Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
Susan 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 moreI’m fascinated with Coppola partly because she does different things very well, something I think we all strive for. But the way she presents herself and her work walks a perfect line between highbrow and approachable, never veering too far either way. She doesn’t deny her lineage or commercial success but maintains her artistic sensibility. Not... See more
Chris Black • Article
taste and
Everyone’s posting about 2016, with a heavy dose of nostalgia.
In 2016, Instagram switched their default feed from purely reverse chronological feed to algorithmically-sorted. In retrospect, this marks the beginning of a shift towards a passive, spoon-fed internet.
Product design matters — people are hungry for digital tools that actually allow them... See more
In 2016, Instagram switched their default feed from purely reverse chronological feed to algorithmically-sorted. In retrospect, this marks the beginning of a shift towards a passive, spoon-fed internet.
Product design matters — people are hungry for digital tools that actually allow them... See more
New_ Public (@wearenewpublic)
Real influence is closer to craft than performance. It’s about understanding the system you’re working in—its incentives, fears, histories, and fault lines—and moving through it with eyes open. It’s knowing when to push, when to wait, and when to shut up. Done right, influence is how you avoid brute force. It’s how you make change stick without... See more
Nope, it's not fair.
NOBL 2/10/26
Keepsakes—like luxury watches or rare books—are already finding their place in the second-hand market, attracting collectors and enthusiasts of contemporary relics. In the future, digital keepsakes could also acquire invaluable worth. Imagine, for example, a Friend pendant worn by a major celebrity or a groundbreaking scientist. This small object,... See more
Laurent François • The promises of digital keepsakes
digital life—digital cultures and
Dec 03, 2024
Ok, here goes: I realized that the quality I value among the most highly—if not the most hightly—in an artistic collaborator is conviction. A lot of words are thrown around when it comes to creative work: trust, community, "gift" in the Lewis Hyde sense, sincerity, etc. But conviction is different—it's belief in what you are doing, being driven to... See more
Weekend Epiphany
making-meaning and taste
Joanne McNeil All My Stars Oct 11, 2022 newsletter
Tech-enabled tl;dr certainly has a place. There’s more content than ever and most of it is too long. But when everything is mediated by a summary, layers are being built between our brains and the thing itself, allowing something else—increasingly, AI—to interpret things for us.
The Summary Edition
making-meaning and digital life—digital cultures
When we mainline takeaways, blurbs, bullets, key insights, there is something lost. We are sanding down friction, muffling voice, removing tone, and accepting pre-fabricated meaning. Will AI-driven distilling get us closer to the thing itself, or further away?
These days, it’s increasingly clear to me that we have a new overlord: the Summary. Thanks to AI, we are experiencing the enshortification (sorry, Cory Doctorow) of everything.
When we mainline takeaways, blurbs, bullets, key insights, there is something lost. We are sanding down friction, muffling voice, removing tone, and accepting pre-fabricated meaning. Will AI-driven distilling get us closer to the thing itself, or further away?
Both responses miss something important, though. They both assume that what we know as “culture” is the only type of culture that could ever exist.
There’s a third possible response, and that’s that there’s a new culture all around us.
We just don’t register it as “culture.”
There’s a third possible response, and that’s that there’s a new culture all around us.
We just don’t register it as “culture.”
Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck
