Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
This shift involves changing workflows and aligning a digital strategy to ever-changing consumer expectations. What used to be judged by clicks is now judged by tone, fluency and feel on your owned platforms and across distributed ones.
Dan Gardner • The Click Is Dying, And It’s Taking Your Brand With It
How are you using AI to improve your relationship with your customers?
We have been an essentially colonial civilization since the first enclosed farm, since agriculture, really, but definitely since territorial wars, slavery, and resource extraction. It’s what we do - not just with imperial armies, but with basic capitalism. This is our average. Our normal. A digital media environment with algorithms and AIs... See more
Douglas Rushkoff • Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
Thinking of yourself as an observer is better for your happiness than obsessing over being observed.
Arthur C. Brooks • Don’t Objectify Yourself
In previous generations, depression was likely to result from internal conflicts between what we want to do and what authority figures – parents, teachers, institutions – wish to prevent us from doing. But in our high-performance society, it’s feelings of inadequacy, not conflict, that bring on depression. The pressure to be the best workers,
... See moreIf you’re trying to lead real change, the most important question is not “How do we drive adoption?” It is “How will this system try to stay itself?” Where will it perform agreement while preserving the old rules? Where will it translate the change into something harmless? What will it protect, and who will it protect?
Progress is not when people... See more
Progress is not when people... See more
We're wrong about progress
NOBL 01/27/26
Decades ago, friction was what made a subculture. You had to figure out what punk or goth was about, learn its codes, seek out compatriots, and then maybe go to Hot Topic or a hardcore show. Friction is lower online and visibility is higher. We are all constantly performing our preferences in public. “Subcultures,” in the sense of aesthetic niches,... See more
One Thing • 🟧 Does subculture still exist?
What we get instead is what Byung-Chul Hanmhas described as an "overheating of the ego." Pure individuality through momentary identification of yourself with an aesthetic, which exhausts us by depriving us of any real conflict or difference. What we consume online amounts to a cheaply reproducible set of vague designs. There is only an endless hall of shiny standees, of potential versions of yourself you can pop your face into as you go. Take the photo. And move on. The problem with this "aesthetic," as Silcoff so candidly shows, is that it is entirely a product of the internet’s selfie culture. Offline, these relations – the social construction of identity — were once mediated by something with a bit more give and a sense of reality.
Educated people feel a duty to know these trends as part of cultural literacy. They don't buy Labubus, yet they join the "we" and descend into introspective angst about what Labubus mean for the state of "our" collective psychology.
As a general strategy for cultural consumption, omnivorism was very smart: Erecting artificial barriers against “low”... See more
As a general strategy for cultural consumption, omnivorism was very smart: Erecting artificial barriers against “low”... See more
The New Yorker Roundup
culture-2526 and
In “This Is for Everyone,” Berners-Lee argues that the web’s lack of compassion is “a design issue ” that can be fixed. “There’s still time,” he writes, “to build machines that serve the human,” that “promote the dignity of our fragile species on this isolated globe.” It’s a moving vision. But it’s hard to reconcile with the entropy of today’s... See more
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
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