Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Infrastructural Theory

  • The interface and the illusion of control

    Most obviously, in using [smartphones] to navigate, we become reliant on access to the network to accomplish ordinary goals. In giving ourselves over to a way of knowing the world that relies completely on real-time access, we find ourselves at the mercy of something more contingent, more fallible and far more complicated than any paper…

  • No organism can be reduced to its own action

    … the obsession with ‘selfish genes’, that is, the neoliberal theory of action parading as biology, makes it impossible to follow Lovelock’s reductionist call. When you really believe that externalities — to locate this philosophy of biology where it belongs: namely economics — cannot be internalized by selfish individual agents, how could you possibly understand what…

  • The ghosts of infrastructures past

    Somewhere along Brindcliff Edge Road in Sheffield, you can still see this wonderful infrastructural relic: That’s a sewer-gas destructor lamp, of which there are maybe a dozen or so remaining in the city, though only a very few of them are a) undamaged, and b) still lit. Destructor lamps took a tricky infrastructural problem (the way…

  • The Metamedium

    From a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Zielinski argues that what he calls “media” (a dense composite notion encompassing both discourse and its material supports) has vanished from the horizon because it is now ubiquitous.” Obviously I need to read the whole book to make this claim more solidly, but nonetheless: this…