It all starts with a user prompt, spelt out in plain English, stating the person's goals, as well as some upfront preferences. Should your curated feed help you to stay informed or, to challenge your current world views? Once the objectives have been outlined, the web will be scoured to try meeting them and this second step brings with it labels not typically available as choices in most software providers:

Any one of these four choices is not currently available in the social networks that a great many deal of people around the world choose to patronize. The closest functionality currently available is the LinkedIn automatic watermark of AI generated images (written content doesn't warrant a similar type of warning).

The curated feed is available upon logging in to webcurator's web app, with the option of also receiving a daily email. But the underlying tone is: do this on your time, whenever is convenient, and not because of our MAUs or DAUs.

Meeting Alex is an exercise in European geography, as well as a philosophical discussion on identity, belonging, and the changing role of tech in all of this postmodern existence. Alex Howard is Swiss, currently living in Portugal, educated in Canada and in the UK. With a background in both regenerative agriculture and product management, he finds it easy to borrow concepts from both to discuss his current project.

Webcurator is meant to be the answer to the shifting perception of time one falls into when surfing the web. It's also meant to give back long form content its rightful place: nuggets of nourishing and interesting articles, videos and other content types that make existence tolerable, even pleasant. Not to worry, there's plenty of AI factored into webcurator; after all, individual feeds do not magically constitute themselves every single day. They require a web of agents sent out to scout the web for pieces of information singularly relevant to each individual user.

Alex's recent past in regenerative agriculture is further apparent in the moderation espoused by webcurator: less can, and often ends up being, more. Individual preferences beget individual feeds, curated timelines, with the user at the wheel. Webcurator is not, pun intended, a pushy product: it does its best work invisibly, quietly, as a background object that never quite announces itself. Its value lies not necessarily in new discovery, but in maintenance and reclamation of time and energy spent cutting through the noise.

For those doubting the ability of cultural offerings to sustain European economies, this is a continent regularly breaking the records for number of visitors from the rest of the world, so the idea of building a web-based cultural institution would have roots in the real world. Nevertheless, the baseline proposition of webcurator is equally likely to raise eyebrows as it is to elicit curiosity from would be users (perhaps that last term might also need to be reinvented).

The topic of rebuilding, reinvention and rediscovery is ripe in Europe at the moment. The continent appears to have woken up from a dream of comfortable slumber to the realisation that it may have unwittingly decided to forfeit the right to its own digital autonomy.

It's no secret that before the end of ZIRP (Zero interest-rate policy), an astounding number of VC backed companies subsidised a substantial part of their user acquisition, activation and loyalty . Although the current capital environment has changed, software business models have not necessarily adapted, with the behemoths of the 2000s and the 2010s effectively stuck in their ways, and overly reliant on advertising, which in turn demands constant user data mining. Alex is looking for different, alternative and better ways of building a business and is not afraid to mention it explicitly: webcurator will rely on user subscriptions, not advertising. That is because it has now become affordable to have a product that parses the web on an extremely frequent basis (which wasn't the case 20 years ago).

Regaining back control of the algorithms in our lives is a hot topic in Europe and elsewhere. Will webcurator show us a different way of building software that isn't reliant on optimizing for engagement? Time will tell. Webcurator might potentially evolve from a solo business to a proper venture soon, with the possibility of fund raising later this year. Serious investors only, please. We're aiming to build an institution that will outlive us.

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