Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • some notes on Martin Parker’s managerial heroisms

    There’s a lot of good stuff in this piece by Martin Parker at Aeon—hell, anyone who wrote a book titled Shut Down the Business School has gotta be on my side of the fence, right?—but it takes a problematic turn at the end that I think is worth digging into. Let’s start with the good…

  • it takes a village to hate a capital

    An excerpt from a chewy Will Davies longread about WhatsApp at Teh Graun from a few weeks back: WhatsApp is certainly an unbeatable conduit for circulating conspiracy theories, but we must also admit that it seems to be an excellent tool for facilitating genuinely conspiratorial behaviour. One of the great difficulties when considering conspiracy theories…

  • Indistinguishable from magic? Extractivism, the infrastructural metasystem, and the obfuscation of consequences

    This is a video-paper I prepared for a virtual conference called Extraction: Tracing the Veins, running this week under the aegis of the Political Ecology Research Center at Massey University, NZ and Wageningen Univeristy, NL. My paper is a part of the Technology & Infrastructure panel, and if you think mine sounds of any interest…

  • an hollowed-out epistemology, an epistemic poverty

    I’ll stop blockquoting Audrey Watters when she stops saying shit that needs saying. The science fiction of The Matrix creeps into presentations that claim to offer science fact. It creeps into promises about instantaneous learning, facilitated by alleged breakthroughs in brain science. It creeps into TED Talks, of course. Take Nicholas Negroponte, for example, the…

  • some kind of code for consumerism at its most insidious

    I’ve got a little girl who’s seven, and she lives in a world that’s all potentially magic. Within her imagination, the possibility of supernatural things sits alongside school and real things. There’s no distinction. At the same time she’s kind of assaulted by magic. What she watches on TV, the magic there is some kind…