Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • it’s about being right, whatever the heck that means

    Couple ‘graphs from Julian Bleecker, here, which manage to put fairly succinctly an argument about futuring which I first found myself trying and failing to make ten, maybe fifteen years ago: Predicting things feels like a setup for bad behavior. It feels weird trying to anticipate what’s going to happen “next” or down the road.…

  • Smart cities: Policy without polity

    Another publication is getting close to popping out of the pipeline! 23rd November 2021 sees the formal release of the Routledge Handbook of Social Futures, in which yours truly has a chapter entitled “Smart cities: Policy without polity”. Regular readers here will likely be able to guess—and guess correctly!—that this piece does not at all…

  • het från pressen

    Taking what feels like a well-earned and much-needed day off today, after yesterday’s launch of the above narrative prototype / experimental futures vehicle (via the second medium of a slightly kludgy pseudo-Brechtean performance of an online talk-show from 2041). If anyone had been wondering why things have been quiet here lately, getting this thing finished…

  • Solnit’s hope vs. Arendt’s natality

    Rebecca Solnit’s definition of hope is so succinct a summary of my own definition that I assume I must have picked it up from her (and from others who got it from the same source). This version is from a new interview at LARB, which I’m stashing here so I can cite it properly going…

  • half-arsed cynicism as gateway drug to solutionism, example #632

    So close, but yet so far. Alan Jacobs on geoengineering: The argument that the exploration and testing of geoengineering technologies should be stopped is not “a worthwhile argument.” It’s a dumb argument. We cannot afford to put all our eggs in the emissions-reduction basket, for the simple reason that there is no good reason to…