Flipboard just launched Surf, a feed-reader-slash-social-app built on the fediverse that is, at its core, a bet that curation is back. Everything is feeds. The pitch is that humans, not engagement algorithms, should decide what flows through their attention. In the same week, Le Labo released a 551-page book celebrating 20 years of slow perfumery, a brand whose entire identity is built on deliberate selection over scale. Both are artifacts of the same cultural correction: the backlash against infinite scroll has found its products.

The Fediverse as Editorial Infrastructure

Surf's fediverse integration is the interesting technical bet. Decentralized social infrastructure means no single algorithmic curator owns the feed. But it does not eliminate curation; it relocates it. Someone still has to decide what goes in the feed. Surf bets that users will. This mirrors what the art dealer David Schrader calls the logic of deal flow in the art market: volume begets volume, but only when the right intermediaries are filtering signal from noise. The fediverse is trying to build that intermediary layer without centralizing it. That is an unsolved problem.

Objective Drift and the Human in the Loop

A 2026 paper in arXiv CS.AI by Mark Dranias and Adam Whitley on human-in-the-loop control of objective drift in LLM-assisted education found that AI systems embedded in ongoing tasks tend to drift from their original objectives without active human intervention. That is a precise description of what recommendation algorithms do to editorial intent over time. The algorithm starts as a curation tool and drifts toward engagement maximization. Surf is proposing human-in-the-loop feed design as a structural solution to that drift. Le Labo's book is a physical monument to the same argument: when you let scale set the agenda, you lose the thing that made the object worth having. .