Curating your own interests is essential. There are so many think pieces devoted to curating your media diet or trimming down on the time that you spend on social media. The concept reads to me that too many people are passively letting crap come to them. Of course, the algorithm is shit, the algorithm only exists to sell you shit. Google and Facebook might not have written their formulae, but every bit of pop culture was created on a recipe to deliver profits by appealing to a broad base of people.

What has changed is now the idea that we should limit the creative output of the world to a narrow demographic of teenage boys and young men's tastes no longer works. If you wonder why it seems twenty-something and middle-aged white dudes seem to be the angriest cohort, it might be that the algorithm and data economy showed they weren't the only game in town. Older white guys selling to their younger selves was a bankable idea; they were obviously best suited to sell to an audience they knew. But now, it's evident that those bankable ideas missed a laughably large section of the population as to be completely meaningless.

That isn't to say that culture isn't still tied to this demographic. Yet, the various ways that the culture has opened up to appeal to other people outside of straight teenage or twenty-something males has changed the way that we see media. The problem is that much of the culture that's being made period is pandering and stupid. Our limited vocabulary of narrative is why so many angry young men online sound like cheap villains; they have no other cultural input. For all the talk of the golden age of television, a lot of people's diet is still formulaic garbage.

This isn't to get snobbish. (Okay, let's be honest, it's actually coming from a pretentious place.) Not all mainstream culture is garbage, but a fair amount of it is disposable. The internet's promise of a long tail only meant that people can watch even more endless reruns. The same small audiences that always have driven the culture forward feed the massive beasts with new creators to hone into commercial gruel. We have access to more creators than ever, but unless you go searching for them, or find good guides, you're going to be stuck trawling the bottom. I resent the idea that all culture can or should be comfort food; you should want to be challenged. You don't need to spend all of your days listening to Avantgarde orchestral music while watching strange french art movies. But maybe your entire media diet shouldn't be made to ensure you never have to think.