Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: General

  • we live our lives within the poetry of our own demise

    While I am under no illusions that they would ever count it as a valid rejoinder, this from Nick Cave pretty much nails the pre-philosophical (which is to say poetic, I suppose) objection I’ve had to the immortalist dreams of the transhumanoids. Someone in the mailbag asks whether, were it possible, he would want to…

  • the subject has been usurped

    Lots of chewy stuff in this M L Sauter joint, jumping off from the seeming climb-down of G**gle’s Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto—which, as Sauter notes, was less of a stoppage than a sort of metastasis, with the ideological cancer scattering away from the site of the obvious tumour—in order to talk about surveillance and…

  • both men believed they knew how the world worked

    I’m always here for anyone giving neoclassical economics the kicking it so rightly deserves; in that sense, this piece at Aeon is a bit measured for my tastes, but Bergin—like all the best journalists—leaves plenty of room for one to read between the lines. If even the simple supply-and-demand curve, a staple of the orthodox…

  • a form of therapy against the sleep of reason

    How should we deal with intrusions of fiction into life, now that we have seen the historical impact that this phenomenon can have?…Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters. Umberto Eco Via Big Other, a timely…

  • out of the valley

    Day four, and it feels like I’ve turned the corner on this virus: I tend to measure such things by the point at which I actually feel like it’s worth wearing more than PJs and a dressing gown, and after a passable (though not great) night of sleep, I’m dressed properly. (Or, given my benchmarks…