Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
But there’s a whole universe that exists outside of your phone. All you need to do is turn away from the screen—even for just a short while—to understand that the culture of now is embedded in something much, much larger.
When we do that, we start seeing that our legacy from the past is an inherited treasure—and both offers us riches and imposes... See more
When we do that, we start seeing that our legacy from the past is an inherited treasure—and both offers us riches and imposes... See more
Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?
By contrast, when “everything is at our fingertips” — when art is compressed into the same omnipresent and infinite digital non-time as every random piece of internet garbage — I think that we’re left feeling incomplete on some basic human level, like we’re the practitioners of a vibey old religion whose rituals were all but erased, and whose... See more
Streaming is an affront to God
making-meaning and
And so, when people valorize these kinds of outmoded media, and outmoded acts of endurance and devotion, I don’t think it’s just about empty nostalgia. Because these are touchstones and processes — precisely in their inefficiency — by which people can open themselves up to transformative experience, and honor the depth and fullness of what art means to us.
AI might take over some of our jobs, but I believe it will also lead to a major resurgence of arts and crafts. It might mobilise people in new ways. New luddite rebellion? Bring it on! Not only will we need creativity to find purpose in life (because what are humans for then?), we will also come to cherish the handmade with a renewed sense of... See more
Karen Rosenkranz • The Home as a Place of Production
via Dense 9/2/24
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
nytimes.com • Works of Art - The New York Times
taste and
Practically speaking, desktop experiences represent a past when the online world was driven from workstations, less devices , and intended to be curated, not consumed. So, as you might piece together your day again after 20 minutes needlessly refreshing a feed, let's remember what it felt like when we were surfing the internet, as opposed to it... See more
Dirt: Desktop was the place
Desktop was the place
Looking back through Bliss-colored glasses.
Patrick McKemey on the lost joys of the desktop internet.
dirt.fyi email
1/30/24
At some point, you have to decide: Do you want to directly contribute to the enshittification of the daily life, or not?
It’s very, very easy to throw up your hands and say there’s nothing you can do. It’s harder to take the time to think about and act on using whatever power you have in productive ways. This could mean organizing in your workplace,... See more
It’s very, very easy to throw up your hands and say there’s nothing you can do. It’s harder to take the time to think about and act on using whatever power you have in productive ways. This could mean organizing in your workplace,... See more
Everything is private equity <3
I get the impulse to recover a more democratic online world compared to the top-down dictates of Silicon Valley. But in seeking a more humane tech future, nostalgia is more hindrance than help; the alternatives will need to be legible to new generations weaned on social-media feeds.
bookforum.com • Kyle Chayka Looks at Our Supposedly Flat New World
But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.
In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.
So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now . The same... See more
In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.
So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now . The same... See more
Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?
eternal-now and
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests... See more
nytimes.com
culture-2526 and
The Wisdom and Prophecy of Jimmy Carter’s ‘Malaise’ Speech
The trends he saw emerging two generations ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body politic.
Carter’s central insight was that even if the country’s political branches could deliver peace and prosperity, they could not deliver community and belonging. Our nation depends on pre-political commitments to each other, and in the absence of those pre-political commitments, the American experiment is ultimately in jeopardy.