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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The designer’s prestidigitation
As Apple’s chief designer Jony Ive recalls, when he and his team sat down to redesign the iPhone operating system in 2012, it did away with many of the classic skeuomorphic elements: “We understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits. So there was…
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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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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…
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].”