Brian Thomas Clark

There is apparently an epidemic of loneliness in the United States. Everyone from Kristen Radtke to Hillary Clinton has written about it. Explanations are far-ranging but mostly come down to the same things: our communities have splintered, work has consumed our lives, our social contract has broken down, the internet has destroyed our ability to... See more

Having a digital product strategy means your organization has defined the value you want to deliver to your customers through software and digital tools. It’s a plan that tells staff and customers where you are applying your focus. It also includes a strategic plan, or product roadmap, for how to get there.

Having a product strategy isn’t the same... See more

Philosophy begins in wonder, and the art of it is to keep this wonder with you. Many questions are worth asking, re-asking, revisiting, rethinking. One must seek Knowledge, but be a little wary of finding it. Perhaps excessive, but one could say the idea of possessing knowledge represents a kind of complacency. This is what Socrates meant: Once you... See more

Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.”

The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.

Part of it is me trying to navigate the external world, and the other side of it is me trying to navigate my internal world. That’s how I view fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction is really good to help you navigate the mental models of the physical world, so you can understand how the world works, how to gain tactics and strategies to shape things... See more

“Authenticity”, I think, looks like the power to opt in or out, perform or not, when you want to—in other words: freedom. So when it comes to the Internet, if switching off entirely isn’t possible any more, then surely the words of MGMT can be useful: “control yourself, take only what you need from it.”

Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in... See more