Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • meandering toward a (trans)media ecology of futures

    I realised just the other day that I’d somehow managed not to do a serious wrap-up–or even an unserious and/or cursory wrap-up—on the Futures Brought to Life symposium in Vienna that I attended back in May. I’m not going to do one now, either*, but I thought I might at the very least point at…

  • Nightmare on Planet Thanet: Rosa Rankin-Gee’s Dreamland

    Anyone of the “climate dystopias are surplus to purpose” school of thought might as well click away now; Dreamland is very much not the droid you’re looking for. A staggeringly bleak extrapolation of post-Brexit Britain, taking as its focus the recently (and probably temporarily) reinvigorated seaside town of Margate as its setting, I’m not sure…

  • as if there was necessarily just one transition

    Graeber and Wengrove again, referring to archaeological evidence from the soi disant ‘Fertile Crescent’: If the situation in just one cradle of early farming was that complicated, then surely it no longer makes sense to ask, ‘what were the social implications of the transition to farming?’ — as if there was necessarily just one transition,…

  • ut på spåren igen

    Going to Austria, BRB. Talking at the Futures Brought To Life symposium, with various other veterans of what was once the Weird Futures scene. Livestreams will be available, apparently, if you’re not in town.

  • a position of negligible influence

    Given my line of work, I should probably be among the many people who scour the latest missives from the IPCC as soon as they drop. My reasons for not doing so are two-fold. Firstly, I’m very short of time, and scanning 800+ pages of written-by-committee material in order to confirm the details of what…