I've been hearing a lot about human curation being the solution. But don't we have that already? Isn't Oprah the ultimate pop curator?

I have nothing against curation, but I fear it will concentrate options into a few mega curators as there will be a flood of would-be curators getting lost in the noise. Aspiring content creators will have to receive the blessing of these super curators to make a living.

Yeah that's the thing, the mechanism of popularity is a blessing and a curse. Algorithms were a popular upset to the previous system which we could call curated, but also nepotist. I suspect too that networking will be important in the future as well, not that it ever went away really.