Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
The smartphone turns us into fragmented actors in a perpetual now.
You’re in a War You Can’t See: McLuhan, Media, and the Machinery of Perception
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests... See more
nytimes.com
culture-2526 and
The Wisdom and Prophecy of Jimmy Carter’s ‘Malaise’ Speech
The trends he saw emerging two generations ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body politic.
Carter’s central insight was that even if the country’s political branches could deliver peace and prosperity, they could not deliver community and belonging. Our nation depends on pre-political commitments to each other, and in the absence of those pre-political commitments, the American experiment is ultimately in jeopardy.
This all isn’t to say that there was nothing novel about TikTok. It obviously did give Americans genuinely new ways to communicate and create culture, but the culture we created with it was always there. Thanks to TikTok, America finally saw itself and it scared us. It turns out Americans don’t talk the way we think they should, don’t dress the way... See more
Holding up a mirror to America
II. Process
I overheard something nice around the office a few months ago.
Speaks to a lot of the nature of work projects, strategy, possibly life too (it’s certainly true in therapy, minus the digital part). Essentially it’s a more clever-sounding way of saying... See more
I overheard something nice around the office a few months ago.
“ You don ’ t reach a moment of digital transformation . You just keep transforming.”
Speaks to a lot of the nature of work projects, strategy, possibly life too (it’s certainly true in therapy, minus the digital part). Essentially it’s a more clever-sounding way of saying... See more
Judgement always wins
Salmon Theory 12/3/21
In Marie Howe’s poem “Hurry,” she describes running errands with a child in tow. “Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,” she urges, as the little one scampers to keep up. Then she wonders: “Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? / To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?”
Melissa Kirsch • Why We Can’t Stop Rushing
Cool means different things to different people, but to me, it’s about authenticity—which is very different from “relatability.” People who make great art that moves the masses are not like you and I. They have a point of view, laser focus, a pinch of delusion, and a level of execution that is required to make something great and be able to sell... See more
Why Celebrities Stopped Being Cool
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
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.