Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • kelly’s antiheroes

    It’s been quite a few years from the last time I was suffiently wound up by Kevin Kelly’s cyber-Amish techno-optimistic sermonising to write a blog post rebutting it, but it seems some things are more reliable triggers than others. So, here’s Kelly’s latest salvo, entitled “The Case for Optimism”, and my step-by-step rebuttal of it—which,…

  • bold as (nostalgic) love: Gwyneth Jones and hauntology

    A Metafilter thread on the new St Ettienne album (haven’t heard it yet) gave up this comment: It’s interesting to see the 90s End Of History era displace the Swinging 60s as a lost golden age just out of clear memory. @metafilter https://www.metafilter.com/192220/Ive-been-trying-to-tell-you#8132163 I’m sharing this here due to its synchronicity with a point I…

  • Longtermism is merely a more acceptable mask for transhumanism

    This longread by Phil Torres at Current Affairs on the Longtermism/x-risk/Effective-Altruism mob does a pretty good job of setting out the issues with what might be the ultimate in moral philosophies, namely a moral philosophy whose adherents have convinced themselves that it is not at all a moral philosophy, but rather the end-game of the…

  • accuracy only happens by mistake

    Aiming to reboot the blog-as-commonplace-book practice, here—a habit which hasn’t so much fallen away as become blocked, in that I keep storing up things to clip in my inbox, but never actually, y’know, clipping them. (Which is a little like continuing to buy cigarettes but not smoking them? Though if I put it that way,…

  • Solargoth

    I keep telling myself I shouldn’t pass public comment on solarpunk, firstly because I haven’t done the reading and legwork, and secondly because I know a few people who really have done the reading and legwork (hi, Jay!), and as a good, responsible academic (cough, cough) I know better than to traipse across someone else’s…