April 29, 20265 min read
Why the Feed Kills Knowledge
Algorithmic feeds are not neutral delivery mechanisms. They are architectures optimized for reaction, not understanding — and the difference matters more than we admit.
Algorithmic feeds are not neutral delivery mechanisms. They are architectures optimized for reaction, not understanding — and the difference matters more than we admit.
There is a particular feeling most people recognize but rarely examine: you open a social app intending to read something useful, and forty minutes later you close it having consumed nothing you can remember. You were not bored — you were engaged, almost continuously. But the engagement was hollow. What was it, exactly, that you were doing?
The honest answer is that you were being processed. The feed was working on you, not for you.
In his work on decision-making, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman described two modes of thinking. System 1 is fast, automatic, and emotional — it reacts before it reflects. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful — it reasons, considers, and constructs understanding. Both are necessary. But they are not equal in the economy of attention.
System 1 is cheap. It costs almost nothing to trigger a reaction: outrage, amusement, surprise, disgust. These responses are immediate and involuntary. Social platforms figured this out early, and their algorithmic feeds are now precision instruments for System 1 activation. Every element of the design — the infinite scroll, the variable reward of the refresh, the engagement metrics that surface the most provocative content — is tuned to keep System 1 firing continuously.
System 2 is expensive. Understanding a complex argument, synthesizing ideas from multiple sources, building a mental model of something genuinely new — these take time, patience, and sustained attention. They require you to stay with something that does not immediately reward you. Algorithmic feeds are structurally hostile to this. They cannot monetize patience. They can only monetize the next reaction.
The result is not that we become stupider. It is more specific than that: we become less capable of the particular cognitive acts that produce durable knowledge. We can recognize, react, and forward. We struggle to understand, synthesize, and remember.
Knowledge has a structure that content does not. Knowledge is relational — it connects to what you already know, modifies it, extends it, sometimes overturns it. A new fact that lands in isolation is trivia. The same fact, placed in context, can shift an entire understanding.
The feed strips this relational structure away. It presents things in sequence but without connection. Post follows post follows post with no relationship between them except temporal proximity. The algorithmic order is not an editorial order — it does not reflect a judgment about what should come before and what should come after, what you need to understand first, what will make the next thing legible.
This is why reading a brilliant thread on Twitter can feel stimulating in the moment and leave almost no trace an hour later. The structure was not designed to create understanding — it was designed to extend engagement. Those are not the same thing, and in practice they are often in direct opposition.
There is a word for the act of creating the structure that feeds destroy: curation. To curate is to select, to order, and to contextualize. It is to make an argument with sources, to say: these things belong together, in this sequence, for this reason. A curated collection is a System 2 object — it requires System 2 to create and rewards System 2 to read.
This is not a new idea. It is what anthologies do, what documentary films do, what syllabi do, what museum exhibitions do. The human practice of organizing knowledge for transmission to others is ancient and necessary. What is new is that the dominant architectures of the modern information environment are actively hostile to it.
The case for curation is not nostalgic. It is not a longing for some pre-digital era of slower information. It is a response to a specific failure mode of the current moment: the abundance of content combined with the scarcity of context. There has never been more material available to think with. There has rarely been less infrastructure for thinking with it.
Musy is built around a single structural bet: that the collection, not the post, should be the primary unit of the platform. Not the individual piece of content, but the assembled, ordered, annotated argument that a curator makes with multiple pieces.
This changes what the platform rewards. A post that generates a fast reaction is valued no more than a post that quietly deepens a collection no one has read yet. The feed is chronological, not algorithmic — it reflects the editorial choices of the people you follow, not a machine's estimate of your reaction probability. Collections have permanent addresses and version histories, because the goal is understanding that persists, not engagement that spikes.
None of this is a guarantee. A curation platform can be misused as easily as any other. But the architecture makes a difference. When the primary unit of sharing is a collection that someone spent time assembling, with a title and a description and an argument, the bar for contribution is different. The default act is not reaction. It is composition.
That distinction — between reacting and composing — is where knowledge lives. If you want to curate instead of consume, Musy was made for you.