Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • A way to sell selling itself, redux

    With the obligatory cynical caveats*, this two-hander article on online advertising at The Correspondent may be a shoo-in for this year’s Most Buried Lede award: Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing. Ouch. Not exactly news, perhaps… but I guess it’s oddly reassuring to have your assumptions confirmed. (But also suspicious; hence…

  • Schlock & Ore

    An archival re-run from 2012 at The Baffler: Will Boisvert on the MIT Media Lab. Boisvert was clearly well ahead of the hype cycle on this topic; it’s a gloriously withering piece. But while the Lab often seems like a marketing team posing as an academic institution, the corruption is subtler than the mere capture…

  • a house that grows

    Paul Dobraszczyk on Graham Caine’s Street Farmhouse eco-structure from the early 1970s: Even though Caine intended the eco-house to be a model for a new kind of society that embraced self-determination as a fundamental tenet in all aspects of life, it nevertheless failed because of its vulnerability to disorder. The ways in which humans occupy…

  • An audience with Saint Donna

    At Logic Magazine, an interview (by, I think, Moira Weigel?) with none other than Donna Haraway. It’s a good long read, so you should go tuck in to the full thing, but I’mma pull some excerpts here for my own purposes. On being accused of encouraging “relativism”, and thereby birthing “post-truth”: Our view was never…

  • the bag contains no heroes

    Siobhan Leddy at The Outline on one of the less-well-known but arguably most important bits of the Le Guinean oeuvre. (Gonna excerpt fairly generously here, because this blog is my online commonplace book, and I learned about link-rot the hard way… but go read the whole thing for yourself, support online writers etc etc.) “The…