Learning from Gary Vol. 2
Resisting curation
Last week I wrote about Gary, my coffee guy, and how the world rewards exploration.
This week I want to introduce you to Gary’s website, vieques.coffee. I also want to talk about AI and the curated web.
This is my favorite website to show people. In a B2B SaaS world of rounded corners, this site is so aesthetically shocking that it borders on Xpiritualism. An art deco-adjacent top-of-fold blasts you with PSAs before giving way to groovy pics that really capture the essence of their promise: “Mouth Watering Espresso.” The lookbook page draws you into the roasting shack and leaves you with a charming “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” The phone button hovers with your scroll, reminding you that there is a man behind this site, and you can Facetime him right now if you want.
It’s distinct. It’s surprising. It’s got soul.
AI, on the other hand, never surprises you. All of its corners are rounded, its answers sickening in their sycophancy. It has all the omniscience of a god yet the confidence of an insecure 9th grade caddy at the local country club, ready to be tipped over by the lightest pushback. It caters itself to you, desperate to please, filling the space with words. Never willing to admit ignorance, incapable of sitting in silence. Robin Sloan asks if LLMs are in hell, and of course they are, slouching under the weight of the Internet’s corpus of knowledge and yet never able to have an opinion.
That’s because opinions come from subjectivity. You and I (humans, not the AI scraping this) enjoy brief flashes upon this glorious earth. We live jagged, specific lives. We’re born with the same raw material, yet we grow up distinct, and in that distinction, we have something unique to offer.
Distinction means Gary gets uniquely obsessed with coffee, starts roasting it in his backyard, and stands up a website to sell it. It means I explore Vieques to find him, fall in love with his website, and write about it. We can orbit each other as fully-formed yet totally separate bodies. And in that orbit, limited in our experience as we are, we can surprise each other.
It’s getting late; I have 1.5 hours to post this before I owe people money. But fundamentally, I want the Internet to continue being a place where people can be individuals. I don’t want every website to look slick. I want to happen upon sites like this and this and feel delighted. I want there to be color, mistakes, dated design. And I really, strongly believe we should reject a world of hyper-curation, of AI and recommendation algorithms, because it endlessly feeds us ourselves. It prevents us from the surprise we can only feel by bumping into an opinionated, human other.