infrastructure

“Many interesting artists and activists these days are working on making things visible. They give hidden but important things shapes that we can see. Seeing, we can discuss. Paul Graham Raven described this engagement with infrastructure, “Don’t think outside the box. Think about the box.”” – Metafoundry 35: Dilution of Precision

“De-fanged by the sickly nostalgia of the new urbanists and the seductive sales patter of the postmodernist forces of ‘regeneration’, our urban discourse has settled into a cosy agreement that all we can and should do with the city is ameliorate and prettify. The consensus disdains intensity and drama, and obsesses about detail and paving and planting. Heavy infrastructure must be ignored, screened or removed. The human scale is venerated above all else.” – The chaos and tangled energy of living cities – Will Wiles – Aeon

“Platforms are the in­fra­struc­ture of global so­ciety. They es­tab­lish the basic para­meters of what is pos­sible, both be­ha­vi­our­ally and ideo­lo­gic­ally. In this sense, they em­body the ma­terial tran­scend­ental of so­ciety: they are what make pos­sible par­tic­ular sets of ac­tions, re­la­tion­ships, and powers. While much of the cur­rent global plat­form is biased to­wards cap­it­alist so­cial re­la­tions, this is not an in­ev­it­able ne­ces­sity. These ma­terial plat­forms of pro­duc­tion, fin­ance, lo­gistics, and con­sump­tion can and will be re­pro­grammed and re­formatted to­wards post-​capitalist ends.” – #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics