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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you trick yourself into thinking that it’s true
John Higgs, in his most recent newsletter, begins by mentioning a piece he wrote for The Big Issue proposing that the super-rich be put in prison, and comparing it to the political notion now known as limitarianism (which is pretty much the same idea, just without the prison bit). Typically modest, Higgs discounts any possibility…
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05FEB24 / accessions
The department notes, without judgement, that the institution is reviving old habits with regard to acquiring texts more quickly than it reads them. Zindell’s The Remembrancer’s Tale: the Requiem for Homo Sapiens sequence had a profound and formative effect on the institution, despite its being discovered almost a decade after its initial publication. (Indeed, with…
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a pattern we are doomed to repeat
Dave Karpf is doing sterling work on what we might call the uppermost archaeological layer of paleofutures—to the extent that the various vague plans I had to write more in this direction have been shelved pretty much permanently. Leave it to the person with the headstart and the bit between their teeth, you know? There…
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23JAN24 / accessions
Caro’s The Power Broker: a book notorious for being referred to far more often than read, and you’ll have an inkling as to why once you see a copy in the wild, given it’s about the same size and weight as a breezeblock. The institution was persuaded to take the plunge by a friend and…
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tools to cudgel or flatter
Bit of a callback here to last week’s post: Addressing the vacuity of the words fascism and democracy, [Orwell] wrote “the word fascism has no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Calling something a democracy is not very different except that “we are praising it.” Fascism is reduced to meaning not good…
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].”