Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Philosophy

  • 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…

  • Staying with the trouble

    Kinda torn between being stoked that Existential Comics has decided to feature Saint Donna in their latest ish, and the urge to get on my high horse about the willful misparsing of the cyborg metaphor… … but hey, it’s a comic, right? And I guess anyone willing to rank social theorists in the “philosopher” category…

  • an appropriately unheroic spirit

    Nice chewy essay by John Farrell at LARB, on the long-running philosophical ding-dong between utopianism and what he calls the “literary-heroic worldview”. … the transition to modernity, with its focus on economic rationality, has only changed the terms upon which status is distributed without assuaging the basic competitive drive that animated the literary culture of…