velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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the cozy catastrophists of cosplay doomerism
Asterisk Magazine, which aspires to be The New Yorker of effective altruism, has a piece profiling “AI doomers” which, even after reviewing the author’s other sincere engagements with related topics, I’m struggling not to parse as a brilliant bit of parody and/or satire. … AI doom is a remarkably cozy catastrophe. If you suffered through…
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the very capacities that make agency possible
A clip from an essay on Zhaungzi’s approach to virtue.
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we (believe that we) have always lived in the castle
B D McClay asks “when exactly was science fiction [literature] about jacked bros in space“, and concludes that the answer is quite possibly “never”—or at least “not back in the Golden Age, despite claims persistent over decades that it was”. McClay thinks that this metanarrative has a lot to do with the long-standing resentment of…
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i find this line of questioning exhilarating
It was never about “tech”, not least because there’s no such thing as “tech”. There is only people using things to do stuff, and if that is anything, then it is politics.
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].”