Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Social Theory

  • 30MAY24 / Tramps!

    30MAY24 / Tramps!

    As a Nineties kid, I came up knowing (and hating) the 1980s for being a period of superficiality, of “style” and the artifice of appearances, and it’s interesting to hear these pioneers concede those diagnoses, and discuss them in terms of their inheritance of scenes previous.

  • might be an ancient pagan remnant

    If we accept that science (very broadly conceived) is a paradigm of meaning-making that succeeded a collection a mythic and folkloric forms, then it seems reasonable to imagine that what we might think of as the geological formation of culture precedes in much the same way in either paradigm.

  • unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures

    … the underlying argument shines through from the very first pages, and glows up in particular in the occasional lengthy and lyrical passages where [Lewis] Hyde clearly just leaned into the vibe of the whole thing.

  • models that might help us grasp how movements grow and shift

    Clipping a short reply from (of all places) LinkedIn, because I feel like I made a point here that I’m going to want to be able to find and repeat. So, in discussion of the talk I’m giving tomorrow: To be clear, it’s not that politics *is* fandom; it’s that they work in strongly analogous…

  • preludes to enantiodromia

    I’m seeing enough of them, now, and discussing the concept with enough people online and off, that I think it’s time to start clipping examples of people pointing at harbingers of enantiodromia—the sudden inversion of a paradigm into its complete opposite. Here’s yer man Dougald Hine—a far better-known and more widely read Brit-who-fled-to-Sweden—in a longer…