Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Sociology

  • the conditions of credibility

    Steven Shapin, with the — OK, with an STS perspective on “post-truth” at LARB: The problem we confront is better described not as too little science in public culture but as too much. Given the absurdities and errors abroad in the land, it may seem crazy to say this, yet the point can be pressed.…

  • Nail them to Zuckerbot’s door

    L M Sacasas, doing a concise post-McLuhan “nine theses” thing for the present media moment. 6: In oral societies, freedom is conformity to communal standards. In the culture of print, to be free is to choose for oneself. In digital culture, freedom is relief from the obligation to choose.

  • A way to sell selling itself, redux

    With the obligatory cynical caveats*, this two-hander article on online advertising at The Correspondent may be a shoo-in for this year’s Most Buried Lede award: Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing. Ouch. Not exactly news, perhaps… but I guess it’s oddly reassuring to have your assumptions confirmed. (But also suspicious; hence…

  • a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist

    David Graeber at NYRoB, reviewing Skidelsky’s Money and Government. Graeber’s acid prose is almost always a delight to this household, and this piece has plenty of it — though it is the exact opposite of a hatchet-job review. On the tautology of monetarism: The premise that markets will always right themselves in the end can…

  • An audience with Saint Donna

    At Logic Magazine, an interview (by, I think, Moira Weigel?) with none other than Donna Haraway. It’s a good long read, so you should go tuck in to the full thing, but I’mma pull some excerpts here for my own purposes. On being accused of encouraging “relativism”, and thereby birthing “post-truth”: Our view was never…