Brian Thomas Clark

I feel alienated from people that believe technology can solve loneliness. To me, effective accelerationism is doomerism disguised as optimism. The belief that things won’t change and the belief that if they do change, through technology, it will be for the better are both sides of the same coin. In fact, just as entropy is an arrow of time, I... See more

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

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

We would be far better off seeking out (or tacitly engineering) encounters in which we both have to struggle together to achieve a common goal. This might be something far out-of-the ordinary – rock-climbing, cliff-diving – or it might be something much more quotidian, like hunting down a hard-to-find ingredient for a meal, or even doing laundry.

We... See more

If your intention is to become a singer, Eugenio, then you need to sing and sing and sing some more. Whether or not you go into the studio when you have the chance is not really up for debate. It is your duty to yourself to do so. If you do not take these opportunities to sing, you may forever be that melancholy boy peering through the window of a... See more

The Beasties were the ultimate curators and culture merchants, although they never perverted their creative universe with gross buzzwords like that.

Between their genre-smashing albums, their iconic videos, their fashion exploits like X-Large, and their magazine Grand Royal , you could say that they were running a “lifestyle brand” of sorts.

The... See more

In his retrospective of 2023 for his company Acquia, a SaaS platform built on top of the open source (and browser-based) Drupal software, Buytaert noted both the dangers and opportunities for the web going forward. “On one side, the rise of AI in information gathering will decrease the need for traditional websites,” he wrote. “On the other side,... See more

Taste isn't some mysterious gift bestowed at birth—it's simply what happens when you pay close attention to what moves you.

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.