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 new narrative for narratives
A few days back a colleague linked me to this editorial at Nature about the use of full narrative forms in critical/speculative foresight work, which they link back to the establishing work of Brian David Johnson, who was at Intel at the time but now splits his labour between Arizona State U, consulting, and a…
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One discipline seeps into another
Rejecting the traditional Marxist idea that the working classes were the seedbed of change, [Deleuze and Guattari] wanted a broader umbrella under which to unite all marginalised groups. They claimed that those oppressed by patriarchy (women), racism (people of colour) and heteronormativity (what we’d now call the LGBT community) were all suffering thanks to the…
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Feersum endjinn
Or “what I did on my mid-week day off”: The River Don Engine, now housed at Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield, UK. The largest working steam engine left in Britain, and quite possibly in the world. I was surprised by how quiet the engine itself was, though I imagine that’s partly down to it now being…
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Hard to start again
I’m not sure how many times I’ve tried (more or less performatively, depending on my prevailing level of insecurity) to restart the habit of regular blogging, and I don’t think counting them will make it any easier. Nonetheless I’m left with a lingering sense that it should be easy — because hey, there was a good…
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Recognise the firm beyond the corporation
Firms are best understood as political entities, rather than merely economic organizations. Of course they have economic dimensions. But saying that they are merely economic organisations would be as reductive as to say that states are merely economic organizations. A firm certainly contains the legal structures of capital investment – this is what the legal…
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].”