Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Infrastructural Theory

  • pronunciation guidance

    A big part of the life-in-a-new-country experience is exposure to and (if you refuse the specious role of the “ex-pat”) learning a new language. For reasons that are presumably obvious, I have not yet been able to take formal in-person lessons in Swedish, but I have done over 400 days of Du*ling* at this point;…

  • revenge effect

    From the conclusion section of Carabantes, M. (2021). “The Coronavirus as a Revenge Effect: The Pandemic from the Perspective of Philosophy of Technique”. Science, Technology, & Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211008595 The main goal of technique is freedom. We use it to free ourselves from the burdens imposed by nature, such as getting food and shelter. However,…

  • How to map nothing: Shannon Mattern on geographies of suspension

    Back on 27th January, the UCL faculty of the Built Environment (virtually) hosted a seminar talk by the mighty mighty Shannon Mattern; a little more than a week ago, they uploaded a recording of said talk to A Popular Video-sharing Platform. This is that video, and I commend it to you wholeheartedly; I will not…

  • always primed with its own conditions of dissolution and abolishment

    Interesting little essay here from one Duncan Stuart, a new name at Blue Labyrinths, which I will cite at length: [Sylvain] Lazarus takes seriously the work of French historian Marc Bloch, who argues in his 1949 book The Historians Craft, that the past is given and the future contingent. Lazarus demonstrates that for Bloch the…

  • there is no transition

    Maybe I’m being over-optimistic, but seeing arguments for non-solutionist and demand-side approaches to decarbonisation research appearing in a journal from the Nature stable feels like a sign that the idea is getting some traction at long last. That said paper is by Elizabeth Shove, a brilliant and tenacious researcher whose work has been a huge…