Velcro City Tourist Board

Month: January 2022

  • both men believed they knew how the world worked

    I’m always here for anyone giving neoclassical economics the kicking it so rightly deserves; in that sense, this piece at Aeon is a bit measured for my tastes, but Bergin—like all the best journalists—leaves plenty of room for one to read between the lines. If even the simple supply-and-demand curve, a staple of the orthodox…

  • it’s about being right, whatever the heck that means

    Couple ‘graphs from Julian Bleecker, here, which manage to put fairly succinctly an argument about futuring which I first found myself trying and failing to make ten, maybe fifteen years ago: Predicting things feels like a setup for bad behavior. It feels weird trying to anticipate what’s going to happen “next” or down the road.…

  • efficiency (slight return)

    Decent piece here at the Atlantic on not just plastic, but the necessity of plastics—by which I mean less their necessity to us, “the consumer” (though they have indeed become profoundly necessary, due to their embeddedness in so many of our day-to-day practices), than to their manufacturers, as a way of getting rid of by-products…

  • organ donation

    Trying to get back into a proper working groove this morning, as there is (long-past-deadline) writing to be done; thus trying to purge myself of a deeply cursed earworm. (Bowling for Soup, thanks for asking. No idea how that fucker got in there.) Stoner-space-doom it is, then—more particularly, Lowrider’s “Ode to Ganymede”, from 2020’s excellent…

  • a world where flesh and machine are in tension: re-reconsidering cyberpunk

    Found myself nodding appreciatively at this re-reassessment of cyberpunk by Lincoln Michel: Everyone has their own definitions of genres, but to me the essence of cyberpunk is not tied to the 1980s visual trappings that have defined it in video games and film. Cyberpunk isn’t merely neon signs or street toughs with high-tech leather jackets…