Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Sociology

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • a metrics of labour other than time

    Very interesting long paper by Matteo Pasquinelli; going back through Marx’s notion of the general intellect, he shows that none other than yer man Babbage theorised computing systems not only as a concretisation of labour but a crystallisation of preexisting biases in the workforce. Everything old becomes new again. … the distinction between manual and…

  • not oppositional, but negatory

    An interview with M John Harrison by Jonathan Lethem, done earlier this year at Festival Internacional de Literatura de Buenos Aires; scroll down for the (original) version in English. (Hat-tip to the man himself for linking to it.) I recall joking to a colleague a few years back that part of me wished Harrison wrote…