velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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caltrops
The things you can’t control will go to shit.So plan ahead, for caltrops in the roadawait unwary drivers. Baggage stowedas best you can, forget the tarmac, grit—keep watching the horizon, far aheadand still receding, still receding, still.I make no guarantees; perhaps you willsee roadblocks that would tip you on your head,and swerve in time. But
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manifesto
Let’s make this clear: I do not want to die.I don’t—I want to live, and live againlike I remember living as a childin stories that I tell myself aboutmyself. To live that childlike life again—not like the lonely dead, reducedto mewling hunger past the fence of life—I must then be reborn, and shoulder offthis chrysalis
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platforms make markets
Rob Horning again, on the hustle economy the gig economy the ubiquity of platforms as obligatory labour intermediaries: The “hustle” platform seems like a mere means of distribution for the “creators” or “entrepreneurs” who own the means of production (their own bodies). But in fact the “hustle economy” scenario is not so different from working
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theatre of expertise / expertise of theatre
This one’s been doing the rounds in infrastructure-wonk circles, and deservedly so. I’m usually distrustful of any organisation that includes the term “governance innovation” in its moniker; CIGI is a Canadian thinktank founded by the guy who helmed RIM, none of which serves to fundamentally allay that instinctive suspicion, but this is nonetheless a serious,
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].”