Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Sociology

  • the bag contains no heroes

    Siobhan Leddy at The Outline on one of the less-well-known but arguably most important bits of the Le Guinean oeuvre. (Gonna excerpt fairly generously here, because this blog is my online commonplace book, and I learned about link-rot the hard way… but go read the whole thing for yourself, support online writers etc etc.) “The…

  • Temporal delamination

    This piece by Katherine Miller on (a)temporality in the age of the algorithm has been doing the rounds, and with some justification; it’s a strong piece of writing, and it’s grasping toward something important. I’d be lying if I didn’t find its implicit attempt to situate Trump as a sort of synecdoche for the state…

  • the line of the arch that they form

    Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to…

  • Them’s the brakes: against accelerationisms

    Andrew Culp interview at Society & Space: Accelerationism is an attempt to rethink deterritorialization outside of the schizoanalytic model of Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari are less used than abused in the early accelerationism proposed in Nick Land’s “Machinic Desire” which fundamentally relies on the opposition between humans and machines—a distinction that is nonsensical within Deleuze…

  • Staying with the trouble

    Kinda torn between being stoked that Existential Comics has decided to feature Saint Donna in their latest ish, and the urge to get on my high horse about the willful misparsing of the cyborg metaphor… … but hey, it’s a comic, right? And I guess anyone willing to rank social theorists in the “philosopher” category…