Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: infrastructure

  • ecosystems are not factories / the tyranny of scale

    Just a quick one today (in case yesterday’s table-thumpin’ epic gave you the fear), and it’s a call-back supplementary to an earlier squib about the fetish for “scaling up” in, well, everything. The case in hand here is food production, and perhaps it’s the case where the argument is made most easily. Scalability as a…

  • revenge effect

    From the conclusion section of Carabantes, M. (2021). “The Coronavirus as a Revenge Effect: The Pandemic from the Perspective of Philosophy of Technique”. Science, Technology, & Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211008595 The main goal of technique is freedom. We use it to free ourselves from the burdens imposed by nature, such as getting food and shelter. However,…

  • “A part of the world’s worlding”: Sofia (2000), Container Technologies

    Sofia, Z. (2000). Container technologies. Hypatia, 15(2), 181-201. I first read this back in the heady days of 2016 or so, on the direct recommendation of its author; I don’t get to name-drop very often, but Zoe Sofoulis (writing here as Zo Sofia, as she sometimes does) is a good friend, and served as a…

  • no such thing as nature

    A serendipitous find: Humans have continually altered biodiversity on many scales. We have changed the local mix of species, their ranges, habitats and niches for thousands of years. Long before agriculture, selective human predation of many non-domesticated species shaped their evolutionary course. Even the relatively small hunter-gatherer populations of the late Pleistocene were capable of…

  • hauntological metasystemics

    I’m cited* in this piece by Kelly Pendergrast at Real Life, but that’s not the (only) reason I’m clipping from it; I’m citing from it because it’s really good, and because it takes ideas from my heretofore most completely ignored journal paper and takes them exactly in the direction I hoped people would take them.…