Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Technology

  • in the process of throwing it away for something we know is worse

    If—as seems to be the case—I am to join the ranks of middle-aged men yelling at clouds, I guess I can bear it if Adam Kotsko is in the vanguard: Print was a perfected technology, an unsurpassable way of sharing information and ideas and stories — and we are all in the process of throwing…

  • a mixture of Vatican clergy and the Wizard of Oz: on hype, strategy, and postmodernity

    Don’t tell my mother I said this*, but as time goes by I’ve really come to appreciate the value of paying attention to the experience of old hands. Exhibit A comes with what I will gladly concede is a hefty slice of self-aggrandisement. Rodney Brooks has been working with robots and autonomous vehicles for almost…

  • mixing McLuhan and Marx (Butlerian coda)

    Sometimes you write a thing in a fit of emotional response, and then the universe sidles up, says “oh, that pushed your buttons, did it?” and offers you another hit, and you demonstrate your own weakness to yourself once again, returning like a dog to its own vomit, because it’s just too damned perfect an…

  • Butlerian jihad (slight return)

    I have mostly tried to avoid both consuming and contributing to The “AI” Discourse, having in essence made my point almost a year ago and encountered little since then that has served to do anything but reinforce my feelings on the matter. But I’m breaking that fast for this observation, which is really (and perhaps…

  • geoengineering is just another suitcase word

    … and that’s as good a reason to distrust it on principle as any other. Via Jay, here’s a rant from Jeff Maurer (a Daily Show writer, I think?) about reductive attitudes to geoengineering which, through its own deployment of reductive attitudes, illustrates (presumably unintentionally) exactly why the reductive attitudes it attacks are justifiable. It…