Brian Thomas Clark

@btc

Strategist/Producer/Collector

Digital Experience Director @risd

All cardsCollections

Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other... See more

Kate Lindsay • You might just have to be bored

post-platform–post-feed and

In the artist of all kinds, I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. This might account for the fact that we cannot conceive of an artist’s coming to the end of the task that occupies his whole nature.

Caleb Crain • On Not Being Found

creativity

D.W. Winnicott

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

overload

I feel alienated from people that believe technology can solve loneliness. To me, effective accelerationism is doomerism disguised as optimism. The belief that things won’t change and the belief that if they do change, through technology, it will be for the better are both sides of the same coin. In fact, just as entropy is an arrow of time, I... See more

Daisy Alioto • The Loneliness Economy

digital life—digital cultures

The Loneliness Economy

Griffin Moss is missing.

Daisy Alioto on the power of refusal in human and bot relations.

dirt.fyi

Oct 16, 2023

To put it more plainly: As you grow older, you face the interconnected questions of which parts of yourself to preserve, which parts of yourself to evolve, and which parts of yourself to abandon .

I think these are fun questions to work over, because they’re questions without easy answers and, anyway, there’s no opting out of them. You can ignore... See more

Are you even alive if you aren't confused?

aging and taste

Part of it is me trying to navigate the external world, and the other side of it is me trying to navigate my internal world. That’s how I view fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction is really good to help you navigate the mental models of the physical world, so you can understand how the world works, how to gain tactics and strategies to shape things... See more

Anne-Laure Le Cunff • Interview: Using Books to Navigate Life With Juvoni Beckford

reading and making-meaning

“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.”

The New Nostalgia

digital life—digital cultures and

When everything is cheerfully “retro,” Fisher argued, we lose our grasp on history—and, without a sense of why the past happened the way it did, our anything-goes embrace of “happy hybridities” is an empty gesture. “What pop lacks now is the capacity for nihilation, for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists,” he

Media & Culture and

Mark Fisher’s “K-Punk” and the Futures That Have Never Arrived

Hua Hsu, December 11, 2018, New Yorker

Every carefully tended knowledge garden is a fingerprint of consciousness: A unique archipelago of interests, insights and inspirations that could never be replicated, even by the most sophisticated AI.

By thoughtfully collecting and connecting the ideas that move us, we not only create an invaluable external memory system (which can be great for... See more

Sari Azout • What Matters in the Age of AI Is Taste

making-meaning