Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: politics

  • Contact low: reading Mark Fisher

    I bought the K-Punk collected works of Mark Fisher late last year, and have slowly been working my way through it, going through phases of reading a few pieces a night before bed when I haven’t been reading fiction. I think I’m maybe ¾ through the thing now, factoring in for the notes and references;…

  • “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society”: Levitas (2013), Utopia as method

    Levitas, R. (2013). Utopia as method: The imaginary reconstitution of society. Springer. (Only annotating the (brief) intro of this one for now; very much want to dig into the detail of the rest, but hahahah OMG scheduling.) Levitas opens with H G Wells’s claim that “the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism –…

  • Social media as trench cyberwarfare

    Will Davies at the NYT: Many of the anxieties surrounding “post-truth” and “fake news” are really symptoms of a public sphere that moves too quickly, with too great a volume of information, to the point where we either trust our instincts or latch on to others’. There’s a reason Twitter invites users to “follow” one…

  • Dispositionally or structurally retrograde

    … typically as designers, and in broader culture, we’re looking for the right answer. As designers we’re still very solutionist in our thinking; just like righteous activism that pretends to have the right answer, dispositionally, this may be a mistake. The chemistry of this kind of solutionist approach produces its own problems. It is very fragile.…

  • Cyborg dialectics / a perpetual state of transition

    Dresden Codak. Started following his original webcomic way way back in the Noughties, when it was just as much of a one-person labour of love as it is now (though the artwork has gone from good to astonishing over the years). Back then DC (and I, for my sins) were fellow-travellers of transhumanism; DC is,…