Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: capitalism

  • no choice but to be aggregated: enclosure and augmented reality

    I’m going to assume that people have spent the last few days pointing poor old Bill Gibson at this story by way of draping the (oft-refused) garland of prophecy around his neck. The short version is that people bored of the tedious affordances of that suddenly ubiquitous video-conferencing platform (and/or possibly seeing an opportunity for…

  • archaeology of prestidigitatory production

    A short Doug Rushkoff riff that chimes with my extended infrastructure-as-stage-magic metaphor: The industrialist’s dream was to replace [workers] entirely — with machines. The consumers of early factory goods loved the idea that no human hands were involved in their creation. They marveled at the seamless machined edges and perfectly spaced stitches of Industrial Age…

  • the monstering

    Almost a decade ago, I reviewed a book at Futurismic written by someone I’d gotten to know via the blog circuit. Ryan Oakley is a pretty singular character, and Technicolor Ultra Mall was a pretty singular book, too—furiously angry and cynical about the world that capital had made for us. With hindsight, I wonder if…

  • an almighty crash in the heart of the form

    Lovable Marxist granddad David Harvey, getting in there early on neoliberalism’s final Wile E Coyote moment: … contemporary capitalist economies are 70 or even 80 percent driven by consumerism. Consumer confidence and sentiment has over the past forty years become the key to the mobilization of effective demand and capital has become increasingly demand- and…

  • contra Maslow

    I really should have guessed, but I never did know that Ol’ Man Maslow was a management consultant. Sam Haselby at Aeon: Why was corporate America drawn to [Maslow’s] hierarchy of needs? They liked it because it offered both a grand narrative and master explanation for human psychology in a changing society and a practical…