velcro city tourist board

a blog by Paul Graham Raven

science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats

  • Neither good nor bad, and never neutral

    The network is neither good, nor bad, and never neutral; instead, the repetition of national politics in virtual space reminds us that our digital lives take place in the context of history and society, subject to the same powers and pressures as our physical lives. The network can be occupied, controlled, forbidden and attacked in

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  • Our lives are linked to land and water

    Last weekend I was a guest at Brown University, Providence, appearing as a panelist at Jo Guldi’s Land & Water conference, a conclave of academics and activists with a mutual interest in the historical forces mediating our access to the environment and its resources. There should be more material to come at the link above, including session

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  • The power of narrative

    … narrative is the specific form taken by a written history to counter the permanence of vision. […] Narrative asserts the the power of men [sic] to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake “classical” civilisations; above all, it asserts that the

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  • On the road again: upcoming appearances

    My career as a musician never really got anywhere, but that doesn’t mean I don’t end up touring…  

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  • The medium is the message: why I’m sick of Twitter

    I’ve been thinking a fair bit about McLuhan’s famous aphorism lately, and I’ve decided it explains why I am, in a very literal sense, sick of Twitter. The point of McLuhan’s riff as I understand it isn’t that the content delivered by any given medium is irrelevant, but that the way in which any given

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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].”