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

  • Fully-automated luxury scale-tipping

    … like others I have encountered who share their unconscious technological assumptions, [Srnicek and Williams] throw the phrase [“scaling up”] around without making it at all clear what they mean by it. For example, in an argument with an apologist for industrial agriculture I pointed to the superior productivity of soil-intensive horticulture in terms of output

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  • The problem of being anyone at all

    Those who disparage authors for practicing auto-fiction tend to believe character is a steady state that can be adequately represented on the page and thus see the autobiographical as an easy option, a copout. What they want instead is a determined effort of the unbridled imagination representing many different characters, all stable and well-defined, interacting

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  • “A model of how to be and how to behave”: Szeman (2015), Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense

    Szeman, I. (2015). Entrepreneurship as the new common sense. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(3), 471-490. [link] # Via a Wired article on the start-up Boomtrain, Szeman introduces the increasingly ubiquitous entrepreneurial story, “narratives that make it seem as if financial and social success is, in the main, inevitable in the new world of the devices and gadgets that increasingly

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    🙜

  • An ending is an extended dissolve

    … Vásquez knows that history isn’t the “facts”, much less an approachable truth: it’s the shape of the ruins. Everything we describe as the past depends on an interpretation of what’s left over: and everything that’s left over has a baked-in undependability. In addition, no historical narrative has clear-cut limits: a beginning is always the

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  • Cyborg dialectics / a perpetual state of transition

    Dresden Codak. Started following his original webcomic way way back in the Noughties, when it was just as much of a one-person labour of love as it is now (though the artwork has gone from good to astonishing over the years). Back then DC (and I, for my sins) were fellow-travellers of transhumanism; DC is,

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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.