Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • the subject has been usurped

    Lots of chewy stuff in this M L Sauter joint, jumping off from the seeming climb-down of G**gle’s Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto—which, as Sauter notes, was less of a stoppage than a sort of metastasis, with the ideological cancer scattering away from the site of the obvious tumour—in order to talk about surveillance and…

  • a world where flesh and machine are in tension: re-reconsidering cyberpunk

    Found myself nodding appreciatively at this re-reassessment of cyberpunk by Lincoln Michel: Everyone has their own definitions of genres, but to me the essence of cyberpunk is not tied to the 1980s visual trappings that have defined it in video games and film. Cyberpunk isn’t merely neon signs or street toughs with high-tech leather jackets…

  • epistemic humility vs. “the engineer’s disease”

    This post is prompted in part by a post by Cennydd Bowles, in which he riff on Nathan Ballantyne’s notion of epistemic trespass. Reading it reminded me of a term I’ve seen frequently, most often on MetaFilter, where it has been part of the lexiconic furniture for some time. An ask-the-hive-mind entry on that site…

  • honeymoon objectivity

    Serendipity, thy name is INTERNET. Currently in the midst of working up a big old grant application*, and what should appear but this piece from Sun-Ha Hong at Real Life, neatly filling a reference gap that’s been bugging me for a few weeks? Preach it, brother: Fredric Jameson once wrote that science fiction has become…

  • a Rube Goldberg machine made of fucking corpses

    Plenty of critiques of the NFT “art” scene exist, but they—neither unreasonably nor unnecessarily—tend to focus on the (socio)technological side of the phenomenon. These two essays from back in June cropped up on Metafilter yesterday, coming at it from a more art-critical and political-economic angle… and while they’re pretty depressing in many respects, it’s a…