Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • 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…

  • 31JAN22 / accessions

    Courtesy a seasonal giftcard from my employer, plus the magic of a four-for-three deal on paperbacks at Akademibokhandeln. These technically came in over the weekend, but hey, the accessions department doesn’t work weekends; if you don’t like it, take it up with the union.

  • 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…