Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • half-arsed cynicism as gateway drug to solutionism, example #632

    So close, but yet so far. Alan Jacobs on geoengineering: The argument that the exploration and testing of geoengineering technologies should be stopped is not “a worthwhile argument.” It’s a dumb argument. We cannot afford to put all our eggs in the emissions-reduction basket, for the simple reason that there is no good reason to…

  • climate change aesthetics and the logic of the spectacle

    Via Andrew Curry’s reliably interesting Just Two Things newsletter, here’s a piece by the Magnum photography collective about the portrayal of climate change in contemporary photography, and in particular the work of a non-profit called Climate Visuals, which is… … founded in research in social science; they use evidence gathered from focus groups in Europe…

  • kelly’s antiheroes

    It’s been quite a few years from the last time I was suffiently wound up by Kevin Kelly’s cyber-Amish techno-optimistic sermonising to write a blog post rebutting it, but it seems some things are more reliable triggers than others. So, here’s Kelly’s latest salvo, entitled “The Case for Optimism”, and my step-by-step rebuttal of it—which,…

  • pronunciation guidance

    A big part of the life-in-a-new-country experience is exposure to and (if you refuse the specious role of the “ex-pat”) learning a new language. For reasons that are presumably obvious, I have not yet been able to take formal in-person lessons in Swedish, but I have done over 400 days of Du*ling* at this point;…

  • How to map nothing: Shannon Mattern on geographies of suspension

    Back on 27th January, the UCL faculty of the Built Environment (virtually) hosted a seminar talk by the mighty mighty Shannon Mattern; a little more than a week ago, they uploaded a recording of said talk to A Popular Video-sharing Platform. This is that video, and I commend it to you wholeheartedly; I will not…