Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
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
Nick Cave • Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #260 - I’m 17 years old, and I don’t know if I want to record and publish an ep that I’ve...
Issue #260 / November 2023
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.
In previous generations, depression was likely to result from internal conflicts between what we want to do and what authority figures – parents, teachers, institutions – wish to prevent us from doing. But in our high-performance society, it’s feelings of inadequacy, not conflict, that bring on depression. The pressure to be the best workers,
... See moreThis, I think, is another reason why Updike has so many detractors. Ever since F.R. Leavis wrote The Great Tradition , there has been a school of literary criticism that has demanded that great novelists also be great moralists: that the job of the writer is not just to reflect the world but to tell it the difference between right and wrong.
That is... See more
That is... See more
John Updike: Tedious Suburbanite or Literary Great?
Cloudflare’s 2025 analysis of the top 5,000 domains shows a sharp shift at the surface. WordPress drops from 53 per cent to 41 per cent in a single year. Drupal slips more modestly from 4.8 per cent to 4.1 per cent. Combined, the two fell from 57.8 per cent to 45.1 per cent. At the same time, proprietary and semi-proprietary platforms fragment the... See more
TheDropTimes: When Foundations Are Ignored
09 Feb 2026
The question of our time is how do you artistically rebel — and win — against a totally flat cultural landscape? And before my readers, who I assume are all approximately 36 years old and very tired, say, “so what, who cares?” This does matter. I mean, just look around right now lol. You know things are bad when even OpenAI President Greg Brockman... See more
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And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room that left their house to experience something.
AI images remove viewers from the complex conditions of life in favor of commercially or politically expedient fantasy, all while packaging this fantasy in a realist mode that makes it less ideologically suspicious, easier to take at face value.
It’s the Real Thing! | Leo Kim
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.
I suspect the rise of inspiration-sharing platforms might be making me, and everyone else on the collaborative internet, more focused on publicising our taste rather than feeding it. It’s easier to go viral on Twitter (err, X) by posting “vintage design inspiration” than it is by posting your own work. New sites like PI.FYI, a social network from... See more
Elizabeth Goodspeed on the Importance of Taste – And How to Acquire It
taste and Media & Culture