Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Politics

  • the arcade fire

    A long ol’ piece on Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus by Apoorva Tadepalli at Real Life. It’s the sort of epic longread that merits at least a second thorough go-thru (and has as such been stashed away to that end), but this bit leapt out as being Relevant To My Interests, as the old meme used…

  • Harrisonian addendum

    The pursuit of fantasy in every single cultural, political, corporate & media arena since the mid 1970s is what led us all here; and fantasy is not, whatever absurd rationale you’re tempted to use to wriggle out from under, an antidote to itself. From this, which neatly codas that.

  • once more, with feeling

    Another eviscerating review of Bastani’s Fully-Automated Luxury Communism, this time at Radical Philosophy: … FALC is an improbable, unhelpful and frankly undesirable blueprint for our collective future: improbable because it glosses over the ecological reality of our desperate global predicament, unhelpful because at a time when we are heading for global ecological collapse FALC advocates…

  • the contentment of Britain

    Will Davies at Teh Graun: It’s not that democracy will end, but that it will be reduced to a set of spectacles that the government is ultimately in command of, which everyone realises are “fake” but that are sufficiently funny or soothing as to be tolerated. This being, of course, a favourite motif of science…

  • regression to the mean

    It’s not a shock — or at least it shouldn’t be. Rather, it’s a regression to the mean, albeit a notional and imagined mean: a grasping for a glory which was largely lost long before anyone who just voted to retrieve it was born, like a fading actor dressing up in the moth-eaten costumes of…