The Curated Person

I wonder if a wave of eccentricities is going to define the future individual in the next decade or so. People will be evaluated on their differences: not solely as a quality of exclusion from a group but also as a marker of interest… a sort of benchmark in a survey of humanity, perhaps. As we see a search for and highlight of oddities and curiosities in the altered environment flourish, it follows that the “interesting person” would be the new feature on the horizon.

We curate places; we curate people. It is form of respect - or requisite distance, perhaps - borne of a system which long-ago destroyed established social relations and replaced them with a modulated chaos of fantasies: the larger the dream, the wider the gap between people. As the the booms and busts of global capitalism run their course, our lofty personal ambitions withdraw into the local and the ether. We begin to witness other people’s little worlds in relation to our own. They become gems - tiny systems which we can behold and fetishize but not fully enter into. The protective cell membrane surrounding the individual is durable by this time, and, as autonomous agents, we fail to fall into an easily identifiable grouping. But because there are so many of us, a common denominator inevitably runs among us. And this denominator may be the wild card in determining the future of humanity.