Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
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.
The gift with the highest return: believing in someone before they believe in themselves.
Brain Food: A Good Email
When Elliot protests that he can’t just do nothing, he is seeing and judging himself from the perspective of a culture that looks with disdain at anything that smacks of inactivity. Under constant self-scrutiny as to whether he is being sufficiently productive, he feels ashamed when he judges himself to have come up short in this regard. But this
... See moreSusan would complain that the present, the life she was living moment to moment, felt unreal to her. Only the future really mattered, for that was where her ideal life resided. “If I just wait a little longer”, she would remark in a tone of wry despondency, “there’ll be this magically transformative event and everything will come right.”
This
... See moreComplicated Culture
Daisy Alioto with W. David Marx.
dirt.fyi
why is a restaurant reservation a high status thing? It's because it is in a specific place. It is finite in supply. A lot of times you have to be somewhat connected to get it. It is the opposite of the Internet.
—
I simply think we can't keep sleepwalking into hoping the (poptimist) world
... See moretaste and Media & Culture
But there’s a whole universe that exists outside of your phone. All you need to do is turn away from the screen—even for just a short while—to understand that the culture of now is embedded in something much, much larger.
When we do that, we start seeing that our legacy from the past is an inherited treasure—and both offers us riches and imposes... See more
When we do that, we start seeing that our legacy from the past is an inherited treasure—and both offers us riches and imposes... See more
Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?
digital life and
I do not blame anyone but myself for this. This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself. But I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to... See more