Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • 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…

  • Temporal delamination

    This piece by Katherine Miller on (a)temporality in the age of the algorithm has been doing the rounds, and with some justification; it’s a strong piece of writing, and it’s grasping toward something important. I’d be lying if I didn’t find its implicit attempt to situate Trump as a sort of synecdoche for the state…

  • A more humane and generous account

    Eugene McCarraher at Aeon: If it’s long past time to deny that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism, the time has come to renounce the parochial secular dogma of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. The pre-modern belief in the enchantment of the world – modernised in Romanticism, blending scientific rationality with Hopkins’s conviction of God’s…

  • Alter the biogeochemical organism on the fly

    Robinson Meyer on the latest IPCC report; climate change is an existential issue in both senses of the term. More than 30 years after climate change first became a political issue, it feels like we are still figuring it out. This report gets us closer. It makes clear that climate change isn’t only about coal-fired…

  • The secret theft of private experience

    All these images are illusions of progress or spaces where progress can be hosted. Just as suburbs were sold to postwar America as an idea of living, the smart city is a vehicle to sell a focus-grouped future. But these marketing images aren’t selling smart cities to you and me—they’re made to demonstrate that the…