Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • always primed with its own conditions of dissolution and abolishment

    Interesting little essay here from one Duncan Stuart, a new name at Blue Labyrinths, which I will cite at length: [Sylvain] Lazarus takes seriously the work of French historian Marc Bloch, who argues in his 1949 book The Historians Craft, that the past is given and the future contingent. Lazarus demonstrates that for Bloch the…

  • the proneness to imply a certain grade of universality

    Yeah, this: In general, as soon as the speculative language is introduced, it is relatively easy to get people involved and excited about tomorrow’s potential, possibilities, and dangers. Even the ones who are naturally more inclined to focus on short-term challenges seem to be at ease taking a break from the everyday struggle. All in…

  • elements of that necessary magic

    Well, I sure as shit picked a great week to start using the birdsite again, didn’t I? Man, you should have been here for the Game of Thrones' finale. Now *THAT* was a night. — Martin McGrath (@martinmcgrath) January 6, 2021 I don’t have much to say about it all, really—which isn’t to say I…

  • contract/bridge: Auger (2013), Speculative design: crafting the speculation

    Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11-35. This justly well-cited paper is in some respects a tour through the work of Auger and others (mostly RCA-aligned, I think?) in the decade prior to its publication in 2013. My purpose in writing it up is to extract and summarise the methodological…

  • being quite serious, the future may be boring

    Offered without comment, but with the contextualising note that the interview took place in 1984, some thoughts from J G Ballard on what we might now identify as the formation of European post-Fordist neoliberalism: The young people of Western Europe since the sixties have grown up in a remarkably uniform environment, both in terms of…