Brian Thomas Clark

To correct the state of AI discourse today, we need to channel this same spirit and train our attention on the messy facts of the human, material world in which these technologies play. Only when we’ve stopped fetishizing “realism” will we be able to turn our attention to very real air, water, ecosystems, and people these technologies consume in... See more

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

What I do know is that we are in an era marked by a crisis of masculinity that is neither warranted nor deserved. That young men feel very alienated. That they are very online. That there is a paradigm shift away from what has been true for the past 60 years: boy leaves home; boy reacts against his parents’ puritanical values; boy becomes some sort... 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

This all isn’t to say that there was nothing novel about TikTok. It obviously did give Americans genuinely new ways to communicate and create culture, but the culture we created with it was always there. Thanks to TikTok, America finally saw itself and it scared us. It turns out Americans don’t talk the way we think they should, don’t dress the way... See more

As the Internet became an always-on, mainstream phenomenon, however, it also reverted to the mean. Influencer culture happens at scale. It’s not about finding the bizarre nooks and crannies of weird, but reaching as many people as possible. Hit counts and numbers of followers are all that matter. It is about getting bigger, rather than smaller.... See more

During the Romantic era, keepsakes were albums of fine engravings, often given as gifts, that sealed an emotion or celebrated a special occasion. This word, which combines to keep (to keep, preserve) and sake (a mark of friendship or consideration), takes on a particular resonance in our digital culture. At its core, it holds tensions related to... See more