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

  • No organism can be reduced to its own action

    … the obsession with ‘selfish genes’, that is, the neoliberal theory of action parading as biology, makes it impossible to follow Lovelock’s reductionist call. When you really believe that externalities — to locate this philosophy of biology where it belongs: namely economics — cannot be internalized by selfish individual agents, how could you possibly understand what

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  • Iron counsel

    China Miéville on the Bolshevik uprising of 1917: So to go back to the question: why does the revolution matter? Because of what was right about it, and what went wrong. It matters because it shows the necessity not only of hope but of appropriate pessimism, and the interrelation of the two. Without hope, that

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  • Pirsig

    To my great shame, I don’t recall the name of the school librarian who suggested I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Hiding out in school libraries was a habit I developed at boarding school, because it was a space of last resort. The habit persisted into my years at a (comparatively) normal grammar

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  • Strategies in huckster narratology

    A few new accessions to the critical futures lexicon, courtesy Stefan Collini’s dissection of the B-school blandishments of UK HE policy: One of the most revealing features of [the HE White Paper’s] prose is the way the tense that might be called the mission-statement present is used to disguise implausible non sequiturs as universally acknowledged general

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  • Nominations and nominality

    Quoth the redoubtable Nicholas Whyte: This is a very well done and well executed piece of work, and I really enjoyed reading it and can understand why people nominated it. However it is clearly a work of fiction, so I won’t vote for it at all in the Best Non-Fiction category. Well, it’s clearly not a

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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.