Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
When you look at what actually goes into good delegation documentation, it’s remarkably consistent: What are we trying to accomplish, and why? Where are the limits of the delegated authority? What does “done” look like? What specific outputs do I need? What interim outputs do I need to follow your progress? And what should you check before telling... See more
Ethan Mollick • Management as AI superpower
This is why my students did so well. They weren’t AI experts. But they’d spent years learning how to scope problems in their fields of expertise, define deliverables, and recognize when a financial model or medical report was off. They had hard-earned frameworks from classes and jobs, and those frameworks became their prompts. The skills that are so often dismissed as “soft” turned out to be the hard ones.
I don’t know exactly what work looks like when everyone is a manager with an army of tireless agents. But I suspect the people who thrive will be the ones who know what good looks like — and can explain it clearly enough that even an AI can deliver it. My students figured this out in four days. Not because they were AI natives, but because they already knew how to manage. All that training, it turns out, was accidentally preparing them for exactly this moment.
That’s the reality of algorithmic society. it creates an endless information loop—like the snake swallowing its own tail. And a fog of sameness descends upon the land.
But this can’t last forever. Human history teaches us that societies resisting change eventually collapse from sheer inertia. And insurgents show up on the scene to accelerate the
... See morehonest-broker.com • The Return of the Weirdo - By Ted Gioia - The Honest Broker
Your Spotify Wrapped for 2024 is the weight of all these things, whether we want to deal with it or not. AI-powered podcasts are the result of expunging the lives of the real humans who built these ideas, replacing them with a facsimile of human connection. Your data feeds into Google, and it builds you the idea of a friend in return. Artists will... See more
Niko Stratis • Wrapped will never love you back
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
Douglas Rushkoff • Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
A new Team Human Live with Occult Historian Mitch Horowitz
Dec 18, 2024
Once something is obvious and working, people tend to underestimate it.
Underestimating What Works
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
While it’s probably one of the corniest things I’ll ever write in this column, I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not... See more
Elizabeth Goodspeed on the Importance of Taste – And How to Acquire It
In writing this history of the 21st century, Blank Space, I noticed that one important marker of our era is the cultural success of widely loathed people , such as Paris Hilton, Kanye West, and Donald Trump. They all figured out a powerful media hack for which there is no known antidote: Sociopathic behavior spurs the media to write lots of... See more
W. David Marx • Only Fads: A Culture (And Economy) of Labubu
attention and
Everyone’s posting about 2016, with a heavy dose of nostalgia.
In 2016, Instagram switched their default feed from purely reverse chronological feed to algorithmically-sorted. In retrospect, this marks the beginning of a shift towards a passive, spoon-fed internet.
Product design matters — people are hungry for digital tools that actually allow them... See more
In 2016, Instagram switched their default feed from purely reverse chronological feed to algorithmically-sorted. In retrospect, this marks the beginning of a shift towards a passive, spoon-fed internet.
Product design matters — people are hungry for digital tools that actually allow them... See more