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

  • 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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  • The ghosts of infrastructures past

    Somewhere along Brindcliff Edge Road in Sheffield, you can still see this wonderful infrastructural relic: That’s a sewer-gas destructor lamp, of which there are maybe a dozen or so remaining in the city, though only a very few of them are a) undamaged, and b) still lit. Destructor lamps took a tricky infrastructural problem (the way…

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  • Rhyme vs. Reason

    The why of my wanting you differs each time. (The wanting, returning, is always the same.) So strangle my reason and drown it in rhyme: to query the telos of love is a crime. (And I know there’s only one crook in the frame.) The why of my wanting you differs each time; this quiddity…

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  • The Metamedium

    From a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Zielinski argues that what he calls “media” (a dense composite notion encompassing both discourse and its material supports) has vanished from the horizon because it is now ubiquitous.” Obviously I need to read the whole book to make this claim more solidly, but nonetheless: this…

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  • Imaginable alternatives

    Tobias Revell takes the mic at AmateurCities to give a designer’s take on critical futures and the SmartCity!* shibboleth: “Too often we are confronted with visions and stories of the future that say: ‘In the future everyone will live this way or that way. In the future everyone will have these things. In the future everyone…

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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.