Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Infrastructural Theory

  • empty, ersatz nature

    Damn, but Kate Wagner is a good writer. Here she is on the aesthetics of ruination for The Baffler: Unlike images of nature’s reclamation of Chernobyl, there is no righteous, morbid, fetishistic pleasure to be found in Superfund sites whether or not they’re remediated. In a secular world free of mysticism, they are perhaps the…

  • nontransparent, unspiderable

    Nicholas Carr on Page and Brin’s vanishing trick: They were prophets, Larry and Sergey. When, in their famous 1998 grad-school paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” they introduced Google to the world, they warned that if the search engine were ever to leave the “academic realm” and become a business, it…

  • 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.…

  • Murketing / Agency

    Ryan Alexander Diduck at tQ on the demise of R*d B*ll Music Academy: We no longer recognise brands and commodities as socially constructed, so we want to oversimplify and assign agency to them – agency that is really much more chaotically distributed, structurally prescribed, and historically driven. We tend to say, for instance, that the…

  • A more humane and generous account

    Eugene McCarraher at Aeon: If it’s long past time to deny that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism, the time has come to renounce the parochial secular dogma of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. The pre-modern belief in the enchantment of the world – modernised in Romanticism, blending scientific rationality with Hopkins’s conviction of God’s…