Brian Sholis

* “It’s lack of awareness to lossiness that dooms most conversations to miscommunication, not the lossiness itself.”

- “My discomfort with our current use of “relevance” as a term of judgment is that it conceals its criteria, and that those criteria are not aesthetic, but social and political. I worry that if we make such “relevance” not just one among other judgments we might make about art, but a condition of our interest, we have made that condition purely... See more

- "Review drift happens whenever the context of review differs from the context of use. … If the context of review is typically short-term, then companies are incentivized to optimize for short-term satisfaction, even at the cost of long-term quality."

- "Pater said beauty is impossible without some element of strangeness; the potential for beauty was built into his own “strange webs” of significance, spun in such writerly fashion around the object with which he was in dialogue. Criticism is one way to be the spider, paying out silk, both navigating and creating the web as one goes. What defines... See more

- "conscious self-branding — an exhausting obligation for many under current labor market conditions — is in tension with its underlying structure of ubiquitous surveillance: how strategically one chooses to present oneself now inescapably occurs within this unchosen context of being tracked and documented and predicted. The efforts made to avoid... See more

- "Rather than applying the traditional object oriented approach of wrapping a consumer around a product; instead by identifying every opportunity to establish a brand as a cultural institution (that serves the public in it’s operation), the brand consistently fortifies an ethical and moral foundation from which to exist."

- "Clock time, Mills learned, is the result of an unending search for consensus. Even the times told by the world’s most precise government-maintained “master clocks” are composites of the readings of several atomic clocks. The master clocks, in turn, are averaged to help create international civil time, known as Coördinated Universal Time and... See more

On the "myths" about IRL versus remote work. "By constantly comparing remote work to an office straw man, we’re not engaging seriously with the challenges of remote work."