Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • 17AUG21 / accessions

  • the n-word

    Storing this one away here against the next time some wise-arse starts going on about how some people bandy the term around without anyone being able to define it: ganked from yer man Phil Burton-Cartledge, here’s Wendy Brown’s (2015) definition of neoliberalism from Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution: … as a normative order of…

  • half-arsed cynicism as gateway drug to solutionism, example #632

    So close, but yet so far. Alan Jacobs on geoengineering: The argument that the exploration and testing of geoengineering technologies should be stopped is not “a worthwhile argument.” It’s a dumb argument. We cannot afford to put all our eggs in the emissions-reduction basket, for the simple reason that there is no good reason to…

  • climate change aesthetics and the logic of the spectacle

    Via Andrew Curry’s reliably interesting Just Two Things newsletter, here’s a piece by the Magnum photography collective about the portrayal of climate change in contemporary photography, and in particular the work of a non-profit called Climate Visuals, which is… … founded in research in social science; they use evidence gathered from focus groups in Europe…

  • kelly’s antiheroes

    It’s been quite a few years from the last time I was suffiently wound up by Kevin Kelly’s cyber-Amish techno-optimistic sermonising to write a blog post rebutting it, but it seems some things are more reliable triggers than others. So, here’s Kelly’s latest salvo, entitled “The Case for Optimism”, and my step-by-step rebuttal of it—which,…