ON JUNKTIME / Troy Conrad Therrien
Junkspace was Rem Koolhaas’s early twenty-first century moniker for the architectural detritus (the “fallout”) of modernization. If “Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course,” then Junktime is the mess digitization has made of temporality.
Junktime is the equally dehumanizing overthrow of empty calendrical time by an occult clock of interpolated events: It is the discretization of time into a succession of interruptions and nothing more. It drowns out the old drone of homogeneous ticks with a new cacophony of heterogeneous pings: updates, notifications, reminders, alerts, alarms, more updates. As the natural cadence of machines, it lobotomizes humans. It requires your full attention but only a fraction of your brain.
Scrum (the development management methodology which transmogrified Toyota’s kanban) is a principal mechanism of leanness, the dogmatic adherence to micro-improvements directed by big-data feedback loops, responding immediately to changing user behavior, technological breakthroughs, or competitive threats with the least possible capital investment.
Leanness is the sacrificing of perfection for minimum viability. Perpetual beta is the objective, a strategy born of the belief that the market is tempestuous and the best way to deliver a product is through regular recalibrations based on which way the wind is blowing. Planning is anathema to leanness; the long-term is eschewed. What counts most is the speed of pivot, the ability to quickly change tack based on new information.
Whereas the rhythm of the just-in-time pipeline is quarantined to the factory → the Internet as distribution channel disintermediates this distance by bringing consumers directly into the production pipeline itself:
Users are unwittingly tapped directly into the temporal vibrations of agile development. Leanness takes the Toyota mantra of kaizen (continuous improvement) to its logical conclusion: continuous integration. Rather than becoming the downstream recipients of technological emancipation, we become just one more layer in the technology development stack, buzzing at the same frequency of ever-tighter release cycles. Liberated from the factory, life itself takes on the rhythm of an assembly line.
Our identities were not built to handle such a blistering refresh rate?
Junktime is a subset of Garbagetime. In computing, garbage is useless data. Computers are garbage-in-garbage-out (GIGO): ingesting garbage only produces more garbage. No valid inference can be made from garbage; no information about the future can be interpolated. Garbagetime is when all information turns to noise. It is a moment when no clear signal about the future can be spotted on the horizon, no matter how faint or how near. It is a confluence of maximum volatility and maximum possibility, wherein complexity dominates causality and anything can happen.
All predictions made in Garbagetime are equally worthless, equally embarrassing eventually. Because anything is possible, radical change is the only certainty. Garbagetime is the savage transcience of system change.
There are many registers of Garbagetime, but finance is an obvious domain. High frequency trading has turned much of the stock market into a mystical game of technical analysis and algorithmic dogfighting clocked at light speed and far removed from the underlying assets. Quantitative easing (the unremorseful printing of troves of money by central banks) further fuels the abstraction into garbage of financial data floating precariously on a bubble of hype and mutually reinforced speculation.
Prometheanity: the Californian church of techno-deterministic progress
As less and less can be assumed about the future, the practices of Prometheanity are bolstered more and more. It achieves this hegemony through a vertical hierarchy whereby venture capitalists place a sea of bets on an army of entrepreneurial hackers: twenty-first century digital miners who chip away at institutions calcified in centuries of analog use and ripe for disrupting, promethean code for retrofitting old infrastructures for the new technosphere and the attendant financial windfalls of the new monopolies that are created.
Prometheanity does not only reshape society; it is a full stack ecosystem for rebuilding institutions, transaction infrastructures, and value systems. Not just a survival strategy for the viciousness of Garbagetime, Prometheanity is using its competitive advantage to terraform the world to outlast it.
If architecture is the process of consciously ordering the world, then the ambitions of Prometheanity are fully architectural. And if the Promethean telos is to eat the world, then there is no room for competing regimes. The injunction is clear: Prometheanity must do away with Architecture.
Prometheanity’s preferred weapon uses the formula for Architecture kryptonite hinted at in Koolhaas’s text: hardwiring Junkspace to Junktime:
Junkspacetime is as ungainly as the moniker itself. The Internet of Things is one potential avenue to the Junkspacetime universe: stupid architectural objects (locks, thermostats, smoke alarms, and the like) “smartified” by a battery of cheap sensors and cheap microprocessors connected to the Internet to achieve cheap tricks like dimming the lights or ordering milk.
Architecture (the original Promethean enterprise) has suffocated slowly by modernization, Utopian hysterics, and professionalization
Alberti first book of De Re Aedificatoria “The Lineaments” → wrested the architect from the building site into the drawing room by trading know-how for a formalized epistemology based on design: shaping lineaments (the characteristic invisible vectors of a building) rather than directing bricklayers. Lineaments are non-scarce. Not only do they extend infinitely, they have no material bias: lineaments can apply to ideas as much as they do to bricks. Lineamental thinking implies an explicit architecture of decision-making: mental models for making sense of an illegible world.
