Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Politics

  • structure [and/of] structurelessness

    I am thinking a lot right now about my work: what it is, certainly, but also what it’s for—where it fits not only in the now, but in times to come. Given that my work is focussed on futurity, this meta-level thinking frequently falls out of and/or collapses back into the more day to day…

  • political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level

    After getting irked by reviews of Oppenheimer, Adam Kotsko wrote a short thing that feels to me like it’s the missing piece to that Sam Kriss essay I excerpted last week, which has been—as the kids say—living rent-free in my head ever since. Kotsko has an interesting and very valuable insight into “culture war” stuff,…

  • the unbearable lightness of blockchain: utopian visions and invisible infrastructures

    As already noted, this has been a strange and hectic year so far, with a whole lot of public talking in the last month and a bit. Not all of these were video’d for public consumption, but some were, and I’m gonna stuff them up here over the next few days, partly because I unwisely…

  • the extreme wrong we congratulate ourselves for not being

    Digital polarization is not simply the process whereby views tend toward extremes, but that which sorts us against our better judgment to commit to a stance of binary opposition. In other words, the process by which politics is hollowed out into opinionating and by which it converges with consumption and entertainment. “Hitler” is the extreme…

  • a media architecture that creates feedback loops that reinforce certain behaviors

    Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber: For me, the big question isn’t whether Jonathan Chait (or Glenn Greenwald, or name any other extremely online person who you think is a controversialist or party hack) is an innately terrible human being. It’s why we have a media architecture that creates feedback loops that reinforce certain behaviors (whether…