Brian Thomas Clark

The smartphone turns us into fragmented actors in a perpetual now.

Our Cringe = Sublime SEED touched on some of this — simply opting out of performance becomes an act of quiet rebellion. Going for a walk without posting about it. Writing a thought without tweeting it. Wearing an outfit without wondering how it will look on Instagram. These small acts chip away at the scaffolding of digital humiliation culture.

The ones and zeroes of the digital map tolerate no error or noise. It’s an auto-tuned reality where everything is on the note or it doesn’t exist. Never mind that James Brown reaching up to that note is where we find the soul of the music. In the world of digital figures, that expression of the human soul — that stuff between the official notes —... See more

The Beasties were the ultimate curators and culture merchants, although they never perverted their creative universe with gross buzzwords like that.

Between their genre-smashing albums, their iconic videos, their fashion exploits like X-Large, and their magazine Grand Royal , you could say that they were running a “lifestyle brand” of sorts.

The... See more

I'm not alone in this experience. I recall discussing with Chris Black of How Long Gone how influential these magazine-driven Borders explorations were for him. It was akin to traveling without the expense of a Virgin Atlantic ticket, building a repository of references by turning pages and tapping into cultural hubs. It involved dedicating time... See more

The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.