Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
Tech-enabled tl;dr certainly has a place. There’s more content than ever and most of it is too long. But when everything is mediated by a summary, layers are being built between our brains and the thing itself, allowing something else—increasingly, AI—to interpret things for us.
The Summary Edition
making-meaning and digital life—digital cultures
When we mainline takeaways, blurbs, bullets, key insights, there is something lost. We are sanding down friction, muffling voice, removing tone, and accepting pre-fabricated meaning. Will AI-driven distilling get us closer to the thing itself, or further away?
These days, it’s increasingly clear to me that we have a new overlord: the Summary. Thanks to AI, we are experiencing the enshortification (sorry, Cory Doctorow) of everything.
When we mainline takeaways, blurbs, bullets, key insights, there is something lost. We are sanding down friction, muffling voice, removing tone, and accepting pre-fabricated meaning. Will AI-driven distilling get us closer to the thing itself, or further away?
The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced. In his 1960 novel “A Burnt-Out Case” (the title may have helped bring the term into general circulation), Graham
... See moreEducated 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
As a general strategy for cultural consumption, omnivorism was very smart: Erecting artificial barriers against “low”... See more
The New Yorker Roundup
culture-2526 and
Trying repeatedly to do something so potentially devastating requires being finely attuned to other people, tapped into your own ability for intimacy. And our culture of extreme individualism and extreme alienation, our culture of loneliness, doesn’t exactly make that easy.
Miriam Gordis • In defense of feeling
May 1, 2024
In defense of feeling
Miriam Gordis on “the loneliness economy” and evolving notions of romantic love. This essay was originally published in Small Wire.
Your extreme local, embodied community is your only truly real one. Think of it this way: Whose bodies are closest to yours when you’re sleeping at night? Those are the ones who can keep you safe. You have to know these people, care about these people, or even just recognize these people.
When we know each other, our relationships transcend whatever... See more
When we know each other, our relationships transcend whatever... See more
Real action starts on the ground.
The human cost of technical debt in higher education is substantial. Developer burnout is a significant problem across the industry, with many institutions losing talented staff due to the constant stress of maintaining aging infrastructure.
The stress reduction alone was worth the migration effort for UCLA. Their team now spends time on innovation... See more
The stress reduction alone was worth the migration effort for UCLA. Their team now spends time on innovation... See more
From Midnight Deployments to Unicorns and Rainbows: The UCLA Digital Transformation Story
The internet has fundamentally altered the conditions under which genuine self-expression can exist. The solution isn’t to perform authenticity harder, but to recognise and jealously guard the remaining places where real authenticity might still be possible: in unrecorded conversations, in private moments, in closed networks that haven’t yet been... See more
Eugene Healey • Gen Z and gen Alpha brought a raw, messy aesthetic to social media. Why does it feel as inauthentic as ever? | Eugene Healey
If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves. Just think about all the garbage content that people you actually know send you via text, or the DMs that feel like they’re from bots but are actually from real people driven by platform incentives (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook,... See more
Slop as a Way of Life | Dirt
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