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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#weaksignals: Panama lock-out, Lithium as the new oil, Nvidia’s gold-rush shovel-store
We’re in a weird phase at the moment, where things simultaneously seem to be moving very fast and not changing at all. So I figure it’s high time I screwed on my Grown-up Foresight Practitioner hat and started a more public practice of looking at (and interpreting) potential weak signals. First up, drought in Central…
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geoengineering is just another suitcase word
… and that’s as good a reason to distrust it on principle as any other. Via Jay, here’s a rant from Jeff Maurer (a Daily Show writer, I think?) about reductive attitudes to geoengineering which, through its own deployment of reductive attitudes, illustrates (presumably unintentionally) exactly why the reductive attitudes it attacks are justifiable. It…
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cultural-fracking-as-a-service (or: an abjuration of “artificial intelligence”)
I’m currently in the nuts-and-bolts phase of booting up my consultancy practice: doing stuff like establishing the business as a legal entity, starting bank accounts, buying domain names and (re)making websites. It’s the sort of stuff that makes a heretofore conceptual goal very concrete, very quickly: my business is actually a thing-in-the-world now. As a…
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07JUL23 / accessions
The institution has been much occupied with implementing The Magrathea Protocol over the last week, but the accessions department has been beavering away nonetheless. Uncharacteristically, their work has focussed on withdrawals from the catalogue—shelf meterage is a real constraint for a small institution, after all—but there are a few fresh accessions also: The Overstory has…
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The Magrathea Protocol, part D: on the merits of openness over closedness
D—on the merits of openness over closedness It is my hope that you may now see why I abandoned my attempts to explain away the differences between various forms of futuring, and opted instead for this little wander through the narratological landscape. But to make it plain, my point is that yes, all these methods…
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].”