Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Philosophy

  • not merely window-dressing

    Adam Tooze, an aside in an account of the unfolding Ghanian debt crisis: Narratives are not merely window-dressing. They matter, because they fuel optimism and sustain belief, which infuses the assessment of analysts and credit rating agencies. Narratives are amongst the tools with which capital allocators manage the uncertainty inherent in any investment, but which…

  • science found it hard to converse with the rest of society

    Nice to see a typically long LRB review of Latour’s last two books, but Harding makes a bit of a blunder here, perhaps due to his not having been party to decades of STS discourse: There was a hint in We Have Never Been Modern that science found it hard to converse with the rest…

  • intellectual fracking / notes toward the declaration of the Butlerian jihad

    Friend-of-the-show Jay Springett talks a lot about “cultural fracking”, and is back on that beat this weekend. I’m feeling it; the big cultural events I’ve seen discussed this morning in the various feeds I follow have included another Star Wars prequel, another Indiana Jones movie, a “dark” Pinocchio remake. (Lest you think I’m pretending not…

  • a true metaphysics of our time

    Everything that was ever sold and created in human history is now interpreted in terms of physical wellbeing. That is fascinating because it is a true metaphysics of our time. It is a metaphysic in a sense that our own body is a meta-object to us. I am not talking about this metaverse. The metaverse…

  • stories and possibilities are always multiple, infinite

    Wonderful essay here at LitHub by Ellie Robins. I was sold from this moment: The truth is, there can be no such thing as a monomyth. Stories are alive, and like all living beings, they exist in ecosystems. In the living world, a monoculture always spells death. Ellie Robins https://lithub.com/how-to-go-home-on-resisting-a-very-english-heros-journey/ TFW someone totally nails, with…