Month: September 2018
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Justifications for critical utopianism
A strident argument for critical utopian discourse (and against technotopian solutionism) from David F Ruccio at Real-World Economics Review [via SyntheticZero]: [This] doesn’t mean utopia is irrelevant to the problem of climate change. On the contrary. The dystopian consequences of current trends clearly invite a utopian response. But it needs to be of a different…
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Red Planet Blues
A fine piece of speculative journalism from the redoubtable Geoff Manaugh: crime and policing on the off-world colonies. Full of chewy gems and story-starters, alongside the existential stuff that proponents of such neocolonial projects either ignore or lack the imagination to consider: In the precarious Martian environment, where so much depends on the efficient, seamless…
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The device paradigm
The switch induced a new and modern space defined not by size, shape, structure, material, use, ornament, or any other conventional measure of architectural merit. Rather, it conjured a space distinguished by its instantaneous appearance, willed into visibility, as if volition alone were enough to make it so. Indeed, the very idea of a volitional…
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The last days of the Next Big Thing
Today, social media enables young people to engage with culture and politics in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with music; from the 1960s to the 1990s, music was pretty much all there was. It seems likely that, in the broad sweep of cultural history, the period circa 1955 to circa 2000…