Velcro City Tourist Board

velcro city tourist board

a blog by Paul Graham Raven

science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats

rough guidance: some reflections on the making of travel guides to places that don’t (yet) exist

Somehow I haven’t really talked much about the Rough Planet Guide to Notterdam here at VCTB; I think that’s partly due to an anxiety about “crossing the streams”, getting my day-job stuff tangled up in what is very much a scratch-pad-pub-booth-talking-to-myself sort of website these days, but also to some extent the same anxiety that
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Climate Change 🙜 Futures 🙜 Science Fiction 🙜 Social Theory

30 Oct 2020
a poetics of Theory

Something anachronistic in proffering a defense of Theory in the third decade of the new millennium; something nostalgic or even retrograde. Who cares anymore? Disciplinary debates make little sense as the discipline itself has imploded, and the anemic cultural studies patois of the Internet hardly seems to warrant the same reflection, either in defense or
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Social Theory

29 Oct 2020
höstens färger

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General

29 Oct 2020
rocket from the crypto / two dead letters

Chairman Bruce appears to be repubbing longreads from the now defunct Beyond The Beyond blog. This is a weird experience for me—distinctly atemporal, to use the man’s own term—because I recall reading this stuff at the time. And so it’s familiar and just-like-yesterday, but also so alienated and impossibly historical… I mean, I can’t recall
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Art 🙜 Philosophy 🙜 Technology

28 Oct 2020
PLANRITNINGEN

It begins. A map can never be a territory, particularly when it comes to writing a book, but nonetheless you need to at least imagine where you think you might be going… and I’ve at least walked some parts of this landscape before, albeit hurriedly and without taking as much time to look around as
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Infrastructural Theory 🙜 PLANRITNINGEN 🙜 Social Theory

27 Oct 2020

Who is Paul Graham Raven?

“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”

Paul is consulting writer, researcher, theorist and foresight practitioner, as well as an author and critic of science fiction literature. More details can be found on the About page of this blog.