Velcro City Tourist Board

Month: February 2022

  • notice that wall

    Apropos of nothing but its glorious strangeness, one of twenty images (of what are presumably hundreds more, unscanned) ganked from an old Scientology textbook. Found via an ongoing thing at Metafilter where they’re raking through ancient posts to find forgotten gems.

  • arrogant fidelity

    Looks like the universe is serendipitously feeding my streak of focus on growthism. Clipped from Geoff Mann reviewing William Nordhaus’s new tome at the LRB: Nordhaus attempts to make climate change compatible with ceaseless long-run growth by emphasising the global economy’s ‘carbon intensity’ instead of its carbon sensitivity. The Spirit of Green is most sanguine…

  • ecosystems are not factories / the tyranny of scale

    Just a quick one today (in case yesterday’s table-thumpin’ epic gave you the fear), and it’s a call-back supplementary to an earlier squib about the fetish for “scaling up” in, well, everything. The case in hand here is food production, and perhaps it’s the case where the argument is made most easily. Scalability as a…

  • design, marketing, and manipulation as ideological imperative

    I seem to be linking Cennydd Bowles a lot lately, but why would one not? So here’s a nice, short injunction from the man himself, off the back of his having thrown out the question “when does design become manipulation?”, and being real unsettled by the answers he got: Design influences. It persuades. But if…