Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Criticism

  • bear discovers fire: on the erroneous over-estimation of generative systems

    bear discovers fire: on the erroneous over-estimation of generative systems

    Oh god, OK—yes, I’m sorry, more “#AI” discourse, and believe me, no one finds my repeated returns to the topic more wearing and ironic than I do, but we are living in A Moment, and I have been wrestling with that moment on the personal and artistic front, but I have also been looking at…

  • the Torment Nexus and the death of satire

    the Torment Nexus and the death of satire

    If you can look at the technological paradigm of which you consider yourself to be a celebrant, and tell yourself it feels like Douglas Adams, you should be running for the exits (having taken care to take your towel with you, naturally).

  • in the process of throwing it away for something we know is worse

    If—as seems to be the case—I am to join the ranks of middle-aged men yelling at clouds, I guess I can bear it if Adam Kotsko is in the vanguard: Print was a perfected technology, an unsurpassable way of sharing information and ideas and stories — and we are all in the process of throwing…

  • mixing McLuhan and Marx (Butlerian coda)

    Sometimes you write a thing in a fit of emotional response, and then the universe sidles up, says “oh, that pushed your buttons, did it?” and offers you another hit, and you demonstrate your own weakness to yourself once again, returning like a dog to its own vomit, because it’s just too damned perfect an…

  • Butlerian jihad (slight return)

    I have mostly tried to avoid both consuming and contributing to The “AI” Discourse, having in essence made my point almost a year ago and encountered little since then that has served to do anything but reinforce my feelings on the matter. But I’m breaking that fast for this observation, which is really (and perhaps…