Why Curiosity

TL;DR

Over the past 7 months, I packed up my life in Chicago, spent two months travelling around Europe by train, lived in Vilnius for a month, and then London for a little more than 3.5 months.

Two New Curiosity-Related Initiatives

For my next step, I'm looking to move to Urbino, Italy, and found the Institute for Human Curiosity. I will also continue with my ongoing research into the history and language of color at the Colorphilia Newsletter.

I'm also starting a free network for independently hosted creatives / artists / researchers called CVRIOVS. If you want help starting your own site / newsletter (and own email domain) on an EU hosted platform, for cheaper than any other option, click there and learn more.

What? Where? Why? Huh?!

Almost a year ago, I had two hypotheses.

1. Curiosity is critical to both creativity and innovation.
2. Curiosity is being throttled by algorithms and artificial intelligence.

But I had two slight problems.

1. I couldn't easily define curiosity or prove either of my hypotheses.
2. If my hypotheses were correct, there would be a severe qualitative decrease in both creativity and innovation.

By that point, I had already been independently researching and writing Colorphilia for more than a year and my finances were the worst they had ever been. I was living in Chicago at the time, and while I had a small cadre of friends and neighbors, I felt more isolated that ever before. It had been several years since Twitter ceased to exist and Meta platforms like Threads and Instagram seemed to be not be sharing posts with your actual social network.

Misinformation

Paradoxically, I was happy with doing research, but becoming increasingly frustrated that while my newsletter was a good outlet to share my discoveries, it didn't matter in the slightest.

• I could discover the history of the tulip, and trace back a two millennia mistranslation, which would have implications in the understanding of two different religions, and yet, I had no way of changing anything.
• I would see an extremely popular and social media savvy dictionary making videos and posting information that ran counter to my research, and it wasn't even a case of David and Goliath, but David, and some random guy. The random guy just happened to write extremely long-form articles in the age of video clips and short attention spans.
  
  (I refer to them as David, because they themselves were up against a powerful Goliath. One comprised of artificial intelligence companies and billions and billions in investments.)

Search results were replaced by an AI-generated summary, which meant that it would make it virtually impossible to change misinformation in a system which seemed frozen in its generative knowledge, as it had been trained on centuries of mistakes and errors.

Even Wikipedia, who just celebrated 25 years, similar to all dictionaries and encyclopedias, was susceptible to human error. But it was (theoretically) constantly evolving. Generative AI was trained on a snapshot in time, without providing footnotes.

No one cared.

And people didn't seem to care. They were satisfied in getting some answer which sounded good, regardless of it was correct or not. What did it matter what the history of the tulip was, or why the turkey was called the turkey? It's nice to know, but it doesn't really change anything.

In some of the best-case scenarios, fact-sharers were going to a single (uncritical) source and stating it as indisputible fact. (And please don't get me started on the obsession with taking theoretical reconstructions of languages, eg. Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, and sharing the reconstructions as fact. Even if correct, they still gloss over centuries of linguistic evolutions and human interventions.)

Every etymology, every historical fact is a fascinating story, one which may not fit into a 6-second soundbite. And, let's face it, there are more important things happening in the world.

Practical Implications

Up until now, it seems to all be an academic argument, without making any real distinction or difference in real people's lives.

The same problems I had with sharing research were the same that people would have sharing their creativity. They may have spent years, investing time and money, building up their social networks, and then an algorithm can flip a proverbial switch and decide that no one is going to see their content.

Organic discovery seemed to be dead. People in creative fields being sidelined by people using generative AI to accomplish the "same" for less cost. And they would be paying outrageous fees to companies to allow them to list and sell whatever creative products they wanted to sell.

Developers were losing jobs in droves, practically making their own positions redundant. There have already been decades of companies minimizing the social sciences and liberal arts, which meant that people paid a lot of money for university degrees to train for jobs that no longer exist.

Initiative #1

No place to call your own and no way to contact your people.

More than a decade and a half after the explosion of social media has led people to have no place anymore. And if you are excited about something you created or learned, chances are, it will get lost within all the noise.

Building a website is expensive, because there is no guarantee that someone will even come there. Everything has become pay-to-play, renting without owning, and this is not sustainable. It's also not realistic for everyone to build their own servers.

I'm putting together a free network called CVRIOVS which will include a directory of independently hosted sites and newsletters. When launched it will also include ways to receive free promotion for your projects and more.

At that link, I also have an offer that I will set up your newsletter site, with your own EU hosted website and domain, for less than the basic plan that most website builders have. It will include complimentary email for your newsletter, as well.

(You don't have to use this to sign up for the network, it's literally just a way to make your life a little easier.)

Initiative #2

What is curiosity anyways?

After spending the past year researching and developing the idea, I'm heading to Urbino, Italy, the birthplace of Rafael (the artist, not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle), to found the Insitute for Human Curiosity.

One of the first projects listed on the website there is to compile a book of personal essays about curiosity from 100 of the most creative and innovative minds in the world. We will also research the entire ecosystem of curiosity, including patronage, loci of curiosity, and more.

We're also going to be creating an interdisciplinary index of the questions and answers that people have been curious about since the dawn of time, including mythic, communal, religious, and scientific responses to common questions.

And we are also looking to host a weeklong Curiosity Camp this summer in August in Italy. Think the Edinburgh Fringe Festival meets SXSW, a place where you can teach, learn, experiment, and collaborate with others.

Bonus:

The Elephants Upstairs

If you made it this far, you may want to check out The Elephants Upstairs, an illustrated book for adults I wrote and commissioned a human illustrator for roughly 6 years ago, but never got around to publishing. It's available as a "pay-what-you-want" download.

Spend a few dollars and enjoy the macabre fantasies of exhausted downstairs neighbor living is a walkup in NYC in 2017.