Velcro City Tourist Board

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a blog by Paul Graham Raven

science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats

ecosystems are not factories / the tyranny of scale

Just a quick one today (in case yesterday’s table-thumpin’ epic gave you the fear), and it’s a call-back supplementary to an earlier squib about the fetish for “scaling up” in, well, everything. The case in hand here is food production, and perhaps it’s the case where the argument is made most easily. Scalability as a
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Climate Change 🙜 Infrastructural Theory 🙜 Social Theory

2 Feb 2022
design, marketing, and manipulation as ideological imperative

I seem to be linking Cennydd Bowles a lot lately, but why would one not? So here’s a nice, short injunction from the man himself, off the back of his having thrown out the question “when does design become manipulation?”, and being real unsettled by the answers he got: Design influences. It persuades. But if
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Climate Change 🙜 Criticism 🙜 Politics 🙜 Social Theory

1 Feb 2022
31JAN22 / accessions

Courtesy a seasonal giftcard from my employer, plus the magic of a four-for-three deal on paperbacks at Akademibokhandeln. These technically came in over the weekend, but hey, the accessions department doesn’t work weekends; if you don’t like it, take it up with the union.
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Accessions

31 Jan 2022
an immaterial objection

Via L M Sacasas, an interview by Evan Selinger with David Chalmers, who appears to be analytical philosophy’s current useful idiot from the POV of the tech scene. Does that seem harsh, whether on analytical philosophy in general or Chalmers in particular? Well, given said discipline prides itself on a rigour that the filthy continentals
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Futures 🙜 Philosophy 🙜 Social Theory 🙜 Technology

28 Jan 2022
time fracture / fracture time

Just realised it’s pretty much exactly a year since I broke the talus of my left foot while climbing… which I guess I’m glad to have remembered on my way back from the climbing wall, rather than on the way there. I now have a lot of the mobility back in that ankle, though not
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General

28 Jan 2022

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.