The Social Media Monster

 

An essay for the "Identity of the Architect" edition of Architectural Design, November 2019, edited by Laura Iloniemi, and for which I also designed the cover artwork, above

We are living through a period of massive tectonic alignment in terms of who controls the information and media people consume. Until recently this information was in the hands of governments, a cadre of institutionally anointed experts and a very small group of oligarchic magnates. Now, it is suddenly open and up for grabs. Within this state of digital chaos, the most intellectually and technically nimble are able to shape spaces in which they can project values they wish to proselytise, even though – and as if counterintuitively – this tumultuous and riven landscape has been created and fostered on platforms owned by some of the biggest corporations in capitalist history. While the traditional media act as a counterweight, they are increasingly portrayed as a relic yet to be swept aside by the all-engulfing digital storm.

Architecture as a field of communication and discourse is an island of impressively stubborn, actively reinforced anachronisms within an otherwise radical and unrecognisable environment. After a brief efflorescence of attenuated discussions on Twitter, and – prior to that – some thoughtful output on blogging platforms, ‘gatekeeping’ has returned with a vengeance. Meanwhile a plethora of small publications and a range of major international newspapers with correspondents has imploded into the seemingly unstoppable and, in my view, editorially opaque media singularity that is Dezeen while a handful of major-outlet correspondents remain attractive to their employers through sensationalisingmainstream content. 

Considering architecture has a history of being at the forefront of technological and cultural change, it is strange to find that within this broader context of fragmentation, the profession seems to view social media as, more or less, either a funny thing hipsters use to share images of their avocado-toast or simply as a free form of traditional advertising. Almost uniformly, architects seem to miss both its danger and its excitement, regressing to the comfortable formats of magazines and journals – back, that is, to a near-Luddite fetishisation of the printed object and, in doing so, eschewing creative or critical engagement with the very technologies that are creating and accelerating the ruptures in the world around them. 

Embarrassing Dads of the Internet 

It is in this context that a steady and deathly drip of digital posts by once radical practices is so very hard to digest. How sorry it is to see practices using this medium to say little more than that they are ‘so proud to announce that’, ‘so honoured’, ‘excited to be completing’, ‘thrilled to have won’ or even ‘so proud of our team’s charity fund-raising bake sale’. The worst must surely be ‘welcome to Cannes after an epic bike ride!’ accompanied by magazine-like images of ersatz ‘friends together’ or iPhone selfies or painfully nostalgic collage-like faux-handmade renders harking back to some illusory pre-digital golden age. 

This landscape of architectural mediation is so featureless and devoid of spunk that Norman Foster posting an image of himself on an inflatable unicorn in a swimming pool was pretty much the most exciting event to have happened on any of the major platforms in 2018, while the publication of Archigram: The Book was such a widely discussed event partly because Archigram represents the last time – fifty years ago! – architects were successful in co-opting and instrumentalising new forms of mediation with any gusto.1 One of the few critics who have used the new media in a thrillingly non-traditional manner is Kate Wagner, aka @mcmansionhell, whose direct and visceral passion has garnered 45,000 followers on Twitter alone. 

Metahaven, a Dutch collective, have been operating freely across politics, international relations, graphic design, fine art, video, web design, architecture, history and speculative fiction since the early 2000s. Their work uncovers strange truths and moments of exception that reveal much about the nature of this new world we inhabit, as well as the terrifying centralisation of Web 2.0, in which we operate entirely within ecosystems driven from Palo Alto, Cupertino and Seattle, and which, bizarrely, are surreptitiously manipulated from Moscow, Macedonia, Tehran and Tel Aviv. Certain members of the architectural avant-garde justify a retreat to the printed page through critiques of a corporatised internet, yet Metahaven show how one can operate within it both critically and reflexively. They actively harness the aesthetics of both the various web-based subcultures that have bloomed online over the past decade and the visual language of the banal platforms themselves, transforming these into shocking new formulations of image, text and narrative that reveal the latent political ideologies at work behind what most of us presume to be neutral material. Metahaven are very much creatures of this new media technological ecosystem, and it is precisely their acquaintance with it that allows them to be so fascinatingly critical of it. 

The modes of mediated engagement of both Wagner and Metahaven offer intriguing and potentially unsettling ways of cutting through the turgid sedimentation of architectural discourse in communicating clear, consistent and relevant messages about the meaning of architecture in a broader cultural and political context. This is the authenticity imperative, a crucial factor in harnessing and directing the energies of observers who become, rather than followers, potent and passionate believers in an entire perspective on the world and the profession. Digital platforms have also reempowered the art of rhetoric, the modulation of speech for emotive effect that can catch the attention of a population weary of manipulation and bored of pre-packaged corporate guff. 

Children of the Internet 

Like Wagner and Metahaven, the millennial generation has grown up with the internet. As it has mutated through various incarnations, many of us have pursued the evolving ways in which we can reach audiences, from Geocities and Tripod sites in the 1990s, to web forums, blogs, standard websites, Facebook groups, Tumblr and eventually other social media and Instagram, all the while producing work, in text, images, animations, videos and drawings operating effectively on each of these various platforms. Participation in an ever-shifting online culture has profoundly affected the development of those of us who were active at each of its stages and platforms. Our thinking, sensibility and general political and aesthetic awareness became fundamentally linked to the plurality of our online experiences, inculcating us with a dynamic and promiscuous relationship to a diverse array of media, content and modes of representation. 

Having experienced this fluid and engaging world, it was – to say the least – quite a shock for architecture students and young practitioners to find themselves in institutions and studios struggling to digest the consequences of the early 1990s pre-internetera digital revolution, let alone creatively engaging with the landscape of a world so saturated in mediation and digital exchange that its occupants are virtually cyborgs. When it came to aesthetics, the situation seemed even more comical, with architects fussing over a palette of formal interests so limited and narrow that Postmodernism – a short-lived and really rather tame opening-up of the architectural canon – would send them into paroxysms of disgust. It was impossible to square this with the coruscating, cascading, bewildering and utterly vibrant array of aesthetic and communicative approaches developing in the world around this closed time-capsule coffin of architectural practice. 

Rebelling Against the Algorithm 

Messier and less refined than either Wagner or Metahaven, my own online engagement has attempted to harness the various media I have had the pleasure of learning and using over the years as well as the taste cultures I have been a part of and moved through with the goal of breaking down preconceptions and rigid value judgements of the architectural mainstream – from long-form visualvideo- lectures, to animated GIFs, to what has come to be a most useful and potent fulcrum, Instagram. 

Perhaps the final apotheosis and most addictive incarnation of the Web 2.0 platforms, Instagram lends itself perfectly to architecture in terms of the primacy it affords the image. Architects tend to ‘stay on message’ and stick to one type of content online, but I have found the opposite tactic has been far more fruitful in terms of treating my feed as a fulfilling research project in its own right. There are several different threads of content that I constantly jump between, bamboozling the Instagram algorithm – which promotes consistency – in the process. The main body of my posts addresses the notion of alternative histories and celebrates the sheer diversity and range of buildings, architectures, modes of living, aesthetics and taste-cultures which exist and have existed in the world, and which have been excluded from the architectural canon and its textbooks. Then there are the posts which test and question the boundaries of good taste and orthodox value, pushing the observer to question why they consider certain things good, and others bad, by posting examples which might initially revile, but on closer inspection should reveal a great deal of interest – a celebration of the ugly and the camp, as it were. I also regularly create polemical posts under the hashtag #archiphorisms that come in two types. On the one hand there are memelike critical statements that operate through humour, and the mixing of image and text, and on the other, there are billboard-style textual posts that are effectively little cannonballs of theory, fragments and aphorisms that hit the ground and stir up conversation and debate. These relate to general contemporary issues or to articles published in the design world, deconstructing them from a particular – and usually progressive – standpoint. Finally, there are the poetic posts, cryptic but expansive moments of visual or textual reprieve that force a hint of enigma into what is otherwise a very direct stream of unambiguously delivered material. The stream is delivered with a forceful voice, which throws in quite a lot of personal detail in a manner that might be taken as ‘oversharing’, yet this blows away any idea that it might be compared to the majority of architecture accounts that stick carefully to a narrow message of product-promotion. Instead, this is an attempt to convey an entire mode-of-being that can be bought into, rejected forcefully or observed with curiosity, one that spans aesthetics, architecture, politics, design and art, and which extends outwards to other platforms. It also incorporates a strong vector of self-promotion that has led to a slew of highly productive opportunities in academia and design. 

On to the Next Paradigm 

As Web 2.0 is reaching full maturity, and will no doubt soon come to the end of its period of dominance, architecture has still barely begun to harness its potential. It would be highly beneficial for the vigour of the discipline if more of those who consider themselves to be progressive, peripheral, critical, or who 

simply have a lot of fire in their bellies, would leave their Luddite snobbery behind and pick up these weapons and tools of mass dissemination, deploying them in ways that can crack open the otherwise narrow range of interests and accepted approaches sanctified by the old gatekeepers of aesthetic decorum. As this ‘new’ media reaches its apogee and goes into decline, something new is coming; nobody knows what, yet whatever it may be, I very much hope that Generation Z will cast aside the architectural tendency to regress into materialist nostalgia, and take up whatever challenges and opportunities come in the world of mediation and intangible exchange with a confidence and exuberance befitting the field’s somewhat obscured tradition of hyper-engagement with the contemporary world.