Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Criticism

  • the pursuit of absolute predictability renders its practitioners foolish

    A conference paper transcript from Terence Blake, in which he smashes together Deleuze and Dune, which results in a much more interesting (and far less reductive) reading of the latter than I’ve seen heretofore. A snippet: Frank Herbert indicates that the « central paradox » of Dune turns on the human perception of time. Paul’s prescience first…

  • solar matter stomache-ache

    So it seems I got a rise out of Matt Webb with my response to his “eating the sun” thing a week or so back. This was not exactly my intention—I had little expectation he’d actually read the thing, tbh—but I’m kinda pleased, for reasons which I’m going to try to explain here, as much…

  • the unbearable lightness of blockchain: utopian visions and invisible infrastructures

    As already noted, this has been a strange and hectic year so far, with a whole lot of public talking in the last month and a bit. Not all of these were video’d for public consumption, but some were, and I’m gonna stuff them up here over the next few days, partly because I unwisely…

  • a clear parable of power

    Raising my head briefly above the palisade*, here, to clip a couple of paragraphs from an excellent (and, unusually, free-to-air) essay at the Paris Review, which is apparently a tweaked version of an introduction by Michael Tondre for a new edition of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the foundational petro-novel. You should read the whole thing, as…

  • 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…