Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Sociology

  • the cozy catastrophists of cosplay doomerism

    Asterisk Magazine, which aspires to be The New Yorker of effective altruism, has a piece profiling “AI doomers” which, even after reviewing the author’s other sincere engagements with related topics, I’m struggling not to parse as a brilliant bit of parody and/or satire. … AI doom is a remarkably cozy catastrophe. If you suffered through…

  • we (believe that we) have always lived in the castle

    B D McClay asks “when exactly was science fiction [literature] about jacked bros in space“, and concludes that the answer is quite possibly “never”—or at least “not back in the Golden Age, despite claims persistent over decades that it was”. McClay thinks that this metanarrative has a lot to do with the long-standing resentment of…

  • “community” as content, and as form

    Schismogenesis and mimetic desire are the yin and yang dynamics at the heart of “community”. Stable cultures must presumably therefore have a good balance of the two.

  • if the house keeps winning they’ll just burn it down

    One of the previous year’s surprisingly difficult lessons has been the need to stop considering reportage from the US as in any way representative of a baseline for circumstances elsewhere.

  • this oppressive cardinality

    They were nonetheless your superiors, and you their inferiors—and that relationship was reinforced tirelessly by the structures and rituals of the place.