Category: Futures
-
Cassandra addresses the Trojans
Greta speaks: … what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing a climate chaos that you knowingly brought upon them? That it seemed so bad for the economy that we decided to resign the idea of securing future living conditions without even trying? Our house is still on…
-
the new normal is that there is no normal
15th January 2020, Sheffield; the Beeb (and all other sources I’ve checked) suggesting a peak temperature of 12 or 13°C* this evening. I think I can recall a single night over the last two or three months during which there was a mild frost. Are you worried yet? Because you fucking well should be. […
-
semiotics of utopia
It’s yer man Stan Robinson, trying to (quite literally) square away the reductive dichotomy of [u/dys]topia: It’s important to remember that utopia and dystopia aren’t the only terms here. You need to use the Greimas rectangle and see that utopia has an opposite, dystopia, and also a contrary, the anti-utopia. For every concept there is…
-
the captured city
Seems like Jathan Sadowski (previously) is doing pre-promo for a new book on the “smart city” memeplex: The “smart city” is not a coherent concept, let alone an actually existing entity. It’s better understood as a misleading euphemism for a corporately controlled urban future. The phrase itself is part of the ideological infrastructure it requires.…
-
Schlock & Ore
An archival re-run from 2012 at The Baffler: Will Boisvert on the MIT Media Lab. Boisvert was clearly well ahead of the hype cycle on this topic; it’s a gloriously withering piece. But while the Lab often seems like a marketing team posing as an academic institution, the corruption is subtler than the mere capture…