COUNTRYSIDE, THE PRESENT
REM KOOLHAAS, THE PAST
SOLIDARITY ECONOMIES, THE FUTURE
My review of Countryside: The Future, Rem Koolhaas´ exhibition at the Guggenheim (Feb 2020 – closed for COVID – Feb 2021) was the last article I got published in DAMn magazine, after a very fruitful 12-year collaboration. The article was so poignant (and so long) it was first published online, then on print (an abbreviated version) and then twice again online.
( If you haven´t you can read it here)
It was for an issue dedicated to COLORS (DAMn 75). Each piece had to respond to a color. I chose GREEN for this one. Green for countryside, but also for MONEY. It was so good that someone started bullying the magazine, and another article I had written for that same issue for the color PINK, had all my sweet pink pictures eliminated in favor of one single image for the whole article – a child dressed as a defiant police officer in a pink uniform, shot by Julie Scher, who had denied me previously other images I had asked her for that same article. And the people who bullied the magazine obviously knew that (more on surveillance capitalism later).
I am not sure if I quit or they fired me after this (I was so pissed they let some angry fascists do this with my pink article, which was kind of personal, that I threteaned them not to write anymore), anyway, I never heard from the magazine again.
But back to GREEN at the Guggenheim; with his Wizard of Oz halo, Rem had chosen to portray, through the appearance of one of his Harvard studios (which indeed were part of the research, among an array of international scholars and students from worldwide institutions) a rosy fascist future of agricultural monopolies and the corporatization of the countryside, omitting in his vast presentation any other possible futures that other segments of society were striving for in different parts of the world at the same time. He was using the Guggenheim Museum in New York to give a stamp of approval to this populist dystopian Minority Report happy ever after transgenic future as a fait accompli, omitting other kinder, more humane visions and voices of what the future of agriculture and the countryside could or might be.
The Guardian, who had seen, before the press conference, what the show was about, had published already a very critical article on it, and because of it, I made my research before going to a full-house auditorium for the press conference. It was packed as a Taylor Swift concert. I wonder if The Guardian had seen Stalin on wheels already! His presentation started good – an innocuous display of statistics on a global analysis of the countryside vs the city – but it started getting gloomy when Nevada´s whore house owner Lance Gilman, Rem´s new client for data centers and Amazon warehouses, showed up on his presentation.
I ran after his exposé to ask the first question under my DAMn magazine correspondent umbrella. As I started complimenting his always showy data gymnastics and diagrammatic presentations, he got self-satisfied, relaxing and moving away from the microphone to allow me to develop all these well-researched information I started by giving on the topic. But when I started citing all the omissions more ecological and human-centered oriented that I had found (specially one from Japanese architecture curator Kayoko Ota who had worked in his office from 2002-2012, who left to develop a beautiful research on the work being done on Japanese rural villages from a smaller and more human-centered perspective, which had even been part of an international program hosted by the Canadian Center for Architecture in Japan, and who was mentioned in the credits of the show), he started becoming increasingly nervous. But he stopped me short as I was quoting Ian Scoones, one member of the coordinating team for the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) from the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam (city for OMA´s headquarters as well). The quote I was reading him was the following:
Architects, even those with good intentions, don’t always have the best interests of inhabitants in mind. If you are living in areas where you have this kind of corporate influence, you might be rightfully suspicious of metropolitan designers suddenly showing an interest in the rural.
Koolhaas rushed to the mic to ask me angrily: “are you saying I am working for the corporations?” a slip of truth I told him I did not say.
“What is your question then?” The Wizard of Oz said even angrier.
“There are all these other visions you obviously know about. Are they part of the show as well? (or something like this).
To which he responded: “No”
“Thanks” I said, and I left.
The curator, Troy Conrad, was very angry as well, looking at me with daggers coming out of his eyes, and asked the audience that next questions be one-line questions. He resigned some months after the show. Looks like I was not the only one losing the job after my article.
As I left the auditorium to go look at the show, which was way worse than the presentation, with Hitler, Boris Johnson, Gaddafi, Stalin on wheels and the Nevada brothel owner – Rem´s new client – culminating the ramp´s ascension in the museum, all the gazes were on me, in a mix of stupor and a little admiration combined with a don´t-come-near-me I-don´t-know-you vibe. Giovanna Borasi, whom I had met and interviewed together with Phyllis Lambert a year before at the CCA before she became director of that institution, acted as if she did not know me 😊
I had pulled the curtain for the whole international press gathered there in the first question.
Thank God Covid hit right at the exact time of the opening, and they had to close that show full of fascist dictators (which opened again once the restrictions got lifted, but to a smaller audience than in normal circumstances). María Millán, illegally subletting me her rent-controlled loft, was coming from Madrid to evict me from it around that time, and they closed the Guggenheim and Madrid´s airport at the same moment 😊 Now that I am writing this, I feel there is a direct connection between both events.
As the first line of a book I started during Covid on the fascist persecution I´ve been enduring for so long (I am writing this article from my mother´s walk-in-closet to have some quiet from the constant construction works following me everywhere I go), “when Covid hit I was ready like I had been training for the Olympics.” 😊
Anyway, we must admit that Koolhaas was not totally wrong with his cynical propaganda vision to what the countryside is becoming. I was reminded of that last winter 2024, when all over Europe farmers went on strike and occupied town squares, blocked highways and burned stuff in a desperate cry for attention and help.
Right after the Guggenheim show, some very hard measures were voted in the EU, profiting big corporate agricultural lobbies in detriment of small farmers who were strongly complaining about their precarity and how those laws were bad for them. I remember seeing protests already back then in the news, and I thought the show was a propaganda to butter things off before passing those laws. Last February, climate emergency legislations, again were hard on smaller farmers who can´t afford such restrictions as bigger businesses can.
Luckily the demonstrations had some effect, and politicians listened, and adapted a little the legislation to their complaints. But it is far from being enough. Small farmers hardly make a living and work so hard to bring quality products to our table. I personally don´t want to eat transgenic food. Have you ever been into a supermarket in the United States? Not Eataly in Manhattan, but a regular one, anywhere. Do you know these shinny fruits and vegetables that look all the same, and taste and smell like nothing?
Last year 2023, I also read this wonderful book from 2019, which is almost like a fortune teller´s vision of the farmers protests of 2024. The real visionary of this whole countryside business is of course Michel Houellebecq, and the book is SEROTONINE (Flammarion 2019). They should have invited him instead of Rem to the Guggenheim, for a 100% score on prediction on the future of the countryside.
The main characters of the book are two agronomy engineers who met during their studies. One of them, Ayméric, is an aristocrat who wants to devote the land of his ancestors and his family fortune to ecological and quality old school French farming. The book follows him into bankruptcy, until in a desperate attempt to protest to the political system, he organizes an armed rebellion with other farmers, taking the highway hostage:
Les autres agriculteurs avaient saisi leurs fusils et s´ étaient avancés au-devant d´Aymeric, braquant eux aussi les armes; mais ils n´avaient que des fusils de chasse. (…) il ne s´agissait pas de terroristes internationaux, c´était, au départ, une simple manifestation d´agriculteurs.
(The other farmers had grabbed their rifles and had come in front of Ayméric, holding defiantly as well their weapons; but they only had hunting rifles (…) these were not international terrorists, it was at first a simple farmer´s demonstration)
Ayméric, who at first is aiming at the police with his Schmeisser gun, ends up instead shooting himself in front of everybody, and several other farmers follow him in this auto-immolation, one feels, as the writer´s metaphor of the countryside suiciding for market profits.
L´aristocrate martyr de la cause paysanne, ainsi qu´on commençait à l´appeler dans certains journaux. (…) Pour éviter que le propriétaire ne s´alarme, je lui expliquai que j´étais un ami d´un des agriculteurs tués dans la manifestation (…). Son visage plutôt avenant s´assombrit d´un seul coup; manifestement, comme tous les habitants de la region, il était solidaire des agriculteurs. “Moi je dis qu´ils on bien fait! Affirma-t-il avec force, c´était pas possible qu´ils continuent comme ça, il y a des choses qui sont pas admissibles, il y a des moments ou il faut réagir…” J´étais d´autant moins tenté de le contredire que je pensais, au fond, à peu près la même chose.
(The martyr aristocrat of the farmers´ cause – how he was starting to be called in certain newspapers (…) To avoid the [hostel] owner´s alarm, I was explaining to him I was friends with one of the farmers killed in the demonstration (…). His gaze, quite amicable, darkened in an instant; obviously, like all the people in the region, he was solidary with the farmers. “I say they did good! He exclaimed with force, it is not possible they go on like this, there are certain things that are not admissible, there are moments where one must react…” I was not tempted to contradict him, since I thought more or less the same thing.”)
Minus the suicidal squad, this scene was repeated on the news last February 2024 across many European countries. We are witnessing the corporatization of the countryside which is slowly but surely impoverishing and strangling our small peasants and farmers who can´t afford climate change regulations and European quotas with their small revenues. Once again Houellebecq foresaw future events with a clarity and lucidity Rem Koolhaas and his vested interests failed to portray. Instead, technology driven agricultural practices, happy greenhouse workers under fluorescent lights, and cows trapped in cages enhancing productivity were the future chosen by OMA to be portrayed at the Guggenheim, leaving behind the future of our farmers, like Ayméric, who had no room in the museum´s rotunda. In Koolhaas´s future small farmers are no longer there.
I wanted to write about this back then, but somehow, I was thinking “are you going to do this again?” “Don´t you have enough troubles as is?” But it was always seating in the back of my mind, as our banana plantation in the Canary Islands is not making us any money, and farmers barely subsist with the European subsidies. These past months, the profits are not even paying for the costs of the plantation, while tons of bananas must be thrown into the garbage due to European quotas! Couldn´t we send them to Africa for example? 57% of Africans live in hunger; can´t Europe figure out how to get them the food we cannot commercialize? Maybe that would even help with the immigrants situation coming from Africa governments have so many problems with. People are leaving their homes and families on boats because they don’t have food to eat.
Farmer´s situation is dramatic and politicians and the corporations of Rem Koolhaas´ future are interested to keep it this way until they all abandon and sell their plots to agricultural corporations (just like it happened in the mid-west in the US). It is like a suicide of traditional farming indeed by slow poisoning. It would seem that the little concessions made last February are just delaying the inevitable and extending the agony. Real help and real action need to happen to save our farmers and our food culture.
When it doesn´t rain, like last year, they don´t have enough to sell, and when it does rain, like this year in Spain, the offer is so big that a 1000kg of wheat pays only 180euros! Wheat is very light if you think of it… A tone of wheat is A LOT of wheat to collect and process. I don´t know anything about agriculture, but why is it this cheap? Isn´t there a way to make a decent living?
The situation is really dramatic all over Europe. We have such a food culture here, with such good products that don´t come from corporations like Goya or Monsanto, that politicians should be protecting small farmers much more. In the LONG FUTURE we can only lose by selling out to big corporations.
Look at the United States for a picture of Countryside: the Future. No wonder their show was there and not in Europe! Are we really going to copy that as well? A country with a land so rich, and agriculturally so diverse in the past, which is so poor today. I had the chance to go to the Midwest a little, and it was heartbreaking all the empty family-run farmhouses that once had been so prosperous. This future happened there already. And you just need to look at how they eat now – the obesity, diabetes, heart and other food related health problems of their population. It was not always like this… It took only two generations to happen and a lot of greedy stupidity. And now, they have farmer´s markets! Woah!! Amazing… Which are for the wealthy alone, who can afford it. One of my favorite things when I was living in Paris was going to the markets on the boulevards to shop for fresh produce. Not a farmer´s market, it is simply THE MARKET.
I finally decided to write this piece, cause, first of all, it doesn´t leave me, plus I was watching few days ago the 2007 documentary Rem Koolhaas, A kind of architect by Markus Heidingsfelder and Min Tesch and saw so many things that helped me understand why he would put together this kind of exhibition. I also realized how much of my own architectural thinking is indebted to his OMA/AMO practice. All my diagrammatic/programmatic approach to architecture is a direct result from looking at his work in the early 2000s when I was studying architecture, and he was like a rock star for our young generation. He was never romantic or idealistic, but to go onto this dark dumb path was something that, I now realized, hurt me personally. The wizard suddenly turned into a little man playing gimmicks. (I would really hope he regrets having done this exhibition).
In fact, I met him once, in Barcelona around 2007 (as the documentary), and funny enough it was with Michel Houellebecq, for a lecture on tourism XXL they were both invited to attend (I think at the time he was doing the sets for a movie adaptation of one of his books). I think at that moment Rem hadn´t totally sold out yet, or the powers at play weren´t as ugly as today are (more on this also at the end with Shoshana Zuboff´s book on Surveillance Capitalism). My interaction with both is funny and revealing, so I am going to tell you about it:
So, as I usually do, if I like a lecture, I wanted to participate and I had a question, and my remark was smart enough that it closed the event (as Fernando Galiano said), something about the world getting smaller as if we had eaten an Alice in Wonderland´s pill and multiplied our own size while the world stayed the same. After it, I approached Rem who asked me if I was working somewhere (possibly to recruit me for his boot camp of slaves). When I told him I hadn’t finished school yet and I was working with architect Enric Ruiz-Geli (who ran to meet us when he saw me with him) he immediately lost interest and became a little rude.
So, I left them both there (Rem and ecstatic Enric) and exited the museum, to find Michel Houellebecq outside smoking a cigarette. Michel, who is famously known for liking Spanish girls (his books are full of them), and recalled me from my comment, thought for some reason I was part of the organizing team, and taking me by the arm started to walk with me out on the street. After a while walking, having some doubts about where we were heading, he asked me if we were going to the diner? To which I responded, “What diner?” Realizing I was not part of the organization, and I was not going to their official diner, he laughed and left me there, running back to the museum to find the right people.
If I explain this, it´s because I found Rem calculative and rude, whereas Michel was a real sweetheart, not at all calculative, but totally genuine. Sort of funny and absent minded, as the little genius that he is.
These impressions of them both I got from that conference, show up in both their visions for the countryside. When I was on my twenties and Koolhaas at the height of his success, I could not see any of this. Twenty years older and him wanting to stay relevant at any cost, makes it clearer. It was there already.
Rem is very aware that – and maybe too aware I would say – cause sometimes he adjusts his motivations too much to this fact, that you have to constantly reinvent yourself if you are going to stay relevant (a person from his office)
But what happened at the Guggenheim was kind of sad.
I first called him the Wizard of Oz during another lecture at MoMA (few months before Covid) where he was rude again to me. I realized then that this is part of his technique to keep the power in any conversation. He systematically rejects your point of view, offering his as the correct and brilliant one 😊. He always does this in a threatening or mocking tone, as if you made a colossal mistake, thus destabilizing your self-confidence to gain the upper hand in the power relation. Remember how in the movie the Wizard of Oz does the same? He has a loud strong voice projected through some kind of Megadeath´s type of speakers combined with some pyrotechnics, to scare visitors away.
I saw it blatantly in an interview with an architecture critic and scholar part of the documentary, which is reproduced in full at the end (some sound bites sound intelligent, but when you watch the full interview Rem appears aggressive and abrasive). Exactly the same. He tries to make him feel smaller constantly, until the scholar, a nice person, who at first is trying to get his complicity starts feeling insecure (as intended) and lastly a little pissed (I think this is why they reproduced the whole interview after the credits, A kind of bully). To anything you say, he is going to doubt it, mock it or reject it, even if what you say is totally valid; just for the sake of keeping the power of the interaction. I believe this is what might have gone sour with all the American boards to his multiple failed American projects. Arrogance. It is also showing some deep-seated insecurity on his part, I believe. The greatest people I have met do the exact opposite, they try to make people feel comfortable and meaningful.
The project for Prada from 2000-2001 was perfect for the Wizard of Oz. “It was most of all about the aura that we have created as a corporation”, he says talking about Prada, despite not having great sales he also admits. Rem is indeed a great self-promoter, and this commission fit him like a glove, and he did put Prada on the international stage big time.
But I feel with time passing, and looking at the Show at the Guggenheim he is going from the Wizard of Oz to The White Slave for corporations – to use the name of a boring and pretentious movie he did as a youngster when he wanted to become a filmmaker. With his group of friends (who did become important filmmakers) they wanted to create a movie manifesto to rebut Godard and his nouvelle vague. They failed miserably. He was jealous of Godard´s aura I believe… Godard was the epitome of cool when Rem was young. My impression is he didn´t want to be a filmmaker, as much as he wanted to be like Godard.
It is not easy to be the son of famous and very accomplished people, you want to get there so fast when you are also talented and ambitious… Rem´s father was a journalist, writer and scriptwriter, so initially he followed in his footsteps. His grandfather, on his mother side, was an architect who, in fact, also worked for corporations. So, after a stint as a journalist, he went on to study architecture, thus combining both in his own practice. Interestingly, Rem´s father was punished after the war for having written about and supported a Nazi propaganda film (like what´s happening at the Guggenheim). Later he joined the resistance though, but the stigma remained, and they left to live in Southeast Asia.
I don´t know what the family dynamics were, growing up under such important male figures, but something seems to have left in him a need to show the world how he is relevant as well. His father recounts how he was totally neglected by both his parents, hence leaving him free to inhabit all day a world of his imagination, very helpful for his writing career. Maybe he reproduced this model himself, so Rem never felt validated growing up (just guessing).
But the truth is Rem always needs to be the man -- to shock, to be different for the sake of being different. “To stay relevant.” When this happens, I believe, it must happen naturally, it is not something to strive for. Then it is just gimmicks and turns trite very fast.
There is a very interesting interview he gave in 2022 to PIN-UP magazine, a very fashionable architecture magazine based in New York, to kind of clean up the personal debacle the show at the Guggenheim had brought upon him, I presume, among liberal new yorkers, which I am not sure this interview really succeeded in doing. You kind of see more of who he is. Check him out, when talking about the show. He doesn´t talk so much about the countryside (the main theme), and the main human problem of overpopulation that is at the base of the whole problematic of it (as he presented it in the press conference), quite the opposite in fact. Instead, he talks with enthusiasm about these new type of buildings in the desert for all these major American corporations disguising it as an interest in global warming...
While doing research for Countryside, The Future, I became really interested in the politics of all these enormous out-of-town structures that are being build. (…) These buildings are fascinating not only because they are bigger than anything that we have seen, but because they aren´t buildings for people, they are made to house the machines. (…) It´s a new form of commission. (…) It´s very liberating to ditch that entire human domain and think about architecture without the need to please or accommodate human beings.
Architecture is by definition a social endeavor; it protects and gives shelter to human beings and their activities. Architecture IS for people. What kind of architect are you when you want to ditch the entire human domain? Maybe this is why, the social problems that his take on the countryside are bringing upon society and that Houellebecq sees so clearly, are not a problem at all for him. Let´s ditch small farmers as well!!
According to Ezra Pound there are 6 types of writers, and I heard the other day in another DVD architect Saenz de Oiza (2018-2000) transmute this list to architects. The Inventors are the number one category and the Masters come second. The diluters come after… On the 6th and last category come the Starters of Crazes, or as Saenz de Oiza called it, the followers of trends and fashions.
Philip Johnson was that kind of architect, copying the inventors and masters (like Mies or Venturi), and setting himself up, by copying their buildings, to create a trend or a movement he did not start – International Style, Postmodernism, Deconstructivism were all promoted by him as styles thanks to his position at MoMA, but he was never the inventor of the works that created it. Jim Venturi calls him a popularizer. I am starting to feel Rem falls in this category as well. He just hides better his sources. His buildings are good but not groundbreaking. He recruits the most talented people to work for him and researches what´s going on around with great journalistic expertise, but nothing is really original.
In fact, in the PIN-UP interview he even confesses, “over time I am thinking myself less and less as an architect. I originally decided to enter architecture because I saw opportunity.” And an opportunistic he does look like, especially in this show meant to be a sociological study on the effects of overpopulation in cities, and a rethinking of the countryside to counter an unbalance that is producing such damaging effects on global warming, and what interests him more of it, is the part where the human beings are absent. Real architects are humanists. This is why Ezra Pound puts at the end of the category not the diluters who can´t do better than copying, but the starters of crazes, like this one of the data centers and warehouses for the most powerful corporations in America, which are also kind of fascists as a new architecture paradigm (more on this further down). I just start to see him as such a fake.
I discovered the other day reading in the Oppositions reader (1973-84), an article by Rafael Moneo on Aldo Rossi called, The idea of architecture and the Modena Cemetery where the concept behind Rem Koolhaas´ FUNDAMENTALS for the Venice Biennale in 2014, where he is hired as the curator, is directly copied from. Not inspired but copied. Koolhaas´s idea of architecture for the Biennale is in fact Aldo Rossi´s idea of architecture.
Quoting Rossi, Moneo writes:
The city, which is the object of this book [The Architecture of the City] is understood within its architecture. When I speak of architecture, I don´t mean exclusively the visible image of the city, and the whole of its architecture, but rather architecture as construction.
Then Moneo goes on to explain: First, Rossi begins a description of the elements from which the city is constructed. (…) This kind of extreme analytic suspension gives us a fleeting glimpse of the raison d´être of the city. On the basis of these elements, we must understand the city as a great representation of the human condition. (…) It is not necessary to underline the importance that the concept of typology has had in Italian theoretical studies of architecture.
Koolhaas calls the only section of the Biennale he personally creates, located at the Central Pavilions: ELEMENTS OF ARCHITECTURE (the two others being the Pavilions with other countries proposals and a compilation of Italian art, movies and dance at the Arsenale)
And still in Moneo´s article:
One can examine the entire history of architecture from the concept of typology, from the temple to the suburban house: through type we can explain the formation of the city. [And quoting Rossi again] “We can say that type is the idea itself of architecture…”
And now, this is what the Biennale´s web site tells us about Rem´s proposition:
Elements of architecture look under a microscope at the fundamentals of our buildings used by any architect, anywhere, anytime: the floor, the wall, the ceiling, etc etc (…) This exhibition is a selection of the most revealing, surprising and unknown moments from a new book “Elements of Architecture” that reconstructs the global history of each element in rooms that are dedicated to a simple element. To create diverse experiences, we have recreated a series of environments – archive, museum, factory, laboratory, etc [here the types and typologies refered by Moneo]
Or it comes straight from Rossi, or I have the feeling it comes straight from Rafael Moneo´s article, which dissects Rossi´s book and presents Rem with the theme of his curatorial idea all neatly laid down. Then he grabs this idea of the elements of architecture and gives it to his hordes of students at Harvard to compile for him. There is even a picture in Moneo´s article that is like a prototype for Koolhaas´ idea.
I didn´t go to Venice, but I bought the book online couple years later (not the huge one he published with Taschen in 2018 but a previous one done, I assume, for the Biennale), curious for this construction catalogue. Researching for this article I have found two more books with the same name -- one by Robert Krier (1983) and one by Pierre von Meiss (2013). Both architects and intellectuals are probably indebted to Aldo Rossi as well. Rem is not being very original with his Biennale theme. What bothers me is this aura of revolutionary he presents hismself with.
I thought the catalogue I bought "Elements of Architecture" might be useful one day as an architect, (this much bigger version on the same theme ressembles more to an Encyclopedia than to a construction catalogue, but it is basically the same idea as the previous, which I can´t find online anymore). But as it happens to me with all his books, I got bored with it (even Delirious New York I found it boring when I read it, I never got all the fuzz about it. Yes, skyscrapers have many different things inside of it, great).
As a young Spanish student (I bought my first computer in the year 2000) I was impressed with his graphic design outputs (he was the first architect to innovate architecture presentations bringing the world of graphic design to architecture, thanks to the advent of computer graphics), the quality of his analytic mind and his aura foremost (since I did not know much), but now as an adult, I don´t think he has contributed significantly to the history of architecture theory, as say Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown or Aldo Rossi who all wrote several really seminal books that are still inspiring architects worldwide, as we can see here.
When I read Moneo´s article few months ago, I saw the elements book showing up in my mind like an apparition and thought “motherfucker”.
Architecturally speaking even less. A lot of aura but no magic. His house manifesto (again), la Maison à Bordeaux (1994-1998) is a pastiche between Mies´s Glass house and Le Corbusier ´s Villa Savoie, specially on one side.
And on the other side it´s copying Herzog & de Meuron´s groundbreaking project, House for an Art Collector (1985-1986), which was very important at the time, if you think that in the mid 80s architecture was lost in neoliberalism´s embrace of a missunderstanding of early postmodern ideas -- with its neoclassical dumb and tacky appropriations and hypercapitalist corporate and extravagant tasteless macho heroics -- which ultimately killed it. In 1988, Philip Johnson seeing where that Frankenstein he had created and spread perverting early postmodern ideas was going (straight to a cliff), he invented another fashion with that show at MoMA on Deconstructivism, and which lasted even less but who helped put in the map people like Frank Ghery, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas indeed.
Well, right before that show, Herzog & de Meuron were already somewhere else, and really setting the tone for a new architecture without fashions, that would herald the path that would take some of the best work of the XXIst century. It was modern but contextual, rational but poetic, honest with its materiality, conceptual more than minimal, elegant, timeless, swiss 😊
Almost a decade later, Rem saw this, and included it in his pastiche in Bordeaux.
Herzong & de Meuron´s web site reads regarding the project: The house’s site is part of a suburb of small plots, its basically rectangular outline rises from the street to a meadow that is as yet undeveloped. The visible volume of the house is a single-storey parallelepiped [two in Rem´s house]. It is made of precast concrete panels held in place by pine slats with a double pitched roof of black concrete tiles that come to rest on a perimeter reinforced-concrete wall. The latter is part of an enclosure that defines both the lower entry court as well as the upper grassed garden. Contained within the base are a garage and an exhibition space.
The only problem with this, it´s that Rem always claims to be breaking some ground he really isn´t. This almost desperation he has to proclaim himself an innovator when what he does is copy other people´s ideas, is irritating. And as with any fashion, the house has aged bad, whereas Herzog´s & de Meuron home looks timeless.
Fifteen years after it was made, the house in Bordeaux was already falling apart. Some of the glass walls breaking under the pressure of the big cantilivered structure, water leacks everywhere, roting metal rods from the constant leaks are damaging the entrance stairwell, mechanical apparatus´ not working, etc. There is a great movie on it called Koolhaas Houselife (2013) by Louise Lemoine and Ila Bêka, which shows all the problems that this kind of architect´s showy projects really entail. It echoes Jacques Tati´s movie Mon oncle (1958) and the absurdity of fashion in architecture.
Houses like the Villa Savoye, Mies´ Glass house, the Vanna Venturi house or Herzog & de Meuron´s House for an Art Collector are still standing in great condition and even used and lived. They are usually clear structurally, even if novel and groundbreaking in their time, they are not about superficial gymnastics, but more about new ideas. In Bordeaux there is not one new idea and all the money is spent in a very expensive structure and technological gizmos instead of nice materials for the interiors, which makes domesticity opulent.
Why do you think Mies uses the amazing marbles and stones if not to contrast the cold glass and steel structure? As Guadalupe, the cleaning lady in Bordeaux, says about the house, "everywhere you look at is grey" like in Tati´s movie (meaning metal, concrete and glass everywhere). There is no warmth in the house. Ceiling and floors are all hard and grey, and concrete and metal are everywhere. While trying to emulate them here, it lacks the subtility and sophistication of Herzog & de Meuron, which combine the concrete with wood and plaster stucco with austere beauty. There is no subtility in Bordeaux´s interiors.
He is a better journalist than architect. Highly intelligent and cultivated, he knows what is important and what is not (just like Philip Johnson). He knows also how to recruit the best people and use their talent (the best and most original element of Delirious New York are Madelon Vriesendorp´s drawings and also her best known work) reason why his office now is booming without him.
His research and intellectual processes are interesting, although if you dig deeper, sometimes kind of shallow too and not so original, like for ELEMENTS OF ARCHITECTURE (But also his book on Japanese Metabolists, Project Japan, or the study on Preservation, Chronocaos, which are critiqued by experts on the field as self-serving, opportunistic and not accurate). He gets catchy names and Bruce Mau´s graphic design style sexy layouts, so they look very lively and trendy. Elements of Architecture (2018) looks like a fashionable encyclopedia, that´s all. Very educational, no doubt, this is why he has been such a teacher for all of us.
Despite taking everybody´s ideas, he has managed to create something somehow personal with it, at least formally. His working processes derive indeed from vast research of other´s great ideas done before – not so much to distill them into something new, as we all get inspired from what came before us, but rather as to adapt it to suit current times and his personal agenda, packaging it as if it was original, when in reality it isn´t so much. I think this is why the books are kind of boring ultimately. You expect a lot from all the presentation´s artifice, and then it´s kind of not new.
This is a very 90s strategy of many artists who blossomed with the market economy and were more preoccupied with making it, than with making something lasting and original. Hence, 70-year-old Rem, still is copying Aldo Rossi.
I see many of this type of 90s aggressive artists working for fascists today.
Rem started to work in the 70s, and began to build a little in the 80s, but he was really put on the map in 1988 with the Deconstructivist show at MoMA curated by Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson, whom he got close to during his studies at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and the 90s is where his career really takes off in this neoliberal economy he reflects so much upon. It is not by chance that Emmanuel Olunkwa for the PIN-UP magazine interview begins it precisely asking him for the 1990s:
Let´s start with the 1990s, because I am interested in the spirit of innovations but also the anxiety around the new millennium and the cultural free fall that followed.
Rem: For me the 90s were interesting not necessarily because of what was going on in America, but because of what was going on in Europe. (…) It was when I began to look away from America as a point of interest. (…) Then in the later 90s I started to look at China. (…)
Despite developing in the States as an architect and writing a (hardly) manifesto on the city of New York, for some reason he doesn´t manage to get work there. He says that in the 90s he is mainly interested in Europe, where, by the way, neoliberalism is also setting shop with Margaret Thatcher, and all the privatizations running through the continent (the fall of the Berlin Wall and communist Russia is due to the victory of that neoliberal market´s economy explosive hypercapitalism).
He doesn´t forget about the US, he just doesn´t find clients as a young foreign architect, so in 1995 he starts teaching at Harvard, one of the US most prestigious Ivy league universities. If Europe really was his main interest, and he was forgetting about the US, wouldn´t he go teach at Zurich´s ETH for example? Rotterdam has a great school of architecture as well!
This is all part of his personal Wizard of Oz´s narrative. He hates to appear needy, as when he became rude when I told him I was working already for somebody else. The stupid thing is I would have loved to go work for him after finishing school, but he didn´t let that door open. Instead I moved to New York 😊.
The truth is he has been all his life wanting to succeed in the States but he found more building opportunity in Europe in the 90s, which were indeed in an expansive moment. He stayed in the US teaching and building networking instead.
For his post-war generation (he is born in 1944) the United States are like heroes, and I could imagine a fascination being a little Freudian. He first came to America when he was 16 and even wrote a novel about Disneyland!
So the interviewer asks him about his opinion on the relationship between Disneyland, its enterprise and corporate culture (I have to say I like the interviewer). To what he responds:
(…) I´ve always been interested in populism and popular culture, and I´ve always been sad and uneasy about the separation of architecture and popular culture, which is where my interest in writing Delirious New York came from. I was thinking it was possible to combine popular culture with architecture, but it is also meant to look at architecture for elements of culture.
As great as this sounds, he is just paraphrasing Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown and their interest in precisely architecture and popular culture, as in their seminal book Learning from las Vegas and then the studio Learning from Levittown which they didn´t dare to publish (the Las Vegas study already brought them so much contempt at the time from the profession), but which was shown at their Smithsonian show SIGNS OF LIFE in 1976 with all the Americana pictures of a young Stephen Shore, and where Philip Johnson took all his ideas for the launching of his take on Postmodernism as the new corporate style, blossoming in the 80s (as he did with early modernist ideas transformed into the International Style blossoming in the 50s).
In fact there is a very interesting document of Bob & Denise visiting the Architectural Association in 1976 for a series of lectures, called The Rally, hosted by a very young Charles Jencks and where a young Koolhaas seats in the audience and at some point intervenes. His intervention is far from being supportive of their ideas. He calls them snobs for pretending to like popular culture. Charles Jencks same thing, he is very belligerent. Eventually both changed radically their posture on the matter, but this document is great in that it shows how radical were Bob and Denise at that time in their embrace of popular culture, among a very elitist profession who did not understand it.
I don´t see anything in Delirious New York which aludes to popular culture in terms of architecture, since there is nothing popular in New York´s pre-war highrise architecture and skyscrapers. This is why Bob & Denise go West to study that phenomenon, in the new fast growing cities of the automobile of the 60s, and to the new suburban towns, like Levittown, also a product of the automobile. In the past, suburban life was for the wealthy classes, and after the war it became accesssible to the middle classes, to the horror of the elite.
But Bob and Denise never loved populism. Popular culture and populism are two very different things. Interesting how Rem says he likes both. Neo-fascism today loves populism as well. Popular culture is about people, populism is about manipulation. I can see why Rosalind Krauss would be suspicious of Koolhaas... (Rem confesses in the interview, although he gives another reason).
And then he goes on:
What is the difference between 1968 and 1988? In the 60s critique was very developed, sophisticated and (…) very fair. But of course part of this critique and the way we were governed at the time was also a critique of modern architecture, which backfired. You have The Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961) and the Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour, Learning from las Vegas (1972) (…) as part of these critiques. MY BOOK DELIRIOUS NEW YORK (1978) WAS BOTH A RESPONSE TO AND PART OF THESE MOVEMENTS.
Sorry to say, but this is just not true, and it is quite opportunistic again. And why can´t he say Postmodernism once, when he is using all the time postmodern theory and ideas? This is happening a lot these days...
Delirious New York is not a critique of modern architecture, nor a critique of anything. It is quite far from Jane Jacobs´ urbanistic and sociological critique and Bob and Denise´s documentation of the new city of the automobile and the new architecture appearing on those fast roads and highways with its popular culture´s communicative devices (the Duck and the Decorated Shed theory). Bob relates a classical theory of architecture as text and popular culture´s new communication expressiveness born out of the information age (pure semiotics), which Las Vegas is just a pristine capsule of an example, but Los Angeles is its apotheosis. it was never about Vegas per se (the biggest missunderstanding at the time and what really angried upper classes). They saw something that was appearing in society at that exact moment, and tried to explain it and understand it.
You just cannot put Delirious New York next to these two seminal books, who did change the way of seeing, thinking of and doing architecture and urban planning in major ways. Congestion and density were not novel ideas, it is the condition of any metropolis, and Fritz Lang did the best manifesto of that condition back in 1927 when it really appeared.
It is a nice analysis, but that is all. This is why I call it "hardly" a manifesto. Manifestos change the course of professions and societies, they see something that was not visible or even there before. It might be a good book, but not at the level of those ones. And he just tries too hard in an almost dishonest way to put himself up there.
If you look closely at the culture of neoliberalism what you see is that popular culture is increasing its engagement with commercialism and its alignment with the market economy. The role of the architect changed in the 90s. (…) Reagan, Bush, Clinton and 90s neoliberalism found themselves working for private interests instead, which was a fundamental change.
I think that is correct, but why is that happening we must ask ourselves? Quotting Emmanuel Olunkwa I would say this is the reason for "the cultural free fall" we are experiencing since the 90s, where corporations and Wall Street are taking over aggressively all the spaces in society, and not caring about anything but proffit, while working hard at eroding democracy to increase their power.
In the past quality mattered, honor in business mattered, values mattered. Today is like only money matters. It´s so poor and stupid. Greed is stupid Gordon Gecko. So nouveau riche. This is why I am convinced this cannot last.
Rem keeps denying working for that system, and if it was true in the past it was not because he did not wanted, but because they did not want him. Looks like now he found a niche with a new corporate America, hence his Go West new venture for the worse capitalists and the lowering of his pants at the Guggenheim.
One of his famous quotes is "Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and impotence." I don´t think all architects think in those terms...
Few public buildings and small private commissions are all he got during the 90s in Europe, and nothing in the US. I remember while being a student, he complained a lot about doing a lot of competitions but not getting to really build a lot of work. He even complains about it to Jim Venturi when he interviews him for his parents´ documentary.
And even if he is saying that he starts looking at China at the end of the 90s, the truth is he opens an office in New York in 2001. Rem wants to be in the States since the 70s, when he first moves there, and my impression is he feels frustrated for how difficult it is to stablish himself there.
He has a great rhetoric, but it is all gimmicks. He says, My interest in America changed, especially after 9/11. I realized America was no longer to be counted at all. And he opens OMA New York, precisely that same year! Then he has a series of failed projects throughout that decade, except from Prada (who is Italian) and the Seattle Library, a winning competition, which seems like a great building on pictures. (I have never been there, but after roaming Barcelona´s public libraries to work, I find the smaller the space of the library the better. I wonder how it must feel being inside all those airport-size spaces all day for reading, work or rest, with people´s caughing, the small talks, the phone beepings, etc). I´d say many of his public projects, are not commissions but competition winners.
The documentary says he then went to Russia and China, frustrated with his American chapter. But if he doesn’t like neoliberalism, I´d say the political systems over there are even less friendly and certainly way less democratic. He experienced it in the flesh. So, in the documentary his colleagues said he returned somehow less enthusiastic about China.
But finally, his international practice of 300 architects is really working full speed and they now have a lot of projects happening all over the world and a lot of them in the States, in fact. He has created a corporation – the model of architecture practices most successful today – where he is not the head figure and his personality doesn´t get in the way anymore 😊. They have his aura, but "real" architects manage the office and the projects. Although the work tends to be more generic as well (as happens with most these architecture corporations). The New Museum addition project is not good, the scale and the geometry are wrong. They try to compete with the gorgeous SANAA building, and it doesn´t work, plus it really doesn´t relate to the Bowery, unlike the existing museum building, which did that masterfully. Fuck context indeed! They should have asked Sejima again.
Rem, as he declares, has lost interest in architecture and this why he gets to do these shows at the Guggenheim to herald the new paradigm of architecture for machines, and all this bullshit, which he loves. He is more of a provocateur than an architect.
Lastly in the interview he says he now is interested in these data centers and enormous warehouses out of ecological concerns, but if the Guggenheim show narrates that the ecological emergencies are in cities precisely, shouldn´t an Office for Metropolitan Architecture be more than ever focusing on it? In that desert of Nevada, the only thing you have are the next level of corporate power after neoliberalism, which is a kind of neofascism.
Those are, as he says the most important American corporations (Tesla, Twitter, Google, Amazon, etc) which are dangerously amassing so much power today, that they are starting to find democracies burdensome to their ambitions. And this is what Rem Koolhaas is heralding as the next architecture paradigm in the Nevada desert? Sorry if I don´t buy it. I just see someone in love with power, and who cares little for people. Almost the definition of a fascist. I am troubled with what I am writing, but I think I am right… Philip Johson was the same, and besides having a nazi period, he ended up being Donald Trump´s architect!
Koolhaas´ first project in Architecture School at the AA in London, was to make a film of a building. Of all things, he chose the Berlin Wall, a fascist instrument of control (he was so proud of, he recalls it in the documentary, as being so original and shocking at the time, despite not being a real building per se). He was never interested in architecture as space or as a social tool (indeed), he admits himself. Then, years later based on this study, he went on to create a wall for Manhattan (a gated community of sorts) for pure shock effect again and sort of copying Superstudio´s graphics.
And then another project, derivative of Bentham´s panopticon, as Michel Foucault popularized it in is “Surveiller et punir” book (1975). The panopticon being the ultimate fascist surveillance mechanism. Foucault was at the height of his cool at the time and Rem wanted a bit of that I feel as well – like with Godard in the 60s when he did his movie The White Slave, (1969). Philip Johnson was very much like that as well.
Dan Graham (1942-2022), great artist-architect, writer and a great architecture intellectual, used to call Rem a capitalist decorator, and lent me a DVD where a younger Koolhaas is with Philip Jonhson at his state, and it´s almost sexual, Dan joked about. Dan believed Rem wanted to be like Philip Johnson. Let´s not forget it was Johnson who put Rem on the map in the MoMA Deconstructivism show, and Rem admired him so much.
At the Guggenheim´s rotunda, we find Philip Jonhson in a huge suspended photograph of him in his glass house with guests, whereas Mies van der Rohe is not in the show, whose glass house originated Philip´s and whose architecture is all about a connection with nature, unlike Jonhson´s. In fact, Koolhaas firsts houses are also copies and permutations of Mies´ glass house. Then, like Johnson, Rem also went to copy Robert Venturi´s work. His Karlsruhe ZKM competition entry (1989) is a copy of Venturi´s competition winner (1967) for the Football Hall of Fame (where he is surreptitiously calling football fascists by the way 😊).
It was a sort of religious building, or rather an architecture that expressed conceptual, physical and visual analogies between popular sport culture and Christian culture. Inside and outside and in the vaults of the naves imagery of the players was projected, where the football players were “Saints in the religion of sports.“ Holy figures in North-American culture, with a kind of sardonic humour. But for Bob “It was the beginning of the information age, or architecture as iconography and relating to signs rather than space”
OMA´s website reads:
Sandwiched between railway lines and autobahn loops at the southern entrance to the city lies this manifesto for a new kind of deep/large building. (...) The Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) is an experiment, a Darwinian arena where different media - classical and futuristic - can compete and influence each other. [I feel he is describing Bob´s project more than his! 😊]
And again with the manifesto! You cannot do a manifesto by copying another project, which was projected at a time where the technology was almost non-existent! That was really groundbreaking.
Philip Johnson, who also copied Bob with zeal, more than a real Nazi, I think what he really was is in love with power. And I have the feeling so does Rem. And of course, like this, you only fall in Ezra Pound´s last category, cause real creativity follows another path. They probably know it, and this is why all the nastiness in both cases 😊 But why the need for the fascism?
Fascism is like the fast-food of power.
Critics of Koolhaas ask themselves in relation of his CCTV building in China, that has a control room emulating a panopticon “does architecture become accomplice of dictatorship?”
It is very interesting to hear what Rem has to say on this regard in the documentary:
I can only think as a tool of others, as an instrument of others because I need clients (…). In our profession, economy has severed all ties to what was public. We don´t work for nations anymore, not for cities, we work for private people, private corporations. So, our connection with the public good is formally severed. And so, to extend it, if today we want to be good, we are only good, because we want to be good? Or because we are afraid to be bad?
First of all, architects worked always for private clients. Today governments have less power maybe, but you have still plenty of projects that are not for big corporate lobbies. Look at the work of Lacatton & Vassal (Pritzker prize 2021). They don´t need to work for brothel owners and have created a REAL NEW PARADIGM of architecture in social housing. With human beings! Amazing 😊
And what is being bad anyway? Working for fascists instead than working for the common good? And why would anybody want to be bad? If you want to be bad, I´d say it is simply because you are bad (using his language). Amoral might be a better term. Power doesn´t have ideology, whatever sustains it goes. Is this bad? Probably…
Are you afraid to let others know, while working in a liberal profession, supposed to work for the whole of society, how little you care? Is more the question he might be asking…
I think he was being bad at the Guggenheim exhibition, which was full of bad people glorified as great thinkers, and a little afraid we all know, given his reaction to my inquiry. And as he says in the documentary 15 years earlier (despite having told me the opposite at the press conference), he does work for the corporate world. That is why he was the one saying it, and not me. Funny he appeared so outraged in front of an auditorium full of international press.
In today´s world, with so many problems that we have in any possible sphere you look at, I believe we need people who want to be good, and who are not afraid to be good, despite not being profitable or trendy. And maybe we can even find inventors still, like Lacatton & Vassal, who find ways of being good and profitable, while bettering society and people´s lives.
This is why I also think, people like Rem, who is a product of the greedy 90s (greed is good said Gordon Gecko) and the birth of this violent market economy, are becoming less relevant in terms of the real discourses that are shaping the current reality, even if in practice we are still living those 90s exhausted narratives as the corpse of a failed system. Donald Trump being the Tiberius of our times, the end of the empire. It is not THE END, it is THEIR END, don´t let them convince you of the contrary. I bet you anything he doesn´t win the election.
I truly believe a world of solidarity economies (as Ian Scoones puts it) is the world that will become victor, eventually, from this crazy technological paradigm shift of an epoch we are witnessing, where fascism is rearing its head again to make a buck on selling our life experience as behavioral data and taking away our most basic freedom and rights to privacy and self-determination. I really don´t believe the future of architecture is post-human and the next architecture meaningful typology is the data center, even if google needs to build hundreds of them to store like a creep all of our daily actions and someone like Rem sees a new way to stay relevant with the new economic powers that are eroding our democracies. He says he is developing a new museum combined with a data center! Maybe it´s a museum for machines too 😊 Seriously... It sounds like a joke, but it is actually sad. As he says in the 2022 interview with PIN-UP magazine:
“Outside Reno, in Nevada, there´s the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, or TRIC, an incredibly beautiful landscape where all the major corporations are building at an unimaginable large scale – Tesla´s battery factory, distributions centers, etc These buildings are fascinating (…) because they aren´t buildings for people, they´re made to house machines.”
Really? Shoshana Zuboff´s calls this, the new frontier of power, and Rem who is in love with power wants to be a part of it. it is only natural. In this new fascist era we live in, sperheaded by a technological and digital revolution, they really don´t give a fuck about people. People are like commodities they use to extract information from and try to modify our behaviour so we buy what they want, while they get rich. It is this stupid. The world is turning into a big add campaign playing on a loop inside your underwear. But if you don’t care about people, people won´t care about you at some point. When? We will see… It might get way dumber and uglier before it turns around. I think we can do much better with technology than Big Brother ourselves to sell deodorant.
And this is why we had all those dictators and fascists at the Guggenheim. They wanted to normalize anti-democratic systems and used Rem, who is sort of cool, to make it palatable. But now he became sort of not cool, even if they try to make him cool again in PIN-UP magazine after the debacle at the Guggenheim. We can call Rem a pin-up for fascists indeed…
Why do you think Donald Trump, the felon running for president again, has elected as running Vice President J.D. Vance, the senator of Ohio who is connected with Silicon Valley billionaires? (who are building those wearehouses in the desert). In a very interesting article, published by NPR few days ago, they explain how around 2016 “he [Vance] began to quietly cement his ties to a cadre of mega-wealthy tech powerbrokers who could be considered the opposite of the Rust Belt´s working class.”
Shoshana Zuboff´s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a must read. It is scary but it is not totally hopeless. We must inform society of what is happening and they are not telling people.
She writes: The discovery of behavioral surplus marks a critical turning point not only in Google´s biography but also in the history of Capitalism. (…) Surveillance is the path to profit that overrides “we the people,” taking our decisions rights without permission and even when we say “no.”
And later on she says: It is important to understand that surveillance capitalists are impelled to pursue lawlessness by the logic of their own creation. Google and Facebook [which started with this logic of accumulation and launched the year Google when public not charging a dime to its users for they are extracting all their personal information] vigorously lobby to kill online privacy protection, limit regulations, weaken or block privacy-enhancing legislation…
So, this is why tech billionaires are already giving millions and expect to turbocharge Trump/Vance campaign. Elon Musk, from Tesla who is building in Rem´s "beautiful" machine landscape and who bought Twitter (now called X), could give them up to 45 million dollars a month! The tech elite sees Vance as a change-agent on tax policy, Artificial Intelligence (which is paramount to analyze all the behavioral data turning it into revenue) and crypto regulations.
Ben Horowitz, from a prominent venture capital firm thinks he has no other choice! “The future of our business, the future of technology, new technology and the future of America is at stake.” And he is right! The future of America´s democracy, and democracy in general, is at stake. And he doesn´t care. They are just making so much money ripping us off of our basic rights to our lives and privacy.
He also says: “Whether the bet pays off depends entirely on the policy of the US government” and so they are backing a fascist psychopath criminal, which will surely end with the America he so much wants not to lose… Are they really this stupid, or greed really blinds people this much?
As Shoshana points out, surveillance capitalism was invented by a specific group of human beings in a specific time and place. IT IS NOT INHERENT RESULT OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY, nor it is a necessary expression of information capitalism. It was intentionally constructed at a moment in history…
And here is the great passage for Trump´s backing for reelection despite being a mentally ill person and the most dangerous person for America (in his niece´s words) and a criminal. This is page 170:
In October 27, 2016 [just before Obama left office] FCC commissioners [The Federal Communications Commission] in a 3-2 vote delivered a landmark ruling in favor of, in this case, consumer protection on internet. It was a historic day not only in the young life of surveillance capitalism but also in the venerable and long life of the FCC, an agency that had never passed such online protections. (…) In a chilling epilogue to this chapter of surveillance capitalism, on March 28, 2017 [couple months into Trump´s presidency] a newly elected Republican Congress voted in favor of a resolution to overturn the broadband privacy regulations over which the FCC had struggled just months earlier.
And not only that, it turns out that companies believe that our principle of consent, meaning our rights to our personal freedom would strike a serious blow to the foundational mechanisms of the new capitalism. Meaning, they cannot make the same money if we don´t want to give our permission to our privacy. To this end the resolution also prevented the FCC from seeking to establish similar protections in the future. Unbelievable and true.
See why all these Tech billionaires sociopaths want the Donald? Cause as Shoshana writes, If new laws were to outlaw extraction operations, the surveillance model would implode. (…) These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century.
When what they are doing to us will become really well-known by everybody, then people won´t be willing to give up so readily their privacy away. This business of your personal data is so lucrative, that now it has migrated to everything (tooth brushes, vacuum cleaners, rectal thermometers, textiles! You name it !!)
In fact, Soshana writes in her book: The ´internet of things´ is all push, not pull. Most consumers do not feel a need for these devices. You can say ´exponential´ and ´inevitable´ as much as you want. The bottom line is that the Valley has decided that this has to be the next thing so that firms here can grow.
These technologies are so new, and like for the Wizard of Oz, so magical as in invisible and mysterious, that not everybody is able to look behind the curtain yet. This book by Shoshana is so important in that it pulls the curtain with vigor. The day will come when Google will be seen as the little man behind a peep hole.
Surveillance capitalism depends on the social, and it is only in and through collective social action that the larger promise of an information capitalism aligned with a flourishing third modernity can be reclaimed. (p.194)
We live very important times with a lot at stake. As Doctorov argues in his book, if we're to have any hope of destroying surveillance capitalism, we're going to have to destroy the monopolies that currently comprise the commercial web as we know it. Only by breaking apart the tech giants that totally control our online experiences can we hope to return to a more open and free web - one where predatory data-harvesting is not a founding principle.
Fortunately, the world is mainly full of normal loving people (not greedy sociopaths), and we need to all work together to overcome the fascist thirst for power this new era seems to have open the gates for. Our freedom, our countryside and our frail democracies are at stake.
Together we can do it. Don´t let them make you think we can´t. As Shoshana says, nothing here is inevitable. Astonishment is lost but can be found again. (p.194) . A lot of social progress has happened during the XXth century, and I believe we can reclaim back our privacies. As Niccolo Machiavelli wrote:
It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.
We need to create policy that protects people and not corporations´ greedy ambitions. We need politicians who will work for society and democracy, and not only for greedy corporations. Let´s see what people want this November! I am really curious... In England they have voted.
The world finds itself like in ancient Greece again, Fascist Sparta vs Democratic Athens (Democracy lost back then and a great civilization was lost with it), but also like in Second World War, (which was a product of industrialisation´s greedy ambitions) and fascism lost then, but at a very high human cost. They say history repeats itself, and here we find ourselves again in that crossroads. A lot can be lost again.
The future is not written Mr. Koolhaas. We write it all together. Every day. With every one of our actions. Don´t be afraid to be good. It´s the new thing !!! 😊
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CODA: I have written this article on my computer offline (after resetting it, which was totally useless) and going around to public libraries, and I have had the sensation that in each one of the different computers I was using, some fascists were reading my article and harrassing me for it from inside and outside the computer.
This is why I am writting this. I lost all my digital privacy with this fascist persecution I am enduring for years just for loving a person (or I should say for being loved by a person) and having an opinion. I am not a political journalist or activist, just an individual with a high sense of self and personal rights. And a firm believer in democracy, as imperfect as it may be.
The problem is not so much of having people buy a brand over another or a product. This new technological era of surveillance capitalism makes it so easy for any hater with a little power, to totally own all the personal information of a person they target, constant spy on them and use it to stalk and bully them, while breaking all their connections with the world -- professional and personal.
I want to live in a world where these things cannot happen so easy and where the digital sphere is not a place you want to avoid, as it happens to me these days. Nor a place were children get abused and bullied (and kill themselves because of it). I believe we can make it a safer place, more mature and intelligent, and not the goldmine for greedy "bad" people, to use Koolhaas´ word, who don´t have any sense of the common good indeed.
And I believe that day will come... This digital revolution is at his infancy, and infants are what we are dealing with right now. Selfish greedy children who don´t have the capacity to do better. But better will come. It always does at some point.
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