Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • the dulling sameness of a world of infinite but meaningless variety

    Via Andrew Curry’s ever-reliable Just Two Things newsletter—where does he find the time?!—here’s Annie Dorsen on AI “art” at [checks notes]… ah, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists? When people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu “creativity” of big tech platforms, on a mass scale, we are facing a particularly dire form of…

  • platforms shape desire through the frustration that they deliver

    Some typically nuanced and insightful thinking from Rob Horning, on the matter of social media, a topic whose omnipresence this last week has been much easier to bear thanks to not actually being present on any social media, and particularly not That One Site. But Horning’s point is that one need not be on social…

  • as if there was necessarily just one transition

    Graeber and Wengrove again, referring to archaeological evidence from the soi disant ‘Fertile Crescent’: If the situation in just one cradle of early farming was that complicated, then surely it no longer makes sense to ask, ‘what were the social implications of the transition to farming?’ — as if there was necessarily just one transition,…

  • accumulations (three different ones)

    So much chewy material in this genuine monster of an Evgeny Morozov essay at New Left Review. Absorbing it fully would likely take a number of re-reads, not to mention a greater familiarity with the literatures and debates he’s navigating here; as such, to the only precis I can offer is Morozov’s own, from near…

  • a position of negligible influence

    Given my line of work, I should probably be among the many people who scour the latest missives from the IPCC as soon as they drop. My reasons for not doing so are two-fold. Firstly, I’m very short of time, and scanning 800+ pages of written-by-committee material in order to confirm the details of what…