Velcro City Tourist Board

velcro city tourist board

a blog by Paul Graham Raven

science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats

international police cops

I have long been aware that the reason spam emails such as 419 scams are so poorly written is to filter for, uh, low-information voters, shall we say—those who are more likely to follow the entire phishing chain, if they’re insufficiently (media) literate to recognise the initial contact as spurious.
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Futures 🙜 Philosophy 🙜 Social Theory 🙜 Technology 🙜 Weak Signals

20 May 2025
help us elaborate upon what we are trying to say

I don’t think it’s difficult to foresee the effects [of LLMs] on academic knowledge production at all, as the effects outside of the academy are glaringly obvious: I mean, have you tried searching the internet recently?
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Art 🙜 Philosophy 🙜 Social Theory 🙜 Technology 🙜 Writing

18 Apr 2025
a bear of very little intelligence

One wonders what sort of things those two discussed over their plausibly liquid lunches along the Strand?
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General

15 Apr 2025
previously unexplored genre substrata

Next time someone asks you “what is genre, anyway?”, send them to Lucy Sante.
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Futures 🙜 General 🙜 Science Fiction 🙜 Writing

14 Apr 2025
directions for the limo driver

From a longer-term perspective, that even the unhinged instinctive autocrat currently at the helm of the world’s largest economic egregore can be persuaded to blink when confronted with the full stare of the basilisk deity that we have dubbed “the markets” cannot be read as anything other than bad news.
[… read the whole post.]

Futures 🙜 Philosophy 🙜 Politics

10 Apr 2025

Who is Paul Graham Raven?

“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”

Paul is consulting writer, researcher, theorist and foresight practitioner, as well as an author and critic of science fiction literature. More details can be found on the About page of this blog.