Velcro City Tourist Board

Month: October 2023

  • Brightbourne is a coy house

    Coming up on halfway through Ian McDonald’s Hopeland, and I already have about a dozen quotes of similar size to this one that I might have held up, as I’m doing now, as a way of saying that is how you do it, that is great writing. The music accompanies them up the drive, heard…

  • a mixture of Vatican clergy and the Wizard of Oz: on hype, strategy, and postmodernity

    Don’t tell my mother I said this*, but as time goes by I’ve really come to appreciate the value of paying attention to the experience of old hands. Exhibit A comes with what I will gladly concede is a hefty slice of self-aggrandisement. Rodney Brooks has been working with robots and autonomous vehicles for almost…

  • the lesson of trees

    To take a train north from Malmö in mid-October is a little like boarding a time machine, accelerating into the oncoming autumn. At the outset, the deciduous trees are only lightly touched with reds and russets, but with every mile travelled they blaze into orange and yellow, and later the ochres and burnt umbers of…

  • mixing McLuhan and Marx (Butlerian coda)

    Sometimes you write a thing in a fit of emotional response, and then the universe sidles up, says “oh, that pushed your buttons, did it?” and offers you another hit, and you demonstrate your own weakness to yourself once again, returning like a dog to its own vomit, because it’s just too damned perfect an…

  • Butlerian jihad (slight return)

    I have mostly tried to avoid both consuming and contributing to The “AI” Discourse, having in essence made my point almost a year ago and encountered little since then that has served to do anything but reinforce my feelings on the matter. But I’m breaking that fast for this observation, which is really (and perhaps…