Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • indigestible lumps of technical explanation in the guise of purported dialogue

    That invigorating yet frustrating thing where someone smarter than you with a bigger audience makes a fairly neat version of an argument you’ve been trying to peddle for a decade or more. Henry ‘Crooked Timber’ Farrell has been reading Cory Doctorow’s latest, and uses it as a foil for talking about what most sf types…

  • our sweaty, bumbling, warm humanity

    Irina Dumitrescu: Lately I look at the way people around me accept technology without question and worry that I’m becoming a reactionary. I don’t want to be that person — the one who grumbles about cell phones in children’s hands and social media and the polished bilge of ChatGPT substituting for the writing people make,…

  • making them seem insurmountable

    A new Laleh Khalili joint at NOEMA: … what if infrastructure is designed, financed and adopted into the habits of everyday lives of its users in such a way that it is not a harbinger of apocalypse? I fear that thinking of infrastructures in a generalized and totalizing way, as always only girding the structures…

  • 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…

  • yet the market approved

    There’s a lot to be said for relying on the FT as your dominant source of world-scale news, but that it will make you a happier person is not among them, unless perhaps you are already a member of its target demographic (which I am decidedly not). Here’s a bit from a medium-long read about…