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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A way to sell selling itself, redux
With the obligatory cynical caveats*, this two-hander article on online advertising at The Correspondent may be a shoo-in for this year’s Most Buried Lede award: Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing. Ouch. Not exactly news, perhaps… but I guess it’s oddly reassuring to have your assumptions confirmed. (But also suspicious; hence…
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a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist
David Graeber at NYRoB, reviewing Skidelsky’s Money and Government. Graeber’s acid prose is almost always a delight to this household, and this piece has plenty of it — though it is the exact opposite of a hatchet-job review. On the tautology of monetarism: The premise that markets will always right themselves in the end can…
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Schlock & Ore
An archival re-run from 2012 at The Baffler: Will Boisvert on the MIT Media Lab. Boisvert was clearly well ahead of the hype cycle on this topic; it’s a gloriously withering piece. But while the Lab often seems like a marketing team posing as an academic institution, the corruption is subtler than the mere capture…
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Cold front
Brighton. Down here for a couple of evenings with C before hitting the rails to Hamburg for a workshop on the politics of scenarios and futurity. Naturally I have acquired a stinking head-cold, and autumn is handing over to winter like a mule handing over to their handler. Insert your own tide-based metaphor here; I’m…
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a house that grows
Paul Dobraszczyk on Graham Caine’s Street Farmhouse eco-structure from the early 1970s: Even though Caine intended the eco-house to be a model for a new kind of society that embraced self-determination as a fundamental tenet in all aspects of life, it nevertheless failed because of its vulnerability to disorder. The ways in which humans occupy…
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].”