Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • Schlock & Ore

    An archival re-run from 2012 at The Baffler: Will Boisvert on the MIT Media Lab. Boisvert was clearly well ahead of the hype cycle on this topic; it’s a gloriously withering piece. But while the Lab often seems like a marketing team posing as an academic institution, the corruption is subtler than the mere capture…

  • Cold front

    Brighton. Down here for a couple of evenings with C before hitting the rails to Hamburg for a workshop on the politics of scenarios and futurity. Naturally I have acquired a stinking head-cold, and autumn is handing over to winter like a mule handing over to their handler. Insert your own tide-based metaphor here; I’m…

  • a house that grows

    Paul Dobraszczyk on Graham Caine’s Street Farmhouse eco-structure from the early 1970s: Even though Caine intended the eco-house to be a model for a new kind of society that embraced self-determination as a fundamental tenet in all aspects of life, it nevertheless failed because of its vulnerability to disorder. The ways in which humans occupy…

  • An audience with Saint Donna

    At Logic Magazine, an interview (by, I think, Moira Weigel?) with none other than Donna Haraway. It’s a good long read, so you should go tuck in to the full thing, but I’mma pull some excerpts here for my own purposes. On being accused of encouraging “relativism”, and thereby birthing “post-truth”: Our view was never…

  • These are the ghosts that get me

    Helena “Griefbacon” Fitzgerald, applying her inimitable turns of phrase to the shifting of the seasons, both external and internal: It’s easy to forget, in the long memory of a worse time, that there was something bright before it; it’s hard not to write a story where every single thing one does before things go wrong…