Frontier Cities: “Like many other moments in American history, we find ourselves at the advent of a technological innovation era that has the potential to significantly increase human freedom. We must grasp it. America must, as it has for centuries, set out toward that goal. We don’t need to colonize Mars, we don’t need new…
Tag: cities
𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: aestheticized violence, life as a work of art, undiluted trust
Aesthetic Violence: “The Left seeks to demonstrate that it can hurt you; this is what encourages lockstep compliance. If this claim is not contested, then the extant Leftist narrative prevails. This was the situation in 2020 when COVID locked much of the country in their homes and riots broke out in the wake of the death…
₩ɆɆ₭Ɇ₦Đ Ⱡł₦₭₴: Erased by Time; Strange Contagions; Collapse
Citizen Disposal: “Mimetic theory teaches us, and neuroscience and studies on human imitation have confirmed, that all desire is mediated. There is no way to desire without emulating some other. In his 2017 book Strange Contagion, Lee Daniel Kravetz explores the phenomenon of social contagions, noting especially the terrible fact that suicide itself is contagious…Social contagions,…
w҇e҇e҇k҇e҇n҇d҇ ҇l҇i҇n҇k҇s҇: the violence of heaven, history’s new surprises, the chthonic swamp
Jupiter Rising: “It is not that the public is in some deep slumber or guided hypnosis, but that they are so deeply humiliated and abused that they don’t even know who they are anymore. Many Americans don’t even know their own fathers, let alone contemplate or internalize the triumphs of their ancestors.” The Cionci Thesis:…
weekend links: chaotic potential, the violent death of men, Psalm 91
From City to Civium: “The fourth industrial revolution really is at hand — but the WEF is completely wrong. They are correct in recognizing that a massive technical wave is sweeping across our economic landscape, but they make the mistake of thinking that the city (and its nature) is an invariant. As a result, they have…
Weekend Links — Hyperobjects, Temporality, and the Book of Job
Magonia As Hyperobject: “If the UFOs are psychic devices, then the real question is not about the devices or machines themselves, but what they serve as such equipment.” Metacosmos: “Behold the time machine called ‘metacosmos’ that pounds on the fabric of reality. The machine does not travel, it prints a timeline, and the world moves. Unceasing,…
#WEEKENDLINKS
Culinary Mysticism — review of “Pig,” starring Nicolas Cage (IM1776) Rob does not hate Portland; like Socrates, who dismisses outright the idea of fleeing Athens for Thessaly, he sees it from the standpoint of eternity, and so both loves it and knows it to be deeply broken: Amir: “If the city floods we can always…
Lost and Found in the Cartographical Matrix
I’ve been thinking about “place” a lot lately. Thinking about “place” led to me write this blog post, which got me digging through the great book Applied Ballardianism again, and a chapter called “Cartographies of the Infinite,” where author Simon Sellars contemplates whether future cities can be “tuned to produce a kind of stereoscopic urbanism.”…
w̴e̶e̴k̶e̵n̸d̵ ̸l̶i̴n̸k̴s̶
#1: A General Theory of Collaboration: “Anyone who reads Vaclav Havel’s Power of the Powerless will be struck by Havel’s portrait of Czechoslovakia forty years ago—with its voluntary window-slogans; its endless parade of crusades; its inexorable machinery of human cancellation. Havel had the right strategy for the subjects of the total state. First, they must…
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Cities and the Balance of Power: “Cities are like massive information-processing units, with real-estate markets revealing the value of being able to access the networks involved. People put a dollar value on physical colocation and proximity to others who have similarly paid a high price to access density. This implicit sorting lies at the heart of…
Baudrillard: “America”
Taking inventory of my summer reading. Here are some favorite passages from Jean Baudrillard‘s “America.” (Emphases mine.) Driving This sort of travel creates its own peculiar type of even and innervation, so it also has its own special form of fatigue. Like a fibrillation of muscles, striated by the excess of heat and speed, by…