Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Criticism

  • simply imagining better things isn’t enough

    Team FOAM have started pushing out more of the fragments I sent them a while back. Latest out of the pipe is a bit titled “The unbearable lightness of solarpunk”, which for old hands at VCTB will be recognisably a condensation-rewrite of this post and a few others. The timing is serendipitous, coinciding closely with…

  • science found it hard to converse with the rest of society

    Nice to see a typically long LRB review of Latour’s last two books, but Harding makes a bit of a blunder here, perhaps due to his not having been party to decades of STS discourse: There was a hint in We Have Never Been Modern that science found it hard to converse with the rest…

  • intellectual fracking / notes toward the declaration of the Butlerian jihad

    Friend-of-the-show Jay Springett talks a lot about “cultural fracking”, and is back on that beat this weekend. I’m feeling it; the big cultural events I’ve seen discussed this morning in the various feeds I follow have included another Star Wars prequel, another Indiana Jones movie, a “dark” Pinocchio remake. (Lest you think I’m pretending not…

  • artificial intelligence and the (post-)apocalyptic imaginary

    An interesting and strident talk last night from academic AI critic Teresa Heffernan at the wonderfully zeitgeisty Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelburg: Veterans of AI discourse may not find much that’s new to them in here, but I found her points regarding the necessity of maintaining and reinforcing the distinction…

  • the dulling sameness of a world of infinite but meaningless variety

    Via Andrew Curry’s ever-reliable Just Two Things newsletter—where does he find the time?!—here’s Annie Dorsen on AI “art” at [checks notes]… ah, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists? When people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu “creativity” of big tech platforms, on a mass scale, we are facing a particularly dire form of…