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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Future fuels and fuel futures
A commendable long essay by Iwan Rhys Morus at Aeon, which should perhaps be added to the list of works that have something to say about #solarpunk, even if it isn’t talking directly to that genre-complex: it’s in part a call for an understanding of “innovation” as a collective endeavour, rather than something individual entrepreneurs…
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Reviews of books that don’t exist
It mat not have been appreciated as such by the readership, but one of the great personal coups of my editorship of Futurismic was persuading the redoubtable Adam Roberts to provide a series of his reviews of imaginary books* for the site (which is, a little surprisingly, still online, despite its original founder reclaiming the…
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Surrealism comes for us all: Miéville’s Last Days of New Paris
The Rex’s guards search them and incompetently question them and let them in to noise and warmth and the smell of drink, dirt, and sweat. Rows of seat-stubs slope down the tumbling hall. people are dancing. Women and men watch the huge screen from a raised half-floor above. What is showing is snips of images,…
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Ravens, reductionism and consciousness
We’ll never find proof for the existence of consciousness by picking the animal apart, or by looking at its parts in isolation. That’s like trying to understand the caching behavior of ravens by grinding them up, examining ever smaller parts down to the molecules, and studying them through the laws of physics or chemistry. That’s…
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Kahneman’s pre-mortems: dystopia as clusterfuck avoidance strategy
I’m not much of one for citing economists approvingly, but in this QZ piece devoted to distinguishing a clusterfuck situation from a mere SNAFU or shitshow, there’s an interesting note on Daniel Kahneman’s approach to forward planning: Before a big decision, teams should undertake what Kahneman calls a “premortem.” Split the group in two. One is…
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].”