Velcro City Tourist Board

Month: May 2020

  • det är hundens liv

  • dead media beat

    Thanks to Jay Springett and Uncle Warren for alerting me to the sunsetting of Bruce Sterling’s old Beyond the Beyond blog at Wired, which I only stopped following because Wired yanked the RSS on it some time ago—this despite its being perhaps the most influential thing they ever published, or ever will publish. Jay’s accompanying…

  • (against) a world that is hollowed out, closed off, sold off, “safe”

    I hadn’t heard of freelance ed-tech thinker and avenging angel of firebrand rhetoric Audrey Watters before Sentiers linked to this transcription of a recent keynote of hers… but from now on, I’ll be keeping an ear out for her work. If you’d now please all stand for a rousing chorus of “Fuck the Hot Take…

  • neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead incremental

    Medium-length essay here by Rob Nixon, whose “slow violence” concept was briefly introduced to me back in early March at a little symposium thing in Utrecht; I’ve acquired the book, obvs, but it’ll likely be a while before I get to it, and I wanted to put up a quick placeholder for it on the…

  • canned applause

    Pandemic humour, Polish style, via a UK colleague whose roots are in that country: Translation: “Doctors are clapping disease out of the patient. Firefighters are clapping the fire out of the forest. The teacher is clapping knowledge into pupils.” For all its ongoing troubles, Poland is apparently still a country capable of recognising performative bullshit…