Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • (not) giving it the progressive legitimacy it would lack otherwise

    One of the joys of having unplugged from the birdsite again is being able to largely ignore the whole crypto/Web3/NFT circus, at least in its most immediate expression. Of course, various people are writing about it more slowly, and it’s probably a function of my pre-existing biases that have ensured the vast majority of what…

  • dispensable and scarce

    Just a quick subtweetish sort of blog post, here, to note that the more times people start an essay or article or academic paper or blog post with a phrase along the lines of “[d]igital platforms and the online services that they provide have become an indispensable and ubiquitous part of modern lifestyles, mediating our…

  • 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…