Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • there is no transition

    Maybe I’m being over-optimistic, but seeing arguments for non-solutionist and demand-side approaches to decarbonisation research appearing in a journal from the Nature stable feels like a sign that the idea is getting some traction at long last. That said paper is by Elizabeth Shove, a brilliant and tenacious researcher whose work has been a huge…

  • partially-automated bi-utopian communism

    I’ve been quietly impressed by the ubiquity of Aaron Benanav across a variety of venues as he promotes his recently-published book Automation and the Future of Work, of which I received a copy a while back. Benanav’s been a guest on blogs and podcasts aplenty, and I’m glad to have read and listened to some…

  • the ubiquitous fictionality of narratives of futurity

    Doing that thing where one quotes a famous and respected person saying things one has been saying for years, in the hope that it’ll be more palatable coming from someone famous and respectable. Once again, it’s yer man KSR, of course: All attempts to speak of the future are science fiction stories, and thus bound…

  • luma daze / nine notions of the metasystemic

    Among the many things on my list of events to speak at in 2020 was Luma Days, which is a kind of annual arts-community-philosophy shindig in Arles, southern France. Of course, the prospect of actually going in person went the way of almost all long distance travel this year—but Maria Finders and her team have…

  • framtiden ser ljus ut

    There’s no escape from dumb-ass hot takes about The Fewtch, even in DuoLingo: On the bright side, I’m on a 225-day streak, and apparently I’ve learned 2,000 words… which makes it all the more embarrassing that I still stumble over unexpected sentences in real-world transactions as simple as buying a coffee. Ah, well. Practice, practice,…