Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Infrastructural Theory

  • partially-automated bi-utopian communism

    I’ve been quietly impressed by the ubiquity of Aaron Benanav across a variety of venues as he promotes his recently-published book Automation and the Future of Work, of which I received a copy a while back. Benanav’s been a guest on blogs and podcasts aplenty, and I’m glad to have read and listened to some…

  • Lana Swartz, payment as media

    I watched this LCC guest lecture by Lana Swartz as a livestream about a month back, and glad to see it’s finally made its way out to public availability. The basic argument is right there in the title of this post—payment as media—but I wholeheartedly recommend anyone with an interest in the usual theoretical thematics…

  • the reason for this pilgrimage

    Clipping this primarily because I suspect it will make an excellent case for thinking about the mirrorscreen idea I was kicking around earlier this week: I visited an elaborate recreation of the Virgin Mary’s appearance in a French grotto in 1858. A narrow footpath led through a forest to a candlelit statue of the Virgin…

  • duckrabbit, figureground, mirrorscreen

    In this episode of Excerpts Of Other People’s Output Used For The Aggrandization Of Personal Theories Which Remain Stubbornly Underwritten, I will be quoting a newsletter from Drew Austin, riffing on Kyle Chayka’s “ambient TV” essay; the bolding is my own. Describing other ambient shows like Netflix’s “Chef’s Table,” which combines pleasant food imagery with…

  • “A part of the world’s worlding”: Sofia (2000), Container Technologies

    Sofia, Z. (2000). Container technologies. Hypatia, 15(2), 181-201. I first read this back in the heady days of 2016 or so, on the direct recommendation of its author; I don’t get to name-drop very often, but Zoe Sofoulis (writing here as Zo Sofia, as she sometimes does) is a good friend, and served as a…