Brian Thomas Clark

A decade ago, you paid for a smartphone to get 24/7 access to a world that, while demanding of your attention and full of advertising, was made up of a greater share of pleasurable, novel, or at least elective stuff: social media; entertainment; communication with friends; a bit of freedom from your desk at work, if you wanted it. (It provided... See more

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.

II. Process

I overheard something nice around the office a few months ago.

“ You don ’ t reach a moment of digital transformation . You just keep transforming.”

Speaks to a lot of the nature of work projects, strategy, possibly life too (it’s certainly true in therapy, minus the digital part). Essentially it’s a more clever-sounding way of saying... See more

I’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

We are adrift–a culture of consumers accustomed to buying objects and building collections as the sole means of documenting our cultures–deprived of the infrastructure to do so. But our individual inability to collect and store is one I’ll lament the least.

Yes, we’re drifting, but maybe we can choose to float towards a more collective stewardship... See more

Thinking of yourself as an observer is better for your happiness than obsessing over being observed.

Social media encourages us to think of every thought we have as interesting; it makes everyone else feel accessible, and therefore disposable; it exposes us to endless bad actors, hardening our hearts and compelling us to suspect the worst; it rewards vulnerability, but also incentivizes defensiveness; and, most cogently for the purposes of this... See more

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

As much as I share his concerns, this book repeatedly made we want to yell back at him for willfully underplaying obvious exceptions and counterarguments.

Chief among these is to what degree Chayka’s “flattening” is anything new. When he writes, “If anything, mass culture lately appears more aesthetically homogenous than ever,” he seems to forget... See more