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

  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • 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.…

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  • 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…

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  • organ donation

    Trying to get back into a proper working groove this morning, as there is (long-past-deadline) writing to be done; thus trying to purge myself of a deeply cursed earworm. (Bowling for Soup, thanks for asking. No idea how that fucker got in there.) Stoner-space-doom it is, then—more particularly, Lowrider’s “Ode to Ganymede”, from 2020’s excellent…

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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.