Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • 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…

  • partially-automated bi-utopian communism

    I’ve been quietly impressed by the ubiquity of Aaron Benanav across a variety of venues as he promotes his recently-published book Automation and the Future of Work, of which I received a copy a while back. Benanav’s been a guest on blogs and podcasts aplenty, and I’m glad to have read and listened to some…

  • Lana Swartz, payment as media

    I watched this LCC guest lecture by Lana Swartz as a livestream about a month back, and glad to see it’s finally made its way out to public availability. The basic argument is right there in the title of this post—payment as media—but I wholeheartedly recommend anyone with an interest in the usual theoretical thematics…