Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • preludes to enantiodromia

    I’m seeing enough of them, now, and discussing the concept with enough people online and off, that I think it’s time to start clipping examples of people pointing at harbingers of enantiodromia—the sudden inversion of a paradigm into its complete opposite. Here’s yer man Dougald Hine—a far better-known and more widely read Brit-who-fled-to-Sweden—in a longer…

  • the parts of the shadows that didn’t exactly reflect the numbers became problems

    Many people loved the installment of Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat & Girl webcomic in which Gambrell confronted her feelings about being one of a few thousand early webcomics people listed as having had their work used as training material for generative models. I loved it too. I haven’t been following C&G since the start, but for…

  • fyra år i Malmö

    I rolled into this town four years ago today. This is a rather less notable or triumphant anniversary than that of Cory Doctorow’s establishment of Pluralistic, which was four years ago yesterday—but I dare say he too ends up saying to people “you know, the week when the Covid pandemic really became a thing?”, or…

  • futures of digital work in a fortnight from now

    At 8am on Tuesday 27th February, MediaEvolution Malmö are launching the book which is the result of their latest community foresight cycle, which took as its topic “the futures of digital work”. The book contains five fictions by yours truly—storified versions of the five scenarios that the core contributors came up with across four days…

  • a pattern we are doomed to repeat

    Dave Karpf is doing sterling work on what we might call the uppermost archaeological layer of paleofutures—to the extent that the various vague plans I had to write more in this direction have been shelved pretty much permanently. Leave it to the person with the headstart and the bit between their teeth, you know? There…