"As the prospect, more than the reality, of artificial intelligence looms over my livelihood and many others, and the rich and powerful continue to de-legitimize and defund the liberal arts, I have been asking myself what the purpose of learning is, and searching for places to see it manifested in real life and online. That, in turn, led me to try to create such a space in my own life."
"The high number of personal curricula on my feeds could certainly be because my social media algorithms detected that I was searching for syllabi and trawling Project Gutenberg for 300-year old novels, or because it simply knows what kind of girl I am, which is: annoying about reading. Some of these people come dangerously close to the kind of "doing my own research" rhetoric that inevitably leads a person down an RFK Jr.-style rabbit hole;"
Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otronto (1764) inspired a self-directed gothic reading list tracing the genre from Romantic origins across the Atlantic into American Southern gothic and contemporary horror. A proliferation of online personal syllabi—often created by young women—functions as self-guided curricula with varying rigor. Anxiety over artificial intelligence threatening livelihoods and the erosion of funding and legitimacy for the liberal arts has prompted reflection on the purpose of learning and attempts to cultivate intentional learning spaces. Social media algorithms amplify exposure to such curricula, while some personal syllabi veer toward conspiratorial 'doing my own research' rhetoric or adopt a neoliberal hustle mindset that monetizes spare time.
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