Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Philosophy

  • 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…

  • Staring down Roko’s basilisk

    Pete Wolfendale: We have consistently overestimated what computation is capable of throughout history, whether computation was seen as an algorithmic method executed by humans, or a process of automated deduction realised by a machine. The fictional record is crystal clear on this point. Instead of imagining machines that can do a task better than we can, we imagine machines…

  • the line of the arch that they form

    Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to…

  • Them’s the brakes: against accelerationisms

    Andrew Culp interview at Society & Space: Accelerationism is an attempt to rethink deterritorialization outside of the schizoanalytic model of Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari are less used than abused in the early accelerationism proposed in Nick Land’s “Machinic Desire” which fundamentally relies on the opposition between humans and machines—a distinction that is nonsensical within Deleuze…