Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Politics

  • amphibiosis / the war against viruses will not take place

    A fairly Harawayian staying-with-the-trouble perspective on the politics of this pandemic and all the other pandemics yet to come, from Charlotte Brives: It is not against viruses that we should be waging a war, but against the political and economic systems which, far from being conceived as protection against the precarity (this itself being variable!)…

  • the caricature of a time that is no longer ours

    Oncle Bruno on the radical ecological potential—or perhaps the lack thereof— of the current moment: The originality of the present situation, it seems to me, is that by remaining trapped at home while outside there is only the extension of police powers and the din of ambulances, we are collectively playing a caricatured form of…

  • better isn’t best, but

    Sean Guynes drops his second of two essays on Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. If it’s a book you know, or if it’s a book you simply know of, I recommend this piece wholeheartendly—and on that basis, the rest of Guynes’s Le Guin re-read to come at Tor.com. (And if you haven’t even heard of it,…

  • the monstering

    Almost a decade ago, I reviewed a book at Futurismic written by someone I’d gotten to know via the blog circuit. Ryan Oakley is a pretty singular character, and Technicolor Ultra Mall was a pretty singular book, too—furiously angry and cynical about the world that capital had made for us. With hindsight, I wonder if…

  • an almighty crash in the heart of the form

    Lovable Marxist granddad David Harvey, getting in there early on neoliberalism’s final Wile E Coyote moment: … contemporary capitalist economies are 70 or even 80 percent driven by consumerism. Consumer confidence and sentiment has over the past forty years become the key to the mobilization of effective demand and capital has become increasingly demand- and…