Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • declining the unearned luxury of despair

    Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber: Our era is drenched in narrative. From the beguiling flame spiral of neoliberalism’s end of ‘grand narratives’, to Trump’s three and four word (lock her up / maga) ultra-short stories of destruction, to our helpless fascination with the far right’s ability to govern by unverified sound-bite, to the fact that…

  • when workshops attack

    TFW you make a bunch of off-the-cuff suggestions around lunchtime on Monday about how you might go about doing some institutional futures stuff in a workshoppy character-driven format, and your PI calls your bluff by saying “sounds good, can you run that on Tuesday afternoon?” ?

  • reific(a)tion

  • some notes on Martin Parker’s managerial heroisms

    There’s a lot of good stuff in this piece by Martin Parker at Aeon—hell, anyone who wrote a book titled Shut Down the Business School has gotta be on my side of the fence, right?—but it takes a problematic turn at the end that I think is worth digging into. Let’s start with the good…

  • an hollowed-out epistemology, an epistemic poverty

    I’ll stop blockquoting Audrey Watters when she stops saying shit that needs saying. The science fiction of The Matrix creeps into presentations that claim to offer science fact. It creeps into promises about instantaneous learning, facilitated by alleged breakthroughs in brain science. It creeps into TED Talks, of course. Take Nicholas Negroponte, for example, the…