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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beyond the valley of the trolls
Interesting interview with Anna Wiener, The New Yorker‘s woman-on-the-ground in Silicon Valley. Her critique is informed by actually having spent a number of years in the trenches of tech, always on the non-coding side of the payroll. Today’s iteration of Silicon Valley seems ahistorical, anti-intellectual, irreverent in a way that is more reflective of the…
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empty, ersatz nature
Damn, but Kate Wagner is a good writer. Here she is on the aesthetics of ruination for The Baffler: Unlike images of nature’s reclamation of Chernobyl, there is no righteous, morbid, fetishistic pleasure to be found in Superfund sites whether or not they’re remediated. In a secular world free of mysticism, they are perhaps the…
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07JAN20 / accessions
Yet more Palgrave sale stuff. It feels all shades of ironic to be acquiring more books at a time when I’m about to undertake a massive library cull… but hey, I’ve dropped a lot of vices over the years, and the only person this one harms or inconveniences is me. No regrets.
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levelling up, moving on
And so it begins. I’ve never gotten into the giving of codenames to my ongoing projects — a practice that’s fairly popular with some other denizens of the Isles of Blogging — because frankly I’d find that to be just one more layer of complication in managing the damned things. And I haven’t really given…
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].”