Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
All this should seem obvious, which is most troubling: the lack of communal love — the indifference we have towards neighbors, strangers — is not only a recent phenomenon, but it’s not a natural one that’s baked into our evolutionary DNA. It’s a step backwards from our primate ancestry, back to our distant reptilian roots. Even now, AI skeptics who... See more
Mo_Diggs • What’s So Funny ‘Bout…
digital life—digital cultures and
In our neoliberal, self-interested era…the tenuous social fabric that we once had doesn’t actually seem to exist at all. There is no concept of a social contract. We don’t believe we have any responsibility to each other. We do not work together. We have no shared identity. We have no common goals. Simply put, we do not live in a society.
My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom... To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel... See more
Maria Popova • Article
awareness / mindfulness and songwriting
Nick Cave on Music, Mystery, and the Relationship Between Vulnerability and Freedom
The gift with the highest return: believing in someone before they believe in themselves.
Brain Food: A Good Email
Complexity increases because adding is easy and removing is dangerous.
Whenever there's a problem, we add: a new person, requirement, or process. We never subtract.
Why?
Because everything that already exists has a champion. That clause in the tax code, that step in the process, that feature in the product ... someone fought for it, and they'll... See more
Whenever there's a problem, we add: a new person, requirement, or process. We never subtract.
Why?
Because everything that already exists has a champion. That clause in the tax code, that step in the process, that feature in the product ... someone fought for it, and they'll... See more
Brain Food: The Limits of Devotion
The result is what Moskowitz describes as a “mirror maze”. We enter social media hoping to express ourselves but instead see endless refractions – ourselves as we want to be seen, as others might perceive us, as the algorithm is training us to become.
All of this has consequences for how we think and feel. Our sense of self begins to dissolve under... See more
All of this has consequences for how we think and feel. Our sense of self begins to dissolve under... See more
Humiliation Rituals
In any case, it’s enough to make anyone feel crazy. Over the last decade we’ve watched — and while I’m talking about the tech industry, I think we can all say it’s been everywhere else too — the things we love get distanced from us so that somebody else can get unbelievably rich, the things we used to do easily made more difficult, confusing and/or... See more
Edward Zitron • Never Forget What They've Done
Media & Culture and
via dirt.fyi
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