly around machine-generated writing — exposes this dynamic tension with unusual intensity.

When the barriers to production fall, the volume of output invariably increases. But volume alone does not destroy signal. It merely makes signal harder to locate.

Bad writing can sometimes conceal good thinking. Good writing struggles to conceal the absence of it.

There is, however, a different and more defensible concern. The marginal cost of generating text has collapsed, while the marginal cost of reading and evaluating it remains human. When intellectual work is outsourced wholesale and forwarded unfiltered, the burden does not disappear — it shifts.

What once required effort to waste someone’s time now requires almost none. That asymmetry changes behavior, and those who object to it are not gatekeeping. They are defending something genuinely scarce: their own time and attention.

But attention is not the only scarcity being exposed.

For most of human history, legitimacy was conferred by institutional proximity. Publication, affiliation, and credentialing served as proxies for competence. When those mechanisms weaken, legitimacy must be established more directly — through clarity of thought and durability of contribution.

This transition removes protective ambiguity.

And ambiguity, once removed, reveals uncomfortable asymmetries.

Legitimacy and Intelligence

We tend to assume that intelligence and insight are universally valued. At least, this is what we tell our children. In practice, intelligence is often tolerated only when it does not disrupt existing social equilibria. When it does, it provokes defensive reactions — rarely framed nakedly in those terms, but instead expressed as concerns about tone, form, process, or propriety.

The reaction is not to the medium, but to the implied redistribution of legitimacy.

I sometimes find myself hoping that we never succeed in creating a truly superhuman intelligence — not because it would necessarily harm us, but because I suspect we would mostly just resent it for being smarter than us. Much as we so often resent the encounter with an exceptional intelligence somehow different from our own within one another.

The history of human response to extraordinary intellect is not, on the whole, a generous one. We celebrate it safely in retrospect — once it has been domesticated into curriculum and canon — but in the hot flash of the moment, brilliance that cannot be credentialed or contained tends to provoke not admiration but anxiety.

This is the gatekeeping impulse at its deepest root: not a defense of standards, but a defense against the unbearable possibility that legitimacy was never ours to confer.

Protected Spaces

This, I suspect, is precisely why places like the Institute for Advanced Study exist.

They are not merely centres of blue-sky research. They are protected ecosystems where the legitimacy of thought does not depend on its conformity to prevailing cultural anxieties. They function as buffers between fragile social hierarchies and the destabilizing force of unconstrained inquiry.

One imagines the IAS founders understood this need intuitively. Brilliance has always required shelter from environments where credentialing substitutes for curiosity — and patrons who understood this.

Final Question

Gatekeeping is, at its core, a symptom of performative anxiety: the fear that one’s own position cannot withstand unconstrained scrutiny.

Curation, by contrast, is an act of ongoing stewardship. It assumes that quality will ultimately distinguish itself, and that the role of institutions and individuals is not to suppress emergence of novelty, but to preserve coherence of meaning.

William Gibson (the Pogo of sci-fi) once wrote, “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”

I frequently ask myself how to navigate between these two poles — how to protect my own attention without becoming what I critique.

What do you think?

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