Brian Thomas Clark

But the curation was never about financial reward. It was “there's a small unscalable business here about taste, that people rely on and really like, and everyone who works on it doesn't make very much money, but they're very cool.” We just don't live in a world where that's an acceptable way to live. There's a lot of economic pressures and again,... See more

the decline of third places means there are fewer places to just hang out and bump into each other. Other economic and social factors have surely contributed to this change, but I suspect that it’s largely due to the new third place—the one in the palm of our hands. We hang out online, which means we don’t hang out at all.

At some point, you have to decide: Do you want to directly contribute to the enshittification of the daily life, or not?

It’s very, very easy to throw up your hands and say there’s nothing you can do. It’s harder to take the time to think about and act on using whatever power you have in productive ways. This could mean organizing in your workplace,... See more

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.

Value-based marketing:

“Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear what we want them to know about us. One of the greatest jobs of marketing the universe has ever seen is Nike.... 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.

Cool means different things to different people, but to me, it’s about authenticity—which is very different from “relatability.” People who make great art that moves the masses are not like you and I. They have a point of view, laser focus, a pinch of delusion, and a level of execution that is required to make something great and be able to sell... See more

All this should seem obvious, which is most troubling: the lack of communal love — the indifference we have towards neighbors, strangers — is not only a recent phenomenon, but it’s not a natural one that’s baked into our evolutionary DNA. It’s a step backwards from our primate ancestry, back to our distant reptilian roots. Even now, AI skeptics who... 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