Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • if we can honestly acknowledge the conditions, then maybe we can do something better

    A couple of days back, a listserv that I’m signed up to delivered the first example of a thing I’d heard whsipers of from others: an invitation to a seminar aimed at teaching academics how to use the new crop of LLMs to make the writing of grant applications more “efficient”. This caused me to…

  • our experience as slaves to the everything machine can be changed

    Lots of chewy goodies in this thoughtful long thing from Christopher Butler. I need to sit with it for longer, perhaps, before I can get the best of it—it is very much a designer’s view of things, and while Some Of My Best Friends Are DesignersTM, it’s a perspective which, in order to see properly…

  • the unbearable lightness of blockchain: utopian visions and invisible infrastructures

    As already noted, this has been a strange and hectic year so far, with a whole lot of public talking in the last month and a bit. Not all of these were video’d for public consumption, but some were, and I’m gonna stuff them up here over the next few days, partly because I unwisely…

  • the extreme wrong we congratulate ourselves for not being

    Digital polarization is not simply the process whereby views tend toward extremes, but that which sorts us against our better judgment to commit to a stance of binary opposition. In other words, the process by which politics is hollowed out into opinionating and by which it converges with consumption and entertainment. “Hitler” is the extreme…

  • our sweaty, bumbling, warm humanity

    Irina Dumitrescu: Lately I look at the way people around me accept technology without question and worry that I’m becoming a reactionary. I don’t want to be that person — the one who grumbles about cell phones in children’s hands and social media and the polished bilge of ChatGPT substituting for the writing people make,…