Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • an immaterial objection

    Via L M Sacasas, an interview by Evan Selinger with David Chalmers, who appears to be analytical philosophy’s current useful idiot from the POV of the tech scene. Does that seem harsh, whether on analytical philosophy in general or Chalmers in particular? Well, given said discipline prides itself on a rigour that the filthy continentals…

  • time fracture / fracture time

    Just realised it’s pretty much exactly a year since I broke the talus of my left foot while climbing… which I guess I’m glad to have remembered on my way back from the climbing wall, rather than on the way there. I now have a lot of the mobility back in that ankle, though not…

  • we live our lives within the poetry of our own demise

    While I am under no illusions that they would ever count it as a valid rejoinder, this from Nick Cave pretty much nails the pre-philosophical (which is to say poetic, I suppose) objection I’ve had to the immortalist dreams of the transhumanoids. Someone in the mailbag asks whether, were it possible, he would want to…

  • (not) giving it the progressive legitimacy it would lack otherwise

    One of the joys of having unplugged from the birdsite again is being able to largely ignore the whole crypto/Web3/NFT circus, at least in its most immediate expression. Of course, various people are writing about it more slowly, and it’s probably a function of my pre-existing biases that have ensured the vast majority of what…

  • 19JAN22 / accessions

    Not new personal purchases, these ones—who can afford to buy their own copies of Routledge handbooks, after all?—but instead delayed contributor copies, the Social Futures one being about two months late to arrive, the Placemaking one closer to a year, the original dispatches of both having presumably been lost to the fathomless Lovecraftean void which…