Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • 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…

  • Temporal delamination

    This piece by Katherine Miller on (a)temporality in the age of the algorithm has been doing the rounds, and with some justification; it’s a strong piece of writing, and it’s grasping toward something important. I’d be lying if I didn’t find its implicit attempt to situate Trump as a sort of synecdoche for the state…

  • Small Smart Objects

    … as opposed to the traditional sf plot-engine staple of the Big Dumb Object. Madeline Ashby and Charlie Jane Anders interviewed-in-conversation at Slate (and edited further by me for concision): Charlie Jane: […] That’s something that always bugs me, the ways that tech is designed to be opaque. Madeline: Right, I think that’s the nature of writing…

  • The barbarians are within the walls

    Naomi Klein on “climate barbarism” (and more) at LARB: We live in societies, whether they admit it or not, that do rank human life based on race and religion. And climate change forces us to reckon with that, and ask, are we going to live up to the rhetoric of equality and the idea that…