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

14JAN22 / accessions

Another review assignment, another demonstration that—for all my anxieties about schedule overload—I am my own worst enemy. Still, there are far worse habits to have. Plus, y’know, books!
[… read the whole post.]

Accessions

14 Jan 2022
the subject has been usurped

Lots of chewy stuff in this M L Sauter joint, jumping off from the seeming climb-down of G**gle’s Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto—which, as Sauter notes, was less of a stoppage than a sort of metastasis, with the ideological cancer scattering away from the site of the obvious tumour—in order to talk about surveillance and
[… read the whole post.]

General 🙜 Infrastructural Theory 🙜 Social Theory 🙜 Technology

14 Jan 2022
both men believed they knew how the world worked

I’m always here for anyone giving neoclassical economics the kicking it so rightly deserves; in that sense, this piece at Aeon is a bit measured for my tastes, but Bergin—like all the best journalists—leaves plenty of room for one to read between the lines. If even the simple supply-and-demand curve, a staple of the orthodox
[… read the whole post.]

Futures 🙜 General 🙜 Social Theory

13 Jan 2022
it’s about being right, whatever the heck that means

Couple ‘graphs from Julian Bleecker, here, which manage to put fairly succinctly an argument about futuring which I first found myself trying and failing to make ten, maybe fifteen years ago: Predicting things feels like a setup for bad behavior. It feels weird trying to anticipate what’s going to happen “next” or down the road.
[… read the whole post.]

Futures

12 Jan 2022
efficiency (slight return)

Decent piece here at the Atlantic on not just plastic, but the necessity of plastics—by which I mean less their necessity to us, “the consumer” (though they have indeed become profoundly necessary, due to their embeddedness in so many of our day-to-day practices), than to their manufacturers, as a way of getting rid of by-products
[… read the whole post.]

Climate Change 🙜 Infrastructural Theory 🙜 Social Theory

11 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.