Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: Technology

  • Give me convenience

    There’s something rather pernicious about this. It seems clear that despite the continual adoption of technologies that promise to save time or make things more convenient, we do not, in fact, feel as if we have more time at all. There are a number of factors that may explain this dynamic. As Neil Postman noted…

  • “Engineers try to do politics by changing infrastructure.”

    From an interview with Fred Turner: What are the “politics of infrastructure”? What does that phrase mean? It means several different things. First, it involves the recognition that the built environment, whether it’s built out of tarmac or concrete or code, has political effects. I was joking earlier about reshaping the Forum, but I shouldn’t…

  • A way to sell selling itself

    VR/AR is ad-tech. Everything built in studios (except for experimental projects from independent artists) is advertising something. That empathy stuff? That’s advertising for nonprofits. But mostly VR is advertising itself. While MTV was advertising musicians, the scale and creative freedom meant that it launched careers for people like Michel Gondry, Antoine Fuqua, David Fincher, Spike…

  • The Metamedium

    From a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Zielinski argues that what he calls “media” (a dense composite notion encompassing both discourse and its material supports) has vanished from the horizon because it is now ubiquitous.” Obviously I need to read the whole book to make this claim more solidly, but nonetheless: this…

  • (Dis)Assembling #Stacktivism; poking holes in utopia

    Tomorrow (Weds 15th October 2014) sees me boarding a train down to That London, in order to be a talking head at a salon titled (Dis)Assembling #Stacktivism at the Goethe Institute. If you’ve not been following along, #stacktivism is Jay Springett’s invention, and it’s less a manifesto than a call for seeing the world anew, a…