Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • inside among the outsiders

    Sean Guynes on Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: … whereas most utopian novels before Le Guin sent an outsider into the utopian society, tracing their voyage through the social, economic, and political structures of the “better” worlds offered by Gilman’s Herland or Bellamy’s United States, Le Guin cut the narrative in half, shuffled the deck, and…

  • up for grabs

    It’s yer man Cory Doctorow, taking the hopepunk position on science fiction: If you need proof that science-fiction writers are trapped by our consensus on the future and struggle to steer it, consider this: It’s not that hard to imagine surviving a just climate transition. Our leaders are willing to accept the market orthodoxy that…

  • fragile, non-fixed ways of thinking

    A bunch of snips from an interview with Matt Ward [via Matt formerly-of-BERG Jones], until fairly recently Head of Design at Goldsmiths: Speculative Design can act as a mode of inquiry or it can be a form of strategic practice within industry. At its worst it’s an aesthetic, a step-by-step guide or corporate vapourware, at…

  • resisting both purity and progress

    Anne Galloway on more-than-human design: … I’m not a believer that technology under capitalism will be the planet’s salvation, and I tend to part ways with (commercial?) designers and technologists who aim to design more “precision” agriculture through “intelligent” machines, and I’m constantly watching for bad omens. The ethos of the More-Than-Human Lab draws on…

  • the next underground

    TFW Simon Reynolds appears to have been rifling thru your list of near-future short-story ideas: It seems unimaginable, but it’s possible that the next underground will exist entirely off-line.