Brian Thomas Clark

Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in... See more

The content marketers who will have a place in the new normal will be the ones who never approached content as a product, or publishing and distribution as “output.” They think about it as a means to an end, and see content as part of a system rather than something created in a silo and optimized for search engines.

If you know enough about... See more

The ones and zeroes of the digital map tolerate no error or noise. It’s an auto-tuned reality where everything is on the note or it doesn’t exist. Never mind that James Brown reaching up to that note is where we find the soul of the music. In the world of digital figures, that expression of the human soul — that stuff between the official notes —... See more

Meaningful friendships develop when things are intense, and involve peril, beauty, jeopardy, drama and self-development

As the Internet became an always-on, mainstream phenomenon, however, it also reverted to the mean. Influencer culture happens at scale. It’s not about finding the bizarre nooks and crannies of weird, but reaching as many people as possible. Hit counts and numbers of followers are all that matter. It is about getting bigger, rather than smaller.... See more

So, what’s going on? Well, the result is more structural than anything to do with machine learning or consumer preferences. It’s because YouTube content is loaded with automated enhancements like transcripts, captions, timestamps, and keyword-rich descriptions.

That structure makes it easy for AI engines to parse, understand, and reference – exactly... See more

From campaigns to ecosystems

A campaign has a beginning, middle, and end. An ecosystem doesn’t. It expands. It adapts. It gives you somewhere to go.

Gen Alpha is used to open environments where they can choose a path, double back, discover something hidden, or bring their friends along for the ride. While they don’t need a cinematic universe to feel... See more

Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.”