Brian Thomas Clark

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

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.

Thirst and clout-chasiness aside, there’s no question that the ‘modern media brand’ need multi-modal expression through published content, social syndication, IRL experience, consumable goods and active community.

And on the internet in 2025, true transgression means making something algorithms can’t promote.

But there’s a whole universe that exists outside of your phone. All you need to do is turn away from the screen—even for just a short while—to understand that the culture of now is embedded in something much, much larger.

When we do that, we start seeing that our legacy from the past is an inherited treasure—and both offers us riches and imposes... See more

In the digital age, cultural artifacts are eroded by abundance. Timelines layer and compress artwork, images, and artifacts into corners of the internet. In my corner, I stumbled across a speech entitled “Perfume, Defense and David Bowie’s Wedding” delivered by Brian Eno in 1992 at the Sadler Wells Theatre in London. In it, Eno predicted the... See more

By the time the Voice had assumed its current semi-undead form, following a 2020 resurrection, the creeping irrelevance of any bounded and singular context—including that of a town, much less “the biggest media town in America”—had become the kind of thing a person might fail to notice while engaged in the ruthless business of noticing everything... See more

Now in his mid-30s, Chayka questions whether the nearly endless availability of cultural content to younger generations has made them value it less, compared to the effort it once took to discover what you might love. But a decade or more ago, I was wondering the same thing about people his age. Before that, perhaps older people thought the same... See more