Every evening, an algorithm decides what you should listen to, watch, read, and drink. It knows your history, your habits, your hesitations. It is efficient, tireless, and very good at giving you more of what you already like. What it cannot do – what it is structurally incapable of doing – is surprise you in a way that changes your mind.
The recommendation machine
We live inside recommendation engines. Spotify builds a playlist from your listening history. Netflix suggests films based on what you have already watched. Instagram shows you restaurants that look like restaurants you have already visited. Wine apps rate bottles on a hundred-point scale and tell you what to buy based on what people with similar profiles have bought. The logic is always the same: observe patterns, identify preferences, eliminate friction, deliver more of the same.
This works. It works so well that it has become invisible – a background condition of daily life, like air conditioning or fluorescent lighting. You do not notice the algorithm until you try to live without it. And when you do, you discover something unsettling: you have forgotten how to choose. Not because you lack taste, but because taste, in the algorithmic world, has been redefined. It no longer means the capacity to judge. It means the data trail you leave behind.
Jaron Lanier, one of the earliest and sharpest critics of this model, put it simply in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018): the algorithm does not serve you. It models you. The difference is not semantic. A person who serves you responds to what you ask for. A system that models you anticipates what you will ask for and narrows the field before you even begin to look. The result is a world that feels personalized but is, in fact, the opposite: a world in which your encounters – with music, with art, with food, with people – are pre-filtered to confirm what you already are, rather than to challenge it.
What curation used to mean
Before the algorithm, there was the person behind the counter. The bookseller who said: I know you liked that last novel, but try this one – it is nothing like it, and I think you will understand why I am recommending it. The record shop owner who played something you had never heard and watched your face to see if it landed. The barman who poured you a wine you had not ordered because he thought you were ready for it.
This kind of recommendation is inefficient. It depends on a single person’s knowledge, judgment, and willingness to take a risk – on you and on themselves. It cannot be scaled. It cannot be automated. It fails often. And when it works, it does something that no algorithm can replicate: it introduces you to something you did not know you wanted. Not because a machine calculated a probability, but because a human being made a judgment about who you are and what you might become.
Walter Benjamin, writing about the collector in The Arcades Project, described this as the difference between finding and searching. Searching is goal-directed: you know what you want, and you go after it. Finding is the opposite: you encounter something you were not looking for, and the encounter changes you. The algorithm is a searching machine. It is designed to minimize the distance between desire and satisfaction. What it eliminates, systematically and by design, is the possibility of the find – the accidental discovery, the wrong turn that leads somewhere better, the stranger’s recommendation that opens a door you did not know existed.
The three choices
Consider a specific evening. You want to go out, have a drink, hear some music. You have three options.
Option one: you consult the algorithm. You open an app – Google Maps, TripAdvisor, Instagram – and search for bars near you. The app returns a ranked list based on ratings, reviews, location, and advertising spend. You choose the highest-rated option within walking distance. You arrive. The bar looks exactly like its photos. The drink tastes exactly like what the reviews described. The music is a playlist generated by another algorithm. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is surprising. You have optimized your evening.
Option two: you consult a guidebook. This is better – a guidebook reflects at least one person’s judgment, filtered through the discipline of writing – but it is static. The recommendation was made months or years ago. The bar may have changed owners, changed its wine list, changed its soul. You are following a map drawn by someone who is no longer there.
Option three: you walk into a place you have never been to, or you return to a place where the person behind the bar knows more than you do about what is worth drinking tonight. They pour you something. You trust them. The wine is from a producer you have never heard of, in a region you have never thought about. The music is played by someone in the room, not streamed from a server in Virginia. The art on the wall was put there because the bar’s owner believed in the artist, not because a consultant recommended it. You did not choose this evening. It was chosen for you – by a person, not a machine. And it is better than anything you would have chosen yourself.
The bar as the last curated space
There are not many places left where all three elements of an evening – what you drink, what you hear, what you see – are selected by a single human sensibility. Galleries curate art but do not pour wine. Concert venues programme music but do not hang paintings. Restaurants choose ingredients but do not book bands. The independent bar is one of the last spaces where all of these decisions converge in one room, made by one person or one small group of people, guided not by data but by conviction.
Altotasso, in Piazza San Francesco 6/d in Bologna, is a bar that has operated on this principle since 2004. The wines are natural, sourced directly from independent producers – not selected from a distributor’s catalogue but found, one by one, by visiting the people who make them and deciding, on the basis of taste and trust, whether their work belongs in the glass. The beers are craft, on tap, rotated according to season and quality rather than brand agreements. The cocktails are made without added sugar – a choice that eliminates an entire category of easy crowd-pleasers in favor of drinks that actually taste like their ingredients. The art on the walls is by local artists who exhibit for free, without commissions, without gallery mediation. The music – live, on many evenings – is booked because someone at the bar heard the musician and believed the room needed to hear them too.
None of these choices would survive an algorithmic test. An algorithm optimizing for revenue would recommend sweeter cocktails, cheaper wines, more recognizable music, and art that matches the colour of the furniture. An algorithm optimizing for engagement would recommend whatever generates the most Instagram posts. An algorithm optimizing for ratings would recommend whatever the largest number of people find inoffensive. What Altotasso does instead is trust a human palate, a human ear, and a human eye – and accept that this means some people will walk in, not find what they expected, and leave. That is the price of curation. It is also the proof that curation is happening.
Why this is political
Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), described the culture industry as a system that produces the illusion of choice while eliminating its substance. You can choose between forty brands of the same product. You can choose between a thousand songs that sound alike. You can choose between ten bars that serve the same drinks from the same distributors, decorated by the same interior designers, playing the same playlist. The range of options expands while the range of actual experiences contracts. This is not a conspiracy. It is the logic of a market that rewards standardization and punishes deviation.
The algorithm accelerates this process because it formalizes what the culture industry does intuitively. It takes the preferences of the majority and feeds them back to everyone as if they were universal truths. If most people click on the Aperol Spritz, the Aperol Spritz appears at the top of every list. If most people stream the same ten songs, those ten songs appear in every recommended playlist. The outlier – the unusual wine, the unknown musician, the difficult painting – is not suppressed. It is simply never surfaced. It exists, but no one encounters it, because the system that governs encounters has no incentive to show it.
The human curator – the bookseller, the barman, the gallery owner, the radio programmer – is the structural counterweight to this logic. Not because they are infallible, but because their judgment operates on a different principle. The algorithm asks: what does this person already like? The curator asks: what does this person not yet know they need? The first question closes a loop. The second opens a door.
The evening you did not plan
The best evenings of your life were not optimized. They were not the result of a careful search, a five-star rating, a recommendation engine that analysed your behavioral data and concluded that this bar, at this time, with this drink, would maximize your satisfaction score. They were accidents. You walked into a place you had never been to. Someone poured you something you had never tasted. A musician played something you had never heard. You talked to someone you had never met. And the evening became a memory – not because it was perfect, but because it was unpredictable.
This is what the algorithm cannot produce: the unpredictable. It can simulate novelty – the “Discover Weekly” playlist, the “You might also like” suggestion – but simulated novelty is a contradiction in terms. Real novelty is what you encounter when no system is mediating between you and the world. It is what happens when you trust a person rather than a platform. It is what happens when you walk through a door without knowing what is on the other side.
There is a bar in Piazza San Francesco, in Bologna, where this happens every evening. The wine is chosen by someone who cares more about the producer than the label. The music is played by someone who is in the room. The art was hung by someone who believes in the artist. And the door is open – to anyone, at any time, without a reservation, without a profile, without a data trail. You walk in as yourself, not as your browsing history. And what you find there is not what you were looking for. It is better.
Minima Moralia srl · Piazza San Francesco 6/d · Bologna · info@altotasso.com · altotasso.com
Frequently asked questions
What is human curation and why does it matter?
Human curation is the practice of selecting what to offer – drinks, music, art, books – based on personal knowledge, taste, and judgment rather than on automated data analysis. It matters because it introduces the possibility of surprise: a human curator can recommend something you did not know you wanted, based on a qualitative assessment of who you are, not a statistical model of what you have consumed before. In bars, restaurants, bookshops, and galleries, human curation is what distinguishes a place with a point of view from a place that follows trends.
How do algorithms affect what we drink and listen to?
Recommendation algorithms analyse user behaviour – past purchases, listening history, ratings, location – to predict what a person is most likely to enjoy. This increases efficiency but reduces diversity: popular choices are surfaced repeatedly, while unusual or independent options are rarely shown. In practice, this means that the same wines, the same songs, and the same bars dominate search results and recommendation feeds, making it harder for independent producers, musicians, and venues to reach new audiences without paid promotion.
What is the culture industry?
The culture industry is a concept introduced by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). It describes a system in which cultural products – music, film, literature, food, drink – are produced and distributed according to industrial logic: standardised, mass-marketed, and designed to satisfy existing demand rather than to challenge or expand it. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that this system creates an illusion of choice while narrowing the range of genuine cultural experiences available to people. The concept remains influential in media studies, cultural criticism, and debates about the effects of algorithmic recommendation on taste and diversity.
What is Altotasso in Bologna?
Altotasso is an independent bar and cultural space at Piazza San Francesco 6/d, Bologna. It opened in 2004 and has since become known for its human-curated approach to everything it offers: natural wines sourced directly from independent producers, craft beers on tap, cocktails made without added sugar, free art exhibitions by local artists, and live music. The bar operates on the principle that what people drink, hear, and see should be chosen by people with knowledge and conviction – not by distributors, algorithms, or commercial formulas.
Where can I find natural wine in Bologna?
Bologna has a growing natural wine scene. Altotasso in Piazza San Francesco is one of the city’s longest-established venues for natural and biodynamic wines, sourced directly from independent producers across Italy and served from steel tanks under inert nitrogen to preserve freshness. Other options can be found along Via del Pratello and in the streets around Piazza Santo Stefano, though the selection and sourcing philosophy vary considerably from bar to bar.
What is the difference between a curated bar and a regular bar?
A curated bar is one where the selection of drinks, music, and visual elements reflects the personal judgment of the owner or staff rather than the catalogue of a distributor or the output of a recommendation algorithm. In practice, this means the wine list changes based on what the bar’s owner has tasted and approved; the music is chosen – or performed live – based on artistic merit; and the décor reflects genuine aesthetic commitments rather than commercial trends. The difference is not always visible from the outside, but it is immediately perceptible in the quality, variety, and coherence of the experience.
Why do independent bars matter for culture?
Independent bars function as informal cultural infrastructure. They provide exhibition space for artists who lack gallery representation, performance opportunities for musicians outside the commercial circuit, and gathering points for communities that share values – about quality, about independence, about the kind of social life worth having. When independent bars are replaced by chains or algorithm-driven concepts, cities lose not just individual venues but the ecosystem of cultural production and encounter that those venues sustain.