Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
Thinking of yourself as an observer is better for your happiness than obsessing over being observed.
Arthur C. Brooks • Don’t Objectify Yourself
Collecting is an exercise in creating a framework, the logic of what is in or out. But then there are decisions that seem associative or intuitive.
The Organizing Edition
Complicated Culture
Daisy Alioto with W. David Marx.
dirt.fyi
why is a restaurant reservation a high status thing? It's because it is in a specific place. It is finite in supply. A lot of times you have to be somewhat connected to get it. It is the opposite of the Internet.
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I simply think we can't keep sleepwalking into hoping the (poptimist) world
... See moretaste and Media & Culture
When Elliot protests that he can’t just do nothing, he is seeing and judging himself from the perspective of a culture that looks with disdain at anything that smacks of inactivity. Under constant self-scrutiny as to whether he is being sufficiently productive, he feels ashamed when he judges himself to have come up short in this regard. But this
... See moreBecause here’s what I’ve learned: if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft. You will realize the loss of something you did not... See more
Mandy Brown • A Unified Theory of Fucks
In the digital age, cultural artifacts are eroded by abundance. Timelines layer and compress artwork, images, and artifacts into corners of the internet. In my corner, I stumbled across a speech entitled “Perfume, Defense and David Bowie’s Wedding” delivered by Brian Eno in 1992 at the Sadler Wells Theatre in London. In it, Eno predicted the... See more
The Future Will Be Like Perfume | Are.na Editorial
Second, by not letting algorithms decide what deserves your attention. If you want to feel creatively and intellectually alive, stop mindlessly consuming the internet and start mindfully curating it. You need a space away from social media's compulsive rhythm, where your ideas can grow at their own pace.
Sari Azout • What Matters in the Age of AI Is Taste
making-meaning and taste
In order to make room for this weird, this liminal zone of possibility, we need to get off the grid-like map of quantized utility and grow a culture instead. We do this together by forming clusters of human weirdness; groups of people with varying forms of space, voltage, and potential between them. We need a cohort, a rabble...what Jews call a... See more
Douglas Rushkoff • Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
“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