Brian Thomas Clark

“Authenticity”, I think, looks like the power to opt in or out, perform or not, when you want to—in other words: freedom. So when it comes to the Internet, if switching off entirely isn’t possible any more, then surely the words of MGMT can be useful: “control yourself, take only what you need from it.”

house dysmorphia vs nostalgia:

social media might be causing a sort of “house dysmorphia”

and it’s finally more noticeable as we become more drawn to nostalgia

your home should be a sincere reflection of yourself, not a copy of someone else’s highly curated design

it has so much more value in your life when the space you spend most of your time is... See more

KRF : How do you define taste?

BD : Taste is the natural tendency to filter, mix and recombine the like and the unlike to approximate sublimity.

Ross: New Romanticism is very interesting to me. Ted Gioia originated the idea, and it drew me in right away. I think it captures a general mood. A growing number of people are very disenchanted with technology as it stands today. They are looking to older forms, a return to a more interpersonal and in-person dynamic, a real turn away from... See more

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.

In “This Is for Everyone,” Berners-Lee argues that the web’s lack of compassion is “a design issue ” that can be fixed. “There’s still time,” he writes, “to build machines that serve the human,” that “promote the dignity of our fragile species on this isolated globe.” It’s a moving vision. But it’s hard to reconcile with the entropy of today’s... See more

By the time the Voice had assumed its current semi-undead form, following a 2020 resurrection, the creeping irrelevance of any bounded and singular context—including that of a town, much less “the biggest media town in America”—had become the kind of thing a person might fail to notice while engaged in the ruthless business of noticing everything... See more

Some More Insight Into The Gen Z Coolness Crisis

There are four sort of low-level generational discourses circulating the web right now that I want to try and synthesize into a larger idea. There’s the weird backlash around the word “demure” going viral after a trans TikToker popularized it. There are millennials panicking that Gen Z thinks we all... See more