Brian Thomas Clark

Both responses miss something important, though. They both assume that what we know as “culture” is the only type of culture that could ever exist.

There’s a third possible response, and that’s that there’s a new culture all around us.

We just don’t register it as “culture.”

Educated people feel a duty to know these trends as part of cultural literacy. They don't buy Labubus, yet they join the "we" and descend into introspective angst about what Labubus mean for the state of "our" collective psychology.

As a general strategy for cultural consumption, omnivorism was very smart: Erecting artificial barriers against “low”... See more

So which direction are we moving in? Down the same old path – where identity is just content, content is monetised, and monetisation demands a steady drip of oversharing and low-key emotional collapse? Or could we actually start to build new ways of being online? Ones that prioritise people as people, and not just scrolling spectacle?

Until then,... See more

Journaling, especially if you include things you’re grateful for, is the cheapest possible therapy. It’s been shown to provide positive mental health benefits, alleviating anxiety, and tamping down intrusive thoughts while improving short-term memory. Focusing on gratitude has been shown to decrease materialism in young people, among the myriad... See more

Your Spotify Wrapped for 2024 is the weight of all these things, whether we want to deal with it or not. AI-powered podcasts are the result of expunging the lives of the real humans who built these ideas, replacing them with a facsimile of human connection. Your data feeds into Google, and it builds you the idea of a friend in return. Artists will... See more

If I sometimes feel like my hard drive is full, then it doesn’t matter if what I’m adding to the drive is, on its face, soothing. It’s just more stuff, more data, more things to process. By adopting my friend’s elevated standard for what’s allowed in, I decreased the number of inputs, the number of demands for thought and work and reaction I was... See more

The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.

Value-based marketing:

“Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear what we want them to know about us. One of the greatest jobs of marketing the universe has ever seen is Nike.... See more

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.... See more