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

making them seem insurmountable

A new Laleh Khalili joint at NOEMA: … what if infrastructure is designed, financed and adopted into the habits of everyday lives of its users in such a way that it is not a harbinger of apocalypse? I fear that thinking of infrastructures in a generalized and totalizing way, as always only girding the structures…
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Climate Change 🙜 Futures 🙜 Infrastructural Theory 🙜 Social Theory

16 Mar 2023
happy (belated) blogday

The arrival of a domain renewal notice by email reminded me that yesterday was VCTB’s 17th birthday. I bought the domain in March 2006, in order to map what was then still a Blogspot-based site onto a digital room-of-my-own. I don’t recall how quickly I then moved to using self-hosted WordPress, but I know it…
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General

15 Mar 2023
a media architecture that creates feedback loops that reinforce certain behaviors

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber: For me, the big question isn’t whether Jonathan Chait (or Glenn Greenwald, or name any other extremely online person who you think is a controversialist or party hack) is an innately terrible human being. It’s why we have a media architecture that creates feedback loops that reinforce certain behaviors (whether…
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General 🙜 Infrastructural Theory 🙜 Politics 🙜 Social Theory

9 Mar 2023
a clear parable of power

Raising my head briefly above the palisade*, here, to clip a couple of paragraphs from an excellent (and, unusually, free-to-air) essay at the Paris Review, which is apparently a tweaked version of an introduction by Michael Tondre for a new edition of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the foundational petro-novel. You should read the whole thing, as…
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Climate Change 🙜 Criticism 🙜 Futures 🙜 Infrastructural Theory 🙜 Politics 🙜 Social Theory

6 Mar 2023
tre år i Malmö

I arrived in Sweden three years ago today. I’ve come to realise that one of my persistent discursive tics—one that very much predates the pandemic—is to observe that a given stretch of time “seems like a lifetime, but at the same time like a blink of the eye”. I say it because it feels true,…
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General

21 Feb 2023

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.