Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Politics

  • the creation of a non-discretionary door-tax

    A great extended-metaphor explainer for money, from Cory Doctorow, channeling Warren Mosler: … consider this thought experiment devised by economist Warren Mosler, one of the foremost proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, the theory built upon this understanding of money): Sometimes when Mosler is explaining money to an audience, he’ll hold up a handful of…

  • organ of leviathan

    A very on-point aside found among a splurge of interesting musings on queuing from Jo Lindsay Walton: The Guardian is perhaps the most Hobbesian of the British papers, in its unwavering insistence that any order, however arbitrary, is preferable to disorder, which can only be understood as a war of all against all. Jo Lindsay…

  • meandering toward a (trans)media ecology of futures

    I realised just the other day that I’d somehow managed not to do a serious wrap-up–or even an unserious and/or cursory wrap-up—on the Futures Brought to Life symposium in Vienna that I attended back in May. I’m not going to do one now, either*, but I thought I might at the very least point at…

  • much more than a dispassionate record of events

    The retrospective coloring of historical judgment shows that history is much more than a dispassionate record of events; it is a dynamic, living web of interpretations. We are not doomed to a false choice between purely objective facts and revisionism, with its often-groundless contestation of those fact[s]. Instead, we ought to observe, carefully and critically,…

  • design, marketing, and manipulation as ideological imperative

    I seem to be linking Cennydd Bowles a lot lately, but why would one not? So here’s a nice, short injunction from the man himself, off the back of his having thrown out the question “when does design become manipulation?”, and being real unsettled by the answers he got: Design influences. It persuades. But if…