Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Sociology

  • an hollowed-out epistemology, an epistemic poverty

    I’ll stop blockquoting Audrey Watters when she stops saying shit that needs saying. The science fiction of The Matrix creeps into presentations that claim to offer science fact. It creeps into promises about instantaneous learning, facilitated by alleged breakthroughs in brain science. It creeps into TED Talks, of course. Take Nicholas Negroponte, for example, the…

  • the feared disseminators of complexity

    A new discovery, made within Simon Reynolds’ response to the shuttering of Beyond the Beyond: Matti Swiedmann’s Red Velvet Corridor. Top of the stack of posts at present is this thing, rambling around in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard… all the intervals in that haunting earworm of a scale that…

  • unknowable differences populating an imagined horizon

    Struggling to write on sociological topics (or indeed on anything that engages significantly with social dimensions, whether academically or otherwise)? David Beer is, too: … beyond the problems of the speed of change and a lack of focus, there is also a sense that the thing Iā€™d normally be analysing – society – will not…

  • the city bureaucrat of the future learns, not preaches

    The appearance of this piece by Barcelona’s chief technology and digital innovation officer, Francesca Bria [via Sentiers] is serendipitous, given that one of the tasks on my slate this week is to do the edits and tweaks on a long-overdue chapter on the “smart city” for a forthcoming Handbook of Social Futures. Five guidelines for…

  • 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,…